I can and do call myself a Trekkie. Having grown up with TOS in reruns and catching the later series as they happened, I can tell you that there are very few contradictions between TOS and TNG/DS9/VOY. There are references in TNG to Kirk and his Enterprise, their specific missions, depictions of the various earlier Enterprises, etc.
There are only a couple timeline-math errors, and they're minor (ten years here, two years there...). The only real problems came in from about the midpoint of that latter era, where sloppy research methods pegged TOS a couple years off from it's actual placement, and everything derived from that was similarly knocked off by a couple years...
And also how they sorta forgot their own future history and started creating new 21st-century backstory based on where we were, rather than where the 1960s had been projecting. So we got mistakes like the Ares IV mission in Voyager's "One Small Step". The (from the name) apparent fourth manned Mars mission in 2032. Dinky little ship, three-person crew, no gravity. But we had interstellar sleeper ships with artificial gravity forty years prior. If it had been set in 2002 rather than 2032, and if the ship had had a more Jeffries-inspired look (and maybe artificial gravity), it'd've been more in step with Trek's space-exploration progression.
But in general, no, no real contradictions between those four series and their films. Nor the backstory cobbled together between them. Wasn't until fairly late that Brannon "Continuity Is For Wussies" Braga started playing Jenga with the canon. And Enterprise is the crowning accomplishment of someone who doesn't let little things like established facts get in the way of the story he wants to tell. I like Enterprise. .I would have loved it if they'd just recognized it for what it was, tweaked only a couple things, and made the series the early voyages of NCC-1701 under Captain Robert April. Everything would have fit just about perfectly, including Scott Bakula as April.
At the same time, I do like the idea of a founding-of-the-Federation series, but the tech needed to have been more primitive, the speeds slower, the ships smaller... If it was about the first joint design of a newly-unified Human Starfleet (the system fleets of the various Earth colonies all merged into one Starfleet in the early 2130s), it could have been the namesake of Arturis' sham starship -- NX-01, U.S.S. Dauntless. And then the header on the name would have actually made sense -- United Starfleet Ship. Cast someone else as Archer, maybe have the ringship-Enterprise make an appearance, establish the interspecies relationships that are still getting sorted out as of TOS and the films...
But neither of those are what we got with Enterprise, and that's why I am cynical about Discovery "getting it right", especially with what we've been shown so far. Set it in the JJ-verse and have it a decade or so before the Kelvin was lost and it fits, I can get behind it. Hell, I'll probably even like it. But so far, I am lss and less confident of it belonging where they say they're setting it...
--Jonah
There are only a couple timeline-math errors, and they're minor (ten years here, two years there...). The only real problems came in from about the midpoint of that latter era, where sloppy research methods pegged TOS a couple years off from it's actual placement, and everything derived from that was similarly knocked off by a couple years...
And also how they sorta forgot their own future history and started creating new 21st-century backstory based on where we were, rather than where the 1960s had been projecting. So we got mistakes like the Ares IV mission in Voyager's "One Small Step". The (from the name) apparent fourth manned Mars mission in 2032. Dinky little ship, three-person crew, no gravity. But we had interstellar sleeper ships with artificial gravity forty years prior. If it had been set in 2002 rather than 2032, and if the ship had had a more Jeffries-inspired look (and maybe artificial gravity), it'd've been more in step with Trek's space-exploration progression.
But in general, no, no real contradictions between those four series and their films. Nor the backstory cobbled together between them. Wasn't until fairly late that Brannon "Continuity Is For Wussies" Braga started playing Jenga with the canon. And Enterprise is the crowning accomplishment of someone who doesn't let little things like established facts get in the way of the story he wants to tell. I like Enterprise. .I would have loved it if they'd just recognized it for what it was, tweaked only a couple things, and made the series the early voyages of NCC-1701 under Captain Robert April. Everything would have fit just about perfectly, including Scott Bakula as April.
At the same time, I do like the idea of a founding-of-the-Federation series, but the tech needed to have been more primitive, the speeds slower, the ships smaller... If it was about the first joint design of a newly-unified Human Starfleet (the system fleets of the various Earth colonies all merged into one Starfleet in the early 2130s), it could have been the namesake of Arturis' sham starship -- NX-01, U.S.S. Dauntless. And then the header on the name would have actually made sense -- United Starfleet Ship. Cast someone else as Archer, maybe have the ringship-Enterprise make an appearance, establish the interspecies relationships that are still getting sorted out as of TOS and the films...
But neither of those are what we got with Enterprise, and that's why I am cynical about Discovery "getting it right", especially with what we've been shown so far. Set it in the JJ-verse and have it a decade or so before the Kelvin was lost and it fits, I can get behind it. Hell, I'll probably even like it. But so far, I am lss and less confident of it belonging where they say they're setting it...
--Jonah
I'm much happier with the old timeline where the transporter was invented by the Federation sometime in the 2220s, and phasers and photon torpedoes further into the 2250s.
