100 AU from Earth
- Thread starter FredH
- Start date
Yes, but.
On the one hand, it's reasonable to have a definition of what qualifies as Trek canon... and that definition is the material that's been on screen (broadcast or cinema). It's kind of like with Sherlock Holmes: the canon is the 56 short stories and four novels that Conan Doyle wrote, no matter what good material others may have written since.
On the other hand, the word canon loses all meaning if you merely use it as a synonym for "stuff that's been broadcast." The implicit question in situations like this is always whether one bit of canon (like, say, Klingons invading the solar system) actually fits logically with what we otherwise know to be canonical. Saying "it was on screen" is a profoundly uninteresting answer to that... just like "Doyle wrote it" is an uninteresting answer to questions about contradictions among Holmes stories. (For instance, despite the well-known fact of the Great Hiatus from spring of 1891 to spring of 1894, during which Holmes was presumed dead, there is a later story that is specifically dated to 1892, which is clearly impossible. Saying "it's part of the canon" doesn't actually help to make sense of it.)
Which is exactly what makes canon so much more useful in the specific case of Trek. Here, we can simplify things immensely by declaring onscreen events rock-solid truth, because everything else can give like styrofoam. There's nothing unprecedented or unusual in Trek about AD 1892 coming after AD 1894, say.
So there's little excuse to ignore that which has been produced and presented until all other means have been exhausted.
Timo Saloniemi
So there's little excuse to ignore that which has been produced and presented until all other means have been exhausted.
Timo Saloniemi
That's because people confuse continuity with canon. You gave the definition of canon yourself - the on screen stuff. Bits of the canon contradict other bits, as is true in most 'canons' - certainly in the origin of the word, the religious canon. Continuity is a whole different argument.
Then why did Nerys Myk weigh in with the comment that "it's canon," and Awesome Possum concur with the same basic observation? Fateor (to whom they were responding) obviously wasn't asking whether the Klingon attack on the solar system was on screen — of course it was, or none of us would be talking about it. He(?) was commenting about whether it made sense in the context of a show which has never even hinted at such an event over 50 years and hundreds of broadcast hours, and in which (as Donker pointed out) at least one prominent Klingon has specifically said no such thing ever happened. He was, in other words, commenting about continuity; saying "it's canon" is entirely beside the point in that discussion.
Or it's all just technobabble. Light year, AU aint real terms they can mean anything. Earth can just magically appear next to a star base a few billion miles from the sun. What's important is that Mike fell in LOVE with a Klingon!
Only if you mistakenly assume that it refers to every detail individually. The thing to understand about the word "canon" is that it's a noun, not an adjective. The canon, by definition, is the entire body of work from the original creators or owners, as distinguished from derivative works by outside parties such as fan fiction or licensed tie-ins. But any sizable canon is going to have internal contradictions where the individual details are concerned. TOS itself had plenty of such contradictions in its first season alone -- James R. Kirk vs. James T. Kirk, lithium crystals vs. dilithium, Vulcanians vs. Vulcans, UESPA vs. Starfleet, etc.
The canon is the aggregate of the various fictional works presented by the creators or owners of the property. Individual details within it are going to contradict each other from time to time, but the overall body of work pretends they represent a consistent whole. And the nature of that whole is bound to change over time as new details and revelations are added. 40 years ago, we thought the Eugenics Wars and World War III were the same conflict; "Space Seed" explicitly said as much. But TNG retconned WWIII to the mid-21st century, so it became a separate event from the 1990s' Eugenics Wars. 20 years ago, we thought NCC-1701 was the first Enterprise; Sisko explicitly said as much in "Trials and Tribble-ations." But ENT introduced an earlier Enterprise, and what had been canonical "fact" was changed. Canon is not any single piece, it's the entire whole, which evolves over time as new things are added to it.
Looked at granularly, every individual Trek series has major continuity errors and internal contradictions, and there are major inconsistencies among the different series. But we gloss over the discrepancies as best we can, and we usually go with whatever the latest version of the continuity is. Because that's how fiction works. You revise it as you go, and later drafts override earlier drafts. We accept that starships use dilithium even though it was originally lithium. We accept that Data doesn't use contractions even though he used them routinely in the early first season of TNG. We accept that there was a Cardassian war up until 2366 even though the first few years of TNG showed a Federation at peace. And so on.
That's like saying that inches and miles ain't real terms. Yes, they are. They exist independently of Star Trek, and they have a specific meaning.
