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[Starver]

Once Manny Coto was promoted to producer in Enterprise, the show was nothing but continuity porn. (Season 4).
After ending the stupid Temporal Cold War arc:
Augments, making the Vulcans logical again, early part of founding of the Federation, Romulans being sneaky Romulans and avoiding being seen, Klingon forehead ridges problem explained, and Orions.

I was going to say that I must not have seen series four (and, as far as I knew, the series had been cancelled before the TCW thread had led to where I thought it would be going[1]).  But I do remember a highly 'plausible' reason for the Klingon's features which I'm sure was an on-canon one, and thus came from seeing this "continuity porn" period.  So maybe I did see that series.  But it might have depended a lot on how much UK TV this known-to-be-cancelled last series managed to get itself aired on.  Sort of like how Dark Angel occasionally popped up in pretty much unschedulable post-midnight TV slots on the commercial stations, interrupted by every other schedule change there could be[5].

(Although I still like the "Trials and Tribblations" episode of DS9 where Whorf "doesn't want to talk about it"...)


Anyway, I could imagine myself (should I ever be in the position to do so, thanks to someone important going totally insane), setting up some "retro-retroconning" (i.e. back to how it was) should I have been let lose at the artistic direction helm.

Basically I can forgive a lot, but I like consistency.  Even if it doesn't look like it from what I previously said about not absolutely hating Enterprise.  (Probably I took the bits that were consistent at a greater face-value, while still imagining the inconsistent things as deliberate misdirections or lead-ups to... yes, via the Time War thingummy... the same conclusion.)

But..  give me a 12-Monkeys non-paradoxical time-loop over a Time Cop or Back To The Future time plot, any day.  (Same atoms in flesh that's decades different in age?  I think not, and it cures nothing about the paradox if you stop future-self from having had happened and thus not being there to destroy younger-self...   And Fading Marty McFly syndrome is a most anaesthetic way to deal with things...  Whatever one might have personally thought about Michael J. Fox himself. )



[1] On this point I was being speculative.  Just like I knew "where The Matrix Trilogy was going[2]", until[3] it suddenly ignored all the Chekov's setups that had been there since the first film[4].

[2]

Spoiler: This short and snappy idea was /not/ shown to be right (click to show/hide)

i.e. "It's Matrices all the way out"...

[3] Possibly due, I've heard, to some smartass going up to the producer brothers at a party and going "I know where you're going", possibly ensuring that they rewrite to avoid being so obvious (albeit more logical and.. satisfying... to me at least) in their conclusion.

[4]

Spoiler: ...but these things /did/ happen (click to show/hide)

"There is no spoon" being reiterated by the Zion kid, how Neo had 'power' over squids in the hovercraft sewer settings, the fact that when blinded he 'saw' Real Life(TM) in a firey-Matrix manner, etc...

(Note on spoilers.  Obviously everybody has seen the whole Trilogy who intends to, but I'm being careful in case someone's slipped through the net.  Both the latter (things that happened) and the former (what I thought it would be, but which was avoided) are rather spoilery in their own way, of course.  Even if it's spoilering the fact that my (and perhaps therefore your) imagined result never happens, thus leading you not to get excited and/or dissapointed the same as you would without these subtle hints.  Does that make sense?  Probably more so than [rot13]jung gur byq thl va gur GI ebbz fnvq[/rot13], to some. )


[5] These days, I hear (not being a TV-watcher at all, for various reasons), you get 'gaming channel' inserts in those slots, on all the non-BBC 'terrestrial-era' standard channels.  Makes me pine for the day when there were only three TV channels available (two BBCs, one your-region version of what is generically ITV).  And if I had a better memory from when I was young I would probably be pining for when there were only two of 'em.

[Sergius]

I may be wrong about this, but I'm pretty sure that in TNG phasers were always orange, not blue (also in the first seasons, photons used to be multi-warhead, which always seemed to miss ). Except those times fighting the Borg where they were changing frequencies, and it looked more like a rainbow.

Time travel in Star Trek has always been inconsistent. Remember that one in DS9 when Sisko became some historical guy? When he returned to the present, Starfleet basically hailed him, nagging about the picture in the history books, all like "hey WTF dude, did you just change time?". I mean, that's just silly, why would they realize NOW that the picture in the books was his.

[Neonivek]

As for the New Star Trek movie

Being an "Alternate timeline" it is exactly the same until the divergence point.

So their portrayal of Vulcans would be 100% canonical.

In fact there is nothing in the movie that suggests there being divergent differences between timelines except where history was altered.

[penguinofhonor]

I'd note that the movie series might start from the same canon, but it's still a different interpretation. I think some differences can be explained with just that.

Now, that doesn't mean those differences can't still be problems, but I don't think they should need to justify every difference from TOS with crazy Star Trek canon.

[Sergius]

I thought the movie was shown in chronological order.

First, the arrival of the Romulans.
Then, the bullying of Spock.

