Just because you want a better tech to do a thing doesn't mean it exists. Wheels aren't necessarily the best way to move a thing from here to there, but they're the *only* way. Or do you think c is flouted merely by the desire to do so, and warp drive is like an old car engine?
Pretty much.
Star Trek has always been really consistent in showing that other FTL methods have some critical flaw
-Solar sails are super slow.
-Quantum Slipstream needs a resource rarer then dilthium, and that takes years to artificially produce, to operate.
-Soliton waves are highly unstable, and can destroy planets.
-The Vaadwaur's underspace corridors, and similar things, are very limited to only certain parts of the galaxy.
-Transwarp puts intense pressures on ships passing through it, so much so that not even the Borg can use it all the time, and rely on normal warp travel to get around areas.
Just because you want a better tech to do a thing doesn't mean it exists. Wheels aren't necessarily the best way to move a thing from here to there, but they're the *only* way. Or do you think c is flouted merely by the desire to do so, and warp drive is like an old car engine?
DSC treats warp drive and, especially dilithium, like magic which isn't much better (though to be fair, The Expanse treats physics like magic to some extent when it comes to the ringmaker's tech, though they do a better job of it).
Season 3 feels like it started out as a "what if" story of the type popular in fantasy stories where the author thinks "what if magic arbitrarily changes this law of nature" or "what if someone did X and it caused magic everywhere to do Y". JJ Abrams did the same thing, taking that process from the fairytale end of fantasy and applying it to science fiction in the one-season wonder Revolution and a few others, and as far as I know of it has never really caught on with science fiction fans unless handled very, very carefully (like in The Expanse with the fusion damping thing and the speed limit, or in the original version of the movie The Day The Earth Stood Still).
There are a few precedents in Trek of that kind of thing, like Q and his ". . . just change the gravitational constant of the universe . . . ", but those already have the support of a trope fairly common in sci-fi, that of the incredibly advanced alien antagonist who cannot be beaten by force but rather has to be dealt with using guile or logic.
That does not apply to the dilithium "crybaby" plot though, and it just comes across as careless arbitrary writing or the quick, simple setup needed by a standalone short story (which would be a bit short for even a single traditional episode, those are more like novelettes) much less an entire season (which is more or less the equivalent of a novella to novel length story).
DSC treats warp drive and, especially dilithium, like magic which isn't much better
How exactly does it do this? Having watched DSC since it started, I see it treating warp drive no different then it was in any previous show.
Season 3 feels like it started out as a "what if" story of the type popular in fantasy stories where the author thinks "what if magic arbitrarily changes this law of nature" or "what if someone did X and it caused magic everywhere to do Y". JJ Abrams did the same thing, taking that process from the fairytale end of fantasy and applying it to science fiction in the one-season wonder Revolution and a few others, and as far as I know of it has never really caught on with science fiction fans unless handled very, very carefully (like in The Expanse with the fusion damping thing and the speed limit, or in the original version of the movie The Day The Earth Stood Still).
DSC S3 was pretty much just the plots of Star Trek: Final Frontier, and Star Trek: Federation, merged together. Its the idea of the future of the Federation that many seemed to agree made sense.
There are a few precedents in Trek of that kind of thing, like Q and his ". . . just change the gravitational constant of the universe . . . ", but those already have the support of a trope fairly common in sci-fi, that of the incredibly advanced alien antagonist who cannot be beaten by force but rather has to be dealt with using guile or logic.
That does not apply to the dilithium "crybaby" plot though,
Why not though?
We have seen in Trek previously, with characters like Gary Mitchell, and Charles Evans, that otherwise normal people getting absurd powers via any number of means isn't unheard of. Or even particularly uncommon. Now both of them managed to be stopped before they could do massive damage to the larger galaxy, but with how often it happens it makes sense that someone, somewhere in the galaxy, would have this happen to them, and not be stopped before they could do damage(intentional or not)
DSC treats warp drive and, especially dilithium, like magic which isn't much better
How exactly does it do this? Having watched DSC since it started, I see it treating warp drive no different then it was in any previous show.