Star Trek has always had problems with numbers. Things supposed to be "miles" across aren't. Things "inches" thick aren't. And they get lightyears and AUs wrong on occasion, too. But the units are real and well-defined, and we don't really benefit from thinking that their definitions have changed between now and the 23rd century.
Timo Saloniemi
"Not mentioning" is a non-issue: they have never mentioned the Prussians or the Rape of Nanking, either, but that doesn't mean they are pretending those didn't exist or were unimportant.
If anything, the "Homefront"/"Paradise Lost" mention that Earth hasn't had a state of emergency since date X (which coincides with the TOS movies) can be taken to mean that such emergencies used to be common earlier on, and then decreased in frequency.
What Martok says in "The Changing Face of Evil" is pretty specific, meaning there's little reason to try and state it's "not canon" and lots of ways to preserve the "continuity" aspect of it.
Starbase 1 isn't Starfleet Headquarters, that much is clear from the recent episode.
Timo Saloniemi
Still, if Starbase 1 is literally on the edge of the Sol system, it's odd the Klingons never attempt to attack Earth or Starfleet Command when they have a foothold in the system.
Also, if Starbase ! gets built in Sol, why was Archer checking out Berengaria in Bound as a potential site for the first starbase? Massive distance difference there.
Whatever Martok's exact wording, he's speaking in the 24th century, and the Federation/Klingon peace accords have likely been in place his entire life. If he knows of this incident, he may simply regard it as dishonorable and be embarrassed to mention it. Or, as Christopher suggested, it could have been dropped from Klingon history books in their revisionist processes.
Assuming that the war gets wrapped up quickly in next week's episode, the occupation of the station may turn out to be quite brief - just a matter of days, perhaps even hours. And, as has already been mentioned, with less than 250 soldiers there, it doesn't seem like they can do much more than simply occupy the starbase at the moment.
There's also the matter of the fractured nature of the Klingon Empire at this point. If the House of G'Kor, or whoever they are, winds up disgraced at the end of the war, maybe the incident is considered unmentionable.
Assuming that the war gets wrapped up quickly in next week's episode, the occupation of the station may turn out to be quite brief - just a matter of days, perhaps even hours. And, as has already been mentioned, with less than 250 soldiers there, it doesn't seem like they can do much more than simply occupy the starbase at the moment.
There's also the matter of the fractured nature of the Klingon Empire at this point. If the House of G'Kor, or whoever they are, winds up disgraced at the end of the war, maybe the incident is considered unmentionable.
Somebody really needs to compile a YouTube video showing all the things in TOS that were contradicted by TNG, DS9, or even later episodes of TOS. The idea that Star Trek has ever had tight continuity becomes absolutely ridiculous if you actually sit down and watch it from beginning to end.
I've long since given up on Starbase numberings making any kind of sense. Really, any kind of numbers in Trek -- stardates, distances, registry numbers, you name it. The various creators over the decades have coined these numbers based on different assumptions and without any expectation that they'd be parsed to death as thoroughly as Trekkies have done, so you can either drive yourself crazy trying to make sense of all the contradictions or you can just shrug it off and not sweat the details.
I've come to realize that Gene Roddenberry himself was fond of the "Doylist" view of canon as opposed to the "Watsonian" view -- that is, he saw Star Trek as a dramatization rather than the real thing, and thus its inconsistencies and logic holes were the result of errors in the dramatic presentation. When TMP came out and fans asked why the Klingons had changed appearance, he told them to pretend that Klingons had always looked that way but TOS just hadn't been able to portray it correctly. In his TMP novelization, he presented himself in the introduction as a 23rd-century producer who'd made an "inaccurately larger-than-life" TV series based on the real adventures of the Enterprise, and said that TMP was a more accurate dramatization because it had Admiral Kirk as a consultant. After all, this was a guy who got his start in TV writing up story proposals for Dragnet, a show that did dramatic recreations of actual police cases and fictionalized the details, and framed them with narration in the form of the lead character's official report. I think that, on some level, he approached Star Trek in the same way, as a dramatic recreation based on "real" starship logs.
I find it easier to resolve the inconsistencies in Trek if I take them as differences in interpretation by different dramatizers. Presumably the underlying reality is more consistent, and those details that make the least sense or conflict the most with the whole can be seen as poetic license or error on the part of a given dramatization.