So my point would stand. Ear sharpeners shortage, they explain everything.

[Jervill]

Sergius, just so you know, the bullying of Spock was pretty much lifted verbatim from The Animated Series episode "Yesteryear".  So, Vulcans have been jerks for quite awhile (if you consider TAS canon, which is debatable.)

[Sergius]

Well I didn't know it was copied. But yes, officially, Paramount doesn't consider TAS canon. It was explicitly "de-canonized" even before the death of G.R. That doesn't mean they can't farm it for ideas - so this would still be an event that happened in the alternate timeline, yet it may not have happened in the original.

I personally think Vulcans have ranged from smug to logical to stupid ever since the original movies. Remember that Vulcan girl from The Undiscovered Country? She didn't behave very Vulcan, in my opinion. I think whoever wrote Spock into the old series was the only one who knew what they were supposed to be like, and it all went downhill as they become more and more "straw Vulcans".

[Neonivek]

Honestly though I don't know why they made the animated series non-canon. There is nothing in it that needs to be ignored or rejected.

If I had to guess it is due to the same old hostility towards the animated medium and how "For children" it is.

[penguinofhonor]

Doesn't Spock summon Satan at one point?

[Xantalos]

Doesn't Spock summon Satan at one point?

Reverse the polarity!

Hell, that could be the answer to everything. Heat death of the universe? Reverse the polarity. Bullshit teacher? Reverse polarity.

[Mongol13524]

Considering the amount of camp in TOS, I'm half surprised that's canon.

Continuity in Star Trek is a big mess, we should just accept everything as being in pretty much the same franchise and enjoy shows/movies independently of each other. Of course it would be much preferable to actually have everything actually be consistent, but we don't live in a perfect world. I'm not saying the nerd rage is unjustified, but you have to accept it, ignore it, or not watch it by this point.

[Neonivek]

Honestly the continuity doesn't hurt so bad if you understand that things change.

Maybe the Vulcans slowly became more idealized after Enterprise... Though given what I've seen of Vulcans from the original series onward, them being secretly jerks is less unexpected.

MIND you the sheer amount of hand wavings required to make Enterprise work is insurmountable... It literally REQUIRES you to assume that Archer and his entire crew told no one of their adventures.

Even Voyager didn't play volleyball with Startrek continuity as much as they did.

[Starver]

MIND you the sheer amount of hand wavings required to make Enterprise work is insurmountable... It literally REQUIRES you to assume that Archer and his entire crew told no one of their adventures.

Which is where my whole "Temporal Cold War changes everything" viewpoint came from, perhaps.  Right from the first episode (Klingons on the starboard bow Earth, etc...) I imagined that what we were looking at was the baby-steps of a time-line that was doomed to be aborted and re-run in order lead up to the known TOS-era timeline[1].  And then we soon (I think, certainly soon enough for me) find that there's a whole chronological change potential going on.

Basically I went on to assume that all the stuff that happened in ENT that could not have happened for TOS/TNG, etc, would have been key moments in an exciting (and unfettered) series timeline that could give you interesting things such as "And this is how the Transporter got invented" and (indeed) "Can we explain the Imperial/non-Imperial Klingon physiognomy differences/changes" (and why the smooth-heads were always far more in a bad mood... ).  Which all happened.

I expected (had the series not been cancelled too quickly) that we'd have had a bit of a ding-dong with a time-travelled Archer[2] (well...  I may have been influenced by the actor's past works on that one) right one big "thing that went wrong" and in the process start up a time-line in which the temporal Big Bads weren't interfering, there never was a Klingon in a Kansas Corn-Field (or wherever he was again) and mankind's foray into the interstellar voids happened with just the 'normal' alien problems (still the Transporter gets invented, Starfleet is founded, we'll eventually get to the time of NCC-1701).




[1] Insofar as breaking events, of course. 

[2] The last thing I 'remember' is him being invited to go on such a mission.  But I really need to re-watch the series, somehow, to correct any misconceptions as I already know I have, as I've not seen it since its original UK broadcast dates.

[Jervill]

Enterprise was cancelled less than a year before canonically the Earth-Romulan War began (2156) and from the sounds of it Season 5 would have dealt with the lead up to that war.

Enterprise did establish that the Federation was formed partially as a result of increased cooperation between Earth, Vulcan, Andoria, and Tellar after the Earth-Romulan War; which makes political sense to protect that region of space from the Romulan Empire.

[Starver]

(Was in the midst of putting the following edit on my post, but as I've been superseded already, here it is as a separate post.)


edit: Yes, I'm suggesting that the first 'n' seasons of Enterprise could have effectively have been like the ninth season of Dallas, for those that remember that...  For those that don't, effectively nothing but a dream.  Archer (or someone else involved) gets the equivalent of the "seeing Bobby Ewing get out of the shower" moment, and realises he's to set out in the NX-01 for the first time again...


(But that's just my own fevered imagination.  You may safely ignore the idea.)