It treats it a lot differently, especially compared to TOS, which DSC was originally set as an immediate prequel to. In TOS, warp drive is seamless and the ship never left normal space (with a few well-delineated exceptions cases due to engine abuse), and they only used impulse drive at all in a few episodes (usually they would just enter and leave orbit using warp drive).
The movie era, with Paramount Pictures calling the shots instead of Paramount TV (which was Desilu with a new name) and wanting Star Trek to be more like Star Wars they complicated things and introduced a lot of problems like ships cruising along in interstellar space on impulse (as if they could actually get anywhere in less than decades that way) like Excelsior was doing in The Undiscovered Country , and the drives lost a lot of their versatility, maneuverability and had that weirdly long windup, but still they generally treated it as a normalspace drive.
The Kelvin movies don't really count, since while they apparently use a form of transwarp instead of warp (and both the VFX and the travel times support this), they are in a different quantum timeline from the rest of Trek.
DSC treats warp like it is a hyperdrive in that going to warp is an automatic getaway free card like they are jumping out of regular space and into some other space. At the very least they apparently are not able to see outside the warp bubble very well and so do things like drop out of warp into the middle of massively dense asteroid fields without seeing they are there.
Conversely, TOS/TNG era ships would see the asteroids a long way off and simply go around (unless they are chasing someone like Mudd who mistakenly thinks going into the field will shake pursuit of course). Also, like Star Wars It turns out that they cannot always communicate properly in DSC warp either and had to "drop out" of it to contact what turns out to be the USS Enterprise.
The transition away from TOS style warp with their UFO-like hairpin turn and sudden stop maneuverability can be explained well enough by a watershed level breakthrough in warp speed that started gaining traction in the 2270s and led to experiments like the Excelsior (which in the Excelsior's case was not 100% successful but still drove warp tech to higher levels), but apparently had side effects that markedly reduced maneuverability and made the use of impulse while in tight spaces like near planets necessary (along with the change to tying weapons into the warp core instead of the impulse stacks slowing combat to sublight).
Also, warp in s1 and s2 DSC is just as anomalous for the period it was set in as the aesthetics are since they were based on an apparently flawed idea of the warp used in the 2290s from The Undiscovered Country movie instead of even attempting to use the era-appropriate version of warp as the starting point.
But the baseline differences in how warp is treated in each show is not the main part of the point. Dilithium is.
In most of TOS it was a critical part of warp drive because it regulated the matter/antimatter reaction that powered it, it did not have any other use besides the fact that in the presence of powered equipment it reacted in a way that showed up on sensors as another source of power (apparently without actually emitting any power or the necklace full of them would have burned Elaan).
There was one single episode, The Alternative Factor, where dilithium was treated differently and introduced the idea of an "artificial dilithium matrix" that could be charged in special charging stations and store power. It was used in the phaser banks and possibly some other systems (a popular fan theory ties it in with the power readings in Elaan of Troyius and postulates that it is essential to the broadcast power system like they used in The Cage to power the dismounted ship phaser). Also those flat paddle-shaped matrix units (they used acrylic cutting boards for the props) could be placed in an adapter in the dilithium chamber in a pinch.
The rest of TOS ignored the dilithium matrix thing just like how a few other one-episode McGuffins in later series (like the VOY "can't turn in warp" nonsense) were ignored and forgotten.
DSC goes totally gonzo on dilithium and presents it as some kind of substance that is all connected wherever it is and that there is a magical motherload that somehow controls all "active" dilithium everywhere, like killing the First Vampire kills all other vampires in some horror stories.
Season 3 feels like it started out as a "what if" story of the type popular in fantasy stories where the author thinks "what if magic arbitrarily changes this law of nature" or "what if someone did X and it caused magic everywhere to do Y". JJ Abrams did the same thing, taking that process from the fairytale end of fantasy and applying it to science fiction in the one-season wonder Revolution and a few others, and as far as I know of it has never really caught on with science fiction fans unless handled very, very carefully (like in The Expanse with the fusion damping thing and the speed limit, or in the original version of the movie The Day The Earth Stood Still).
DSC S3 was pretty much just the plots of Star Trek: Final Frontier, and Star Trek: Federation, merged together. Its the idea of the future of the Federation that many seemed to agree made sense.
And how is that supposed to make the feel any less like they used the fantasy magic "what if" schtick?