It was the House of D'Ghor, which has been mentioned a couple of times before this season. It might be the same as the House of Kozak from DS9: "The House of Quark," since that House's only male survivor after Kozak's death was named D'Ghor. And that House was portrayed as a fairly minor one, not a member of the High Council as it was in DSC. So it may indeed have fallen from favor in the intervening century or so.
No, they certainly knew what an AU was in TMP; after all, they had an actual NASA rocket scientist, Dr. Jesco von Puttkamer, as their technical consultant, along with Isaac Asimov. And Roddenberry's TMP novelization has a line specifically explaining that an AU is the distance from the Earth to the Sun. The fact that V'Ger's energy cloud was as large as an entire star system was just what was so astonishing about it.
I've come to realize that Gene Roddenberry himself was fond of the "Doylist" view of canon as opposed to the "Watsonian" view -- that is, he saw Star Trek as a dramatization rather than the real thing, and thus its inconsistencies and logic holes were the result of errors in the dramatic presentation. When TMP came out and fans asked why the Klingons had changed appearance, he told them to pretend that Klingons had always looked that way but TOS just hadn't been able to portray it correctly. In his TMP novelization, he presented himself in the introduction as a 23rd-century producer who'd made an "inaccurately larger-than-life" TV series based on the real adventures of the Enterprise, and said that TMP was a more accurate dramatization because it had Admiral Kirk as a consultant. After all, this was a guy who got his start in TV writing up story proposals for Dragnet, a show that did dramatic recreations of actual police cases and fictionalized the details, and framed them with narration in the form of the lead character's official report. I think that, on some level, he approached Star Trek in the same way, as a dramatic recreation based on "real" starship logs.
I find it easier to resolve the inconsistencies in Trek if I take them as differences in interpretation by different dramatizers. Presumably the underlying reality is more consistent, and those details that make the least sense or conflict the most with the whole can be seen as poetic license or error on the part of a given dramatization.
It was the House of D'Ghor, which has been mentioned a couple of times before this season. It might be the same as the House of Kozak from DS9: "The House of Quark," since that House's only male survivor after Kozak's death was named D'Ghor. And that House was portrayed as a fairly minor one, not a member of the High Council as it was in DSC. So it may indeed have fallen from favor in the intervening century or so.
No, they certainly knew what an AU was in TMP; after all, they had an actual NASA rocket scientist, Dr. Jesco von Puttkamer, as their technical consultant, along with Isaac Asimov. And Roddenberry's TMP novelization has a line specifically explaining that an AU is the distance from the Earth to the Sun. The fact that V'Ger's energy cloud was as large as an entire star system was just what was so astonishing about it.
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Here's the full line:
It's clear from the way the line is delivered that Martok is impressed by the balls the Breen have demonstrated they have by this attack on Earth. I'm not really sure I buy they idea that Martok was embarrassed by this or that Klingon history was later revised to neglect any mention of a beachhead in the Sol system. I mean think about it, the Klingons have literally established a base of operations in the heart of the Federation. If anything, that's the sort of thing that'll get embellished through song and exaggeration by Klingons, not swept under the rug and forgotten.
That number though was edited in the audio on subsequent versions, though I hear its back to being the original number (which should eliminate night skies for anyone in a nearby system for awhile. Hope it was only emitting on the visual band. )
They said it was 100 AU from Earth, and that it was in Earth's backyard. But let's not obsess over the details. There are thousands of details in Trek that don't make any sense and have to be glossed over. (Like, did you know we're scheduled to give up sleeper ships in favor of faster space drives this year?)
It's not "back." They changed it from 82 AU in the theatrical and TV-movie edits to 2 AU in the Director's Edition, because that's less insanely huge and fits better with the duration of the Enterprise's trip through the cloud. It was an informed and calculated choice, not the result of ignorance. But because the DE was not made in HD resolution, later home video releases tend to be of the theatrical cut. That's not "undoing" the DE, it's just a matter of what gets released for sale.
You're forgetting that V'Ger's energy cloud dissipated as it drew near the Sol system. I figure the cloud was basically V'Ger's warp field, so naturally it went away when V'Ger dropped out of warp.
I'll just continue to assume Trek is in a different reality, maybe one with less advanced computer technology but more advanced aerospace. More details get filled in over time. Was Elon Musk the visionary that built DY100's for the Khanate? I hope he shows some sympathy to the victims of the Bell Riots..
Thanks for explaining that. That makes more sense now. And you're right obsessing over details gets futile, but we like Trek, it's what we do.
