Star Trek: No Subtitle

[Wowbagger]

Originally Posted by Nate the Great

Whether or not they showed us an origin for the TOS crew onscreen or not, there are hundreds of Trek books out there that show a relatively cohesive version of events that have served as an origin for the TOS crew. I read the books, they fit together rather well.

Every Star Trek movie, series, episode, and -- nowadays -- nearly every book out-and-out ignores every Star Trek book. Why? Because respecting them would be ridiculously binding and limit a huge part of the Trek universe to the tiny proportion of it that buys the books. We're not Star Wars, with its now insanely insular fanbase that's almost completely closed to normal people (oh, how the popular mighty have fallen!). I'm very happy with that.

Canon does not contain a TOS origin story. Now it does. It was rich, it was fun, it was beautiful. And scores of millions of people saw it, rather than the few dozen who read the typical Star Trek paperback book.

This how Trek has always worked. It's how Trek is supposed to work. Once you're saying that canon needs to stay away from something because, "Oh, the books already dealt with that," you are way gone from the path that Roddenberry, Moore, Behr, Berman, Braga, Justman, Solow, Hurley, Coto, Coon, the Okudas, and all the rest blazed for us over the course of four decades.

Plus, those books are not consistent. Let's just grab three, the first three that come to mind: Best Destiny, Kobayashi Maru, and Cadet Kirk. Reconciliation of those three works is almost as impossible as reconciling the movieverse and the Primeverse. They're spaghetti. The movie is a decided canonical improvement.

And I haven't even mentioned the Shatnerverse novels. Throw in Collision Course and your head will a'splode.

So, basically, you're wrong, and, even if you were right, you'd still be wrong. This choice of setting and storyline was appropriate, canonical, respectful, consistent... and, based on dramatic opportunity alone, correct.

And you STILL haven't addressed the "we can do it BETTER" mentality. Are there not enough fans behind the scenes to point out continuity or characterization errors behind the scenes yet?

Actually, I did:

Originally Posted by Wowbagger

...if you go back and rewatch TOS, TAS, and everything Gene Roddenberry and the original creators ever did, you'll find that they didn't give us an origin story for the characters or the crew. Not once. Ever.

Bottom line: there was no "we can do it BETTER" mentality, because there was nothing for them to do better than! This is like complaining that Isaac Newton was arrogant for coming up with the theory of gravity. "What gives him the right to publish these theories?" asks Nate the Great, "Does he think he can do a theory of gravity better than all the previous theories of gravity postulated by other physicists?" Since this origin story is the first origin story we've been given for the characters, and since it is consistent with the tiny flecks of background story we got for the TOS characters during the course of TOS (and, incidentally, those "tiny flecks" were themselves highly inconsistent), this complaint is, literally, nonsensical. Parsing the sentence actual results in concrete meaninglessness.

You can feel free to argue that there were characterization problems, but not until after you've seen the movie. For myself and most other fans, no characterization problems were apparent -- though I did find Chris Pine's interpretation of the Kirk character to be interesting and at times surprising, nothing appeared to me to be at all out-of-character for young J.T. Kirk.

Of course all the old stuff is still there; Paramount is going to sell everything with the Trek name on it for as long as they can make money off of it. It still doesn't negate the fact that they felt that they weren't up to the task of calling in a few fans to create a story that could fit in the mainstream timeline, nor were they confident enough to create a brand new universe without pulling Spock Prime in to muddle the waters in the public's eye about which universe is "real" now.

Clearly you have no idea who they had writing the movie. Roberto Orci -- I am not overstating this here -- could eat your knowledge of canon for breakfast. Then he'd polish it off with a spot of Tech Manual. The man is a walking encyclopedia (and apparently relied on Memory Alpha to double-check the script work throughout the process of scripting). They brought in hardcore fans throughout cast and crew, and, of course, you can't beat having a hardcore as co-writer. This is what those fans produced.

Why did they create a new universe? Because they felt it would be wrong to simply dismiss and destroy forty years of Star Trek canon. They love that canon as much as we do. Nonetheless, they did not believe it prudent to begin a prequel series that was locked on a preset course. They believed that doing so would drain dramatic tension, because, for example, if they killed off Sulu, we'd know that they'd have to bring back Sulu in the next movie, and so there would be no dramatic tension.

In their position, I am not certain of what I would do. I definitely understand and respect their position. Anyone who writes on even a reasonably regular basis must understand that. Dramatic tension -- suspense -- is one of the key tools of the craft.

The rest of it -- bringing in Spock Prime and so forth -- is not a cynical marketing move, as you seem to insist on believing. It's the greatest paean to the importance and beauty of Star Trek canon ever composed. That love of the canon, and the insistence on respecting it and linking the Primeverse to the Neroverse to preserve Trek's ancient continuity, was a trade-off. The fixation on canon was the direct cause of most of the movie's plotting and motivation problems.

And if that doesn't argue heavily in favor of an anti-canonista position, I don't know what does.

You're not going to love everything about this movie, Nate. If there is any Trek movie you love everything about, for which you would have done little or nothing different, then I must insist that you're wearing rose-colored nostalgia glasses. I think that if you look at this movie honestly, though, you'll find a series of brutally difficult creative choices, where the filmmakers couldn't get everything they wanted (both a Primeverse setting and a great TOS origin story) and settled for a happy medium in which they produced an incredibly surprising, unbelievably respectful, helluva good movie.

As to your question about which universe is "real": most members of the non-Trekkie public I've spoken to are not aware that there are two universes. They don't think about it. Those who are aware of the fact generally know the correct answer: both are equally real. We're just doing a few movies in this one while the Primeverse lays fallow for a bit. We'll see what happens after that.

Your bile against this film and its creators is so intense, Nate (and it just looks sillier and sillier now that everyone else on the face of the Earth has seen this movie and actually knows what they're talking about). What's your real deal here? What's your bone to pick with Abrams & Co.?