BTW, the popularity of the idea of a post-Federation story is probably had more to do with the myth that Andromeda was supposed to be Star Trek after that fall, and likening it to how Sir Conan Doyle killed off Sherlock Holms because the only stories the publishers wanted from him were more Holms stories and he was tired of writing them.
While Roddenberry had trouble selling anything after Star Trek the same way Doyle did after the Sherlock Holms stories, he was not tired of it, the problem was that Paramount wanted him to change it into a psuedo-Star Wars with primetime soap backbiting elements and other nastiness added in.
There are a few precedents in Trek of that kind of thing, like Q and his ". . . just change the gravitational constant of the universe . . . ", but those already have the support of a trope fairly common in sci-fi, that of the incredibly advanced alien antagonist who cannot be beaten by force but rather has to be dealt with using guile or logic.
That does not apply to the dilithium "crybaby" plot though,
Why not though?
We have seen in Trek previously, with characters like Gary Mitchell, and Charles Evans, that otherwise normal people getting absurd powers via any number of means isn't unheard of. Or even particularly uncommon. Now both of them managed to be stopped before they could do massive damage to the larger galaxy, but with how often it happens it makes sense that someone, somewhere in the galaxy, would have this happen to them, and not be stopped before they could do damage(intentional or not)
Gary Mitchell, Elizabeth Dehner, and Charles Evans were able to get those powers because one of the tenants of Trek was that Humans (and Vulcans apparently) were on the edge of ascension so the nudge from high-end (for humans) psyonics hitting the barrier could push them into a sort of half-ascension, as could ascended aliens deliberately awaking those powers. Eventually material peoples end up as energy beings similar to the way they did in Babylon5 (it is actually a rather common trope in sci-fi).
Roddenberry was a humanist and he put aspects of that into the core of the show (which is also the reason that all of the transhumans have severe flaws like the overriding ambition, ended up slaves to their machines, etc.).
Anyway, the difference is that particular villain trope is essentially a battle of intelligence/trickery, not passive like the "crybaby" plot point. Roddenberry liked the folk stories (like The Hairy Man ones) and made a rule that no episode could ever be resolved by resorting to brute force, it always had to have a clever way around it as the solution like those folklore stories.
The long "magic box" buildup of the main plot does not help either, when the anticipation builds up over the course of a dozen hours the viewers expect something truly profound and when it turns out to be something pedestrian like the "crybaby" thing it sours the whole season with a sense of underwelmingness.
It treats it a lot differently, especially compared to TOS, which DSC was originally set as an immediate prequel to. In TOS, warp drive is seamless and the ship never left normal space (with a few well-delineated exceptions cases due to engine abuse), and they only used impulse drive at all in a few episodes (usually they would just enter and leave orbit using warp drive).
The movie era, with Paramount Pictures calling the shots instead of Paramount TV (which was Desilu with a new name) and wanting Star Trek to be more like Star Wars they complicated things and introduced a lot of problems like ships cruising along in interstellar space on impulse (as if they could actually get anywhere in less than decades that way) like Excelsior was doing in The Undiscovered Country , and the drives lost a lot of their versatility, maneuverability and had that weirdly long windup, but still they generally treated it as a normalspace drive.
The Kelvin movies don't really count, since while they apparently use a form of transwarp instead of warp (and both the VFX and the travel times support this), they are in a different quantum timeline from the rest of Trek.
So the problem is that it treats warp like its treated in every other show set before and after TOS? The way warp was treated in TOS was long retconed into how DSC does it long before DSC was a thing. You're trying to argue that an artifact of production, that being TOS's warp visuals compared to every other show's, is something in-universe, it isn't. Its just a visual artifact from an ever changing, and expanding, franchise.
DSC treats warp like it is a hyperdrive in that going to warp is an automatic getaway free card like they are jumping out of regular space and into some other space. At the very least they apparently are not able to see outside the warp bubble very well and so do things like drop out of warp into the middle of massively dense asteroid fields without seeing they are there.
Conversely, TOS/TNG era ships would see the asteroids a long way off and simply go around (unless they are chasing someone like Mudd who mistakenly thinks going into the field will shake pursuit of course). Also, like Star Wars It turns out that they cannot always communicate properly in DSC warp either and had to "drop out" of it to contact what turns out to be the USS Enterprise.
Well they are. The whole "science" behind warp is that you are existing normal space, to enter a subspace bubble. This is why time dilation doesn't affect them despite going many times faster then light. They aren't in normal space to be affected by it, they are in a subspace pocket.
And as I recall that was a result of the Enterprise being damaged, and suffering various issues, not the DSC being at warp. If you're talking about the scene at the end of DSC S1/beginning of S2.
The transition away from TOS style warp with their UFO-like hairpin turn and sudden stop maneuverability can be explained well enough by a watershed level breakthrough in warp speed that started gaining traction in the 2270s and led to experiments like the Excelsior (which in the Excelsior's case was not 100% successful but still drove warp tech to higher levels), but apparently had side effects that markedly reduced maneuverability and made the use of impulse while in tight spaces like near planets necessary (along with the change to tying weapons into the warp core instead of the impulse stacks slowing combat to sublight).
Also, warp in s1 and s2 DSC is just as anomalous for the period it was set in as the aesthetics are since they were based on an apparently flawed idea of the warp used in the 2290s from The Undiscovered Country movie instead of even attempting to use the era-appropriate version of warp as the starting point.
This, as far as I can see online, was never mentioned in canon. And just represents a fan explanation to try to justify the difference of visuals/mechanics when the realty is they just changed it.
But the baseline differences in how warp is treated in each show is not the main part of the point. Dilithium is.
In most of TOS it was a critical part of warp drive because it regulated the matter/antimatter reaction that powered it, it did not have any other use besides the fact that in the presence of powered equipment it reacted in a way that showed up on sensors as another source of power (apparently without actually emitting any power or the necklace full of them would have burned Elaan).
There was one single episode, The Alternative Factor, where dilithium was treated differently and introduced the idea of an "artificial dilithium matrix" that could be charged in special charging stations and store power. It was used in the phaser banks and possibly some other systems (a popular fan theory ties it in with the power readings in Elaan of Troyius and postulates that it is essential to the broadcast power system like they used in The Cage to power the dismounted ship phaser). Also those flat paddle-shaped matrix units (they used acrylic cutting boards for the props) could be placed in an adapter in the dilithium chamber in a pinch.
The rest of TOS ignored the dilithium matrix thing just like how a few other one-episode McGuffins in later series (like the VOY "can't turn in warp" nonsense) were ignored and forgotten.
DSC goes totally gonzo on dilithium and presents it as some kind of substance that is all connected wherever it is and that there is a magical motherload that somehow controls all "active" dilithium everywhere, like killing the First Vampire kills all other vampires in some horror stories.
And all the other shows retconed that, and were rather consistent about that retcon. So DSC is following the most current canon established before it started. You can't keep citing aspects of how TOS did things when those aspects of TOS haven't been canon for decades.
The last part isn't what happened in Discovery at all. The dilthium planet Sukal was on wasn't some motherload that controlled all dilthium everywhere, nor did they state as such. Sukal got his connection to dilthium/subspace by being exposed to the high concentrations of radiation/dilthium on the planet. His cry resonated at the same subspace frequency as diltihum does, causing it to go inert. But the dilthium on the planet wasn't some "master control" dilthium. And that's not even that hard to believe. You can use high frequency noises to crack crystals IRL if you hit them with the same resonance frequency as the crystal itself has.
And how is that supposed to make the feel any less like they used the fantasy magic "what if" schtick?
BTW, the popularity of the idea of a post-Federation story is probably had more to do with the myth that Andromeda was supposed to be Star Trek after that fall, and likening it to how Sir Conan Doyle killed off Sherlock Holms because the only stories the publishers wanted from him were more Holms stories and he was tired of writing them.
While Roddenberry had trouble selling anything after Star Trek the same way Doyle did after the Sherlock Holms stories, he was not tired of it, the problem was that Paramount wanted him to change it into a psuedo-Star Wars with primetime soap backbiting elements and other nastiness added in.
Because nothing about it changes anything about the setting's established canon, and is consistent with past canon. So its not really "fantasy" any more then the rest of Trek is.
