Why This Trekkie Is Thrilled That Abrams Junked Canon

[brentdax]

After I got home from watching the new Star Trek, I enthused to two friends about it on the phone (as I finished packing for the flight to England I'm writing this on). With each description, though, they became more and more confused. J.J. Abrams, after all, didn't just skirt the edges of canon the way Enterprise did; he went in and actively,

Comments

[izuko]

I haven't seen the movie, so I don't know what they do. But I do see one way to avoid your escalator problem - the Pyrrhic victory. What if, in DS9, they had utterly destroyed the Cardassian empire, but lost half their own fleet in doing so? All of the sudden, things ain't so rosy. All of the sudden, minor annoyances become major issues.

[joshlamont]

But that's not Star Trek. Star Trek's always been about optimism for the future. Not the heavy cost humanity inevitably invokes.

[brentdax]

They did and in the books they are. The reconstruction of Betazed, a planet populated by harmonious telepaths and virtually a paradise before it was occupied by the Dominion, is taking on the order of years of in-universe time. But the old writers are unable to resist the cheap drama of introducing a bigger and badder enemy every time. Besides, how long can it really take a society with matter replicators, faster-than-light travel, and instant teleportation to rebuild? Draw it out too long and it starts to seem implausible.

[vorlon010]

Which in turn means you have to strip away the replicators, FTL and transporters to make it work going forwards. Kick 'em down so they can get back up.

Back in the days of homeworld modding we bandied about some post-DS9 ideas, and some of them look pretty good on reflection.(Mostly political stuff, and declaring Voyager to be as canonical as the original BSG from the perspective of the RDM show - the 'nice' version of what happened, far removed from reality.)

That said, I've not dabbled in the Trek novels and such, What I can say is that to its credit DS9 finished in such a way that later shows could come from the perspective of a fragile peacetime, during a protracted and unpleasant phase of reconstruction and recovery.

Of course, I could probly be justified in suggesting that was mostly the work of RDM, who left after DS9 finished. Kinda left the screwups to take over, which means no matter what we would wish, they'd never make good on it.