I can't speak to the Andromeda thing, since I haven't heard of it, but I don't really think thats the issue. I think the issue is that Star Trek had kind of run into a dead end. By the time Voyager ended we had warp 9.99 ships, the Federation had explored over 1/5 of the Galaxy, made peace with all the major powers in local space, defeated the major badguys of the other quadrants, and generally done so many different aliens, and artifacts, and anomalies, that it was becoming harder to write a credible threat to the ships/crews. The obsession with prequels following Voyager, and various attempts to destroy the Federation in the future after ENT, were likely just a way for the writers to tone everything back down to the point they could write stories that felt like they had real impact/threat.
Its honestly not that different then the problem I think STO has now. When you have a big galactic alliance of every major power from most of the galaxy its hard to write a story that creates a believable threat to them.
Gary Mitchell, Elizabeth Dehner, and Charles Evans were able to get those powers because one of the tenants of Trek was that Humans (and Vulcans apparently) were on the edge of ascension so the nudge from high-end (for humans) psyonics hitting the barrier could push them into a sort of half-ascension, as could ascended aliens deliberately awaking those powers. Eventually material peoples end up as energy beings similar to the way they did in Babylon5 (it is actually a rather common trope in sci-fi).
Roddenberry was a humanist and he put aspects of that into the core of the show (which is also the reason that all of the transhumans have severe flaws like the overriding ambition, ended up slaves to their machines, etc.).
Anyway, the difference is that particular villain trope is essentially a battle of intelligence/trickery, not passive like the "crybaby" plot point. Roddenberry liked the folk stories (like The Hairy Man ones) and made a rule that no episode could ever be resolved by resorting to brute force, it always had to have a clever way around it as the solution like those folklore stories.
I've never seen anything suggesting Roddenberry believed humans were on the cusp of ascension. Even early TNG had Q imply that was a long way off for humanity. And Charles got his powers because he was gifted them by higher beings, not because he was himself near a higher state of being. They could have given those powers to anyone of any species. Humans had solved most social ills on Earth, but physically we were ages off from being energy beings or w/e.
And I think most people nowadays will agree that Roddenberry's ideas on transhumanism were pretty flawed, and morally questionable. Which is likely why future Trek shows like DS9, and ENT, went to lengths to portray the exact opposite ideals.]
But here's the thing, Sukal wasn't a villain. Many Star Trek episodes were focused around the idea that what seemed like a villainous act was just another alien race doing something without knowing how, or even that, they were harming others. This was a key point on being able to reach peaceful conclusions in many episodes. You're trying to narrowly define the trope Sukal was into something it wasn't, when the thing it was is itself a common Trek trope.
So the problem is that it treats warp like its treated in every other show set before and after TOS? The way warp was treated in TOS was long retconed into how DSC does it long before DSC was a thing. You're trying to argue that an artifact of production, that being TOS's warp visuals compared to every other show's, is something in-universe, it isn't. Its just a visual artifact from an ever changing, and expanding, franchise.
Where did you get that weird idea? The problem is that DSC treats warp like NONE of the other Trek shows did, not just TOS, and all the Paramount Treks used the same warp as TOS did, it was just faster at the expense of adding other limitations. They even had warp-chase combat in TNG a few times and it was fairly common in ENT once Reed figured out how to balance the warp field, shields, and phasers to allow it (before that it was mainly shown by the Suliban warp strafing them). So no, warp was not "retconned" by anything as late as the ENT TV series.
The whole "science" behind warp is that you are existing normal space, to enter a subspace bubble. This is why time dilation doesn't affect them despite going many times faster then light. They aren't in normal space to be affected by it, they are in a subspace pocket.
And as I recall that was a result of the Enterprise being damaged, and suffering various issues, not the DSC being at warp. If you're talking about the scene at the end of DSC S1/beginning of S2.
No, that is not how warp works at all. Though subspace transtator circuitry is obviously used in the machinery that produces the warp field since transtators are the basis of all their advanced tech (according to dialog in A Piece of the Action), the warp bubble does not transfer the ship into subspace.
They have shown both subspace and hyperspace in Trek before, and it is nothing like warp. Subspace has that weird druglike effect on regularspace people as shown in Schisms along with other weird effects. They bring subspace particles into normalspace (like the nadions that phasers fire) and have also brought bubbles of subspace into regular space in the various Treks for various purposes, but those were always done with the deflector dish/sensor array unit which actually IS a subspace-based device (as in subspace radio and whatnot).
If the ship actually went into subspace it would become immaterial from the point of view of the regular dimension like the spherebulders did in ENT (if they had any presence left in normal space at all while at warp) so Enterprise-D would not have needed to mount the phase cloak to get out of that asteroid in The Pegasus. Also if they were travelling in subspace they would have the solanogen-based lifeforms and the sphere builders to contend with all the time, which they don't.
The explanation of how warp works was always (up until recently at least, Kurtzman probably has other ideas about it but that is a CHANGE from all Treks made before 2009, not something that would work in a retcon without causing all kinds of compatibility problems with the previous stories) that the warp bubble used a time effect to manipulate a small area containing the ship into sort of sliding along in the desired direction in relation to the rest of space, carrying the ship and anything else in the field with it. The ship itself never goes faster than the speed of light though it seems to from an outsider's point of view so there is no problem.
The dependance on time as part of distance and speed is what the "time warp factor" was all about in The Cage, TOS simply dropped the word "time" from the dialog. It is also why disrupting the field, like with gravity effects, causes a ship to move through time in addition to or instead, of distance. And yes, it might seem a bit hokey to some people because it is an old sci-fi novel staple and the hype about Alcubierre drive (which works in an entirely different way).
As for the communications thing, it turns out that the Enterprise was damaged, sure, but the Discovery crew did not know that was the case before they dropped out of warp to attempt to clear up the signal. That decision to drop out of warp to make it easier to communicate was apparently the go-to solution in DSC which indicates that they have problems communicating in warp often enough to make that so.
This, as far as I can see online, was never mentioned in canon. And just represents a fan explanation to try to justify the difference of visuals/mechanics when the realty is they just changed it.
It was, however, the official explanation that Paramount would give, and it was even on startrek.com during the Berman era of Trek, and the writers were held to it when writing episodes. Any mention that FTL combat never happened in TOS was corrected out of scripts, even the episode The Battle had to dance around the point and not state directly that TOS style FTL combat never happened, and had to be content with stating that the double-image trick using warp on a target whose sensors were down was what was new.
And all the other shows retconed that, and were rather consistent about that retcon. So DSC is following the most current canon established before it started. You can't keep citing aspects of how TOS did things when those aspects of TOS haven't been canon for decades.
The last part isn't what happened in Discovery at all. The dilthium planet Sukal was on wasn't some motherload that controlled all dilthium everywhere, nor did they state as such. Sukal got his connection to dilthium/subspace by being exposed to the high concentrations of radiation/dilthium on the planet. His cry resonated at the same subspace frequency as diltihum does, causing it to go inert. But the dilthium on the planet wasn't some "master control" dilthium. And that's not even that hard to believe. You can use high frequency noises to crack crystals IRL if you hit them with the same resonance frequency as the crystal itself has.
No, as much as TOS-haters would like it to be otherwise, it was never retconned in anything before NuTrek. If it had been then a lot of the older episodes would not work for one thing, and also Paramount was trying not to split the fanbase because it would hurt their ratings and thus lose them money. If it has gone out of canon at all then it would be since 2017, not "decades".
And yes, I am aware that the dilithium planet is not stated to be some unique central control, what I said was that in the plot mechanics it functioned as if it was. Maybe I did not phrase it clearly enough, it happens sometimes.
Because nothing about it changes anything about the setting's established canon, and is consistent with past canon. So its not really "fantasy" any more then the rest of Trek is.
I can't speak to the Andromeda thing, since I haven't heard of it, but I don't really think thats the issue. I think the issue is that Star Trek had kind of run into a dead end. By the time Voyager ended we had warp 9.99 ships, the Federation had explored over 1/5 of the Galaxy, made peace with all the major powers in local space, defeated the major badguys of the other quadrants, and generally done so many different aliens, and artifacts, and anomalies, that it was becoming harder to write a credible threat to the ships/crews. The obsession with prequels following Voyager, and various attempts to destroy the Federation in the future after ENT, were likely just a way for the writers to tone everything back down to the point they could write stories that felt like they had real impact/threat.
Its honestly not that different then the problem I think STO has now. When you have a big galactic alliance of every major power from most of the galaxy its hard to write a story that creates a believable threat to them.
The fantasy genre "arbitrary what if" effect has nothing to do with canon, it has to do with the feeling that they used an out-of-genre technique, in this case the fairytale arbitrary change thing that is the basis of a particular class of magic systems in the fantasy genre.
The Andromeda/Federation myth is not talked about anywhere near as much as it was back when the show was still going, so it is not too surprising that you never heard of it.
I agree that Paramount TV had a problem with post-VOY stories because of the over-expansive hero-on-a-pedestal scripting that they inherited from the movie division, in fact they recognized that they wrote themselves into a corner which is why they went prequel (to ENT) instead. DSC was perfectly positioned for a strong comeback if they would have used TOS as a style/writing technique basis for the show instead of The Undiscovered Country which came with all of the pedestal baggage the movie division heaped on.
That added to all the "up yours TOS fans" stuff (remember the "NO ROUND ENGINES!!!" signs and other examples) and attempts to coattail all of (the then) currently popular shows like Game of Thrones, the Kelvin timeline stuff, and TV sci-fi shows like Dark Matter and Killjoys at the same time that turned the show so generic, it made enough of a damage control problem for CBS that they felt they had to take it into the future.
I don't agree with CBS that the move was the only option (or even the best option), they had plenty of ways to fix it, but that is another matter.
I've never seen anything suggesting Roddenberry believed humans were on the cusp of ascension. Even early TNG had Q imply that was a long way off for humanity. And Charles got his powers because he was gifted them by higher beings, not because he was himself near a higher state of being. They could have given those powers to anyone of any species. Humans had solved most social ills on Earth, but physically we were ages off from being energy beings or w/e.
And I think most people nowadays will agree that Roddenberry's ideas on transhumanism were pretty flawed, and morally questionable. Which is likely why future Trek shows like DS9, and ENT, went to lengths to portray the exact opposite ideals.]
But here's the thing, Sukal wasn't a villain. Many Star Trek episodes were focused around the idea that what seemed like a villainous act was just another alien race doing something without knowing how, or even that, they were harming others. This was a key point on being able to reach peaceful conclusions in many episodes. You're trying to narrowly define the trope Sukal was into something it wasn't, when the thing it was is itself a common Trek trope.
Unless you were enough of a fan back in the 1970s when convention talks were being published and behind the scenes stuff like copies of the original scripts and memo compilations and whatnot were being sold by Roddenberry to have seen them then it is not surprising that you never heard about it, stories about how much an egotistical jerk he could be are far more popular fare nowadays so things like his humanist beliefs get lost in the noise.
So I originally typed up a much longer response to this post, but have decided it would just be best to end this conversation here.
All I will say is that, from the wording of your posts, you seem to have a deep seated persecution complex in regards to anything being changed from TOS, which I think has heavily skewed your opinion on things regarding the various retcons made in later shows. Things like the lack of round engines in DSC isn't an "up yours" to TOS fans, and changes to how warp drive works aren't just perpetuated by "TOS haters" and I can't even imagine how you would come to that conclusion in the first place. Nor am I sure how you came to the conclusion that going into the future was "damage" control given that the first two seasons of DSC were incredibly popular worldwide. Damage control would imply it was doing bad, and they were trying to salvage it. When that simply isn't the case.
So I originally typed up a much longer response to this post, but have decided it would just be best to end this conversation here.
All I will say is that, from the wording of your posts, you seem to have a deep seated persecution complex in regards to anything being changed from TOS, which I think has heavily skewed your opinion on things regarding the various retcons made in later shows. Things like the lack of round engines in DSC isn't an "up yours" to TOS fans, and changes to how warp drive works aren't just perpetuated by "TOS haters" and I can't even imagine how you would come to that conclusion in the first place. Nor am I sure how you came to the conclusion that going into the future was "damage" control given that the first two seasons of DSC were incredibly popular worldwide. Damage control would imply it was doing bad, and they were trying to salvage it. When that simply isn't the case.
An ad hominem attack? You do know that those are the last refuge of people who have run out of valid arguments, don't you?
And no, I do not feel "persecuted", I just get annoyed by people dumping on a really great groundbreaking show just because it came out before modern production technology made SFX so cheap and easy. And TOS contempt is a real thing, there have been a lot of papers written about the phenomenon, and in recent years it has gotten much worse from the polarization of the rift in the fanbase.
I could go into a long discussion of Hollywood damage control and the signs that it is being used, but it would take too long and be too much typing for today, so maybe I will take it up later, but probably not. I will briefly say this however: some of the simplest signs (besides articles written about it happening on a particular show, which has also happened concerning DSC) are when production stops for the season then suddenly starts up again like what happened in season one of DSC, and massively different treatments of adjacent seasons, and both of those have happened in DSC (including an entire setting change between second and third season).
And no, I don't hate DSC, I actually like it though I don't think it really stands out from all the other modern sci-fi shows such as Dark Matter, Killjoys, Pandora, the Lost in Space reboot and others.
An ad hominem attack? You do know that those are the last refuge of people who have run out of valid arguments, don't you?
That wasn't an ad hominem, as it wasn't meant to be an insult. It was just an observation.
I had a number of arguments regarding your last post.
-None of the other Treks used the same kind of warp TOS did. Just to name the most high level changes. In TOS they used warp everywhere, even inside systems, and near planets, with impulse power only being rarely used. In TNG, and all later Treks, warp was used for travel between systems, while impulse was used in systems/near planets. Unless you were leaving the system entirely. In TOS warp travel just looked like the ship was moving through space normally. Starting in TMP, and carrying over to all later Treks, the use of warp drive put the ship in a tunnel, or other visual spatial distortion, to signify it was no longer moving through space normally. DSC warp, DS9 warp, VOY warp, Kelvin warp. Its all pretty consistent with each other, and very obviously not how TOS warp is.
-Your explanation of how warp works isn't accurate at all. Warp works by creating a subspace bubble around the ship to take it slightly out of normal space. This allows it to go many times faster then the speed of light, since its no longer affected by the laws of normal space. They even state they are in fact going faster then the speed of light multiple times throughout the franchise. You're also wrong in that being out of normal space would mean they have no presence in normal space. We have seen numerous times throughout the franchise that you can be out of phase with normal space in various ways and still be seen/interact with it in various means. Its not an all or nothing situation. Likewise we have seen the warp bubble be affected, and it not cause them to time travel, because time is not inherently connected to warp travel. You can use warp, along with other factors, to achieve time travel, but its not directly linked to time in such an easy manner.
-Subspace is not a singular thing, its a name given to a large number of various realms ranging from Fluidic Space, to the Vaadwaur Underspace, to the Mycelial Realm. Going into subspace doesn't automatically mean you suffer drug like effects. It also means you're unlikely to run into the Solanae, or the Sphere Builders, unless you intrude on their specific subspace realms, which normal warp obviously doesn't.
-Paramount is not the holder of Trek canon CBS is. And nothing in the shows actually suggests any such change in warp/warp combat happened in-universe. They just changed how warp worked in later shows, and how warp works in DSC is far more consistent with every other show from TNG to ENT, with ENT not acting like TOS at all despite being before it.
-The plot mechanics of DSC's 3rd season didn't treat the dilthium planet like it was some sort of hub. If it treated it like it was a hub then there would have been a plot point about how the dilthium there was super special, and all other dilthium in the galaxy came from it, or something along those lines. No such an implication was made, either in dialogue, or the actions of Sukal. This idea of it being treated that way is completely made up. Any large amount of dilthium anyone could have caused the same results. And nothing changed about dilthium in Star Trek with this plot point, so claiming this fantasy "what if" trope doesn't really work either. Its no more a "what if" then if they used omega to destory subspace across the galaxy.
-The problem with Star Trek had nothing to do with a "hero on a pedestal" writing. And even if it was, going "back to" TOS style writing wouldn't fix that because Kirk in TOS was the definition of a "western cowboy action hero on pedestal". TOS was made as a space western, with Kirk portrayed as an overly romanticized cowboy in space. Star Trek has been that from the beginning. The issue was that between the hundreds upon hundreds of episodes they had run out of ideas since they had done most everything already, and had found solutions to most problems you could think of. They needed to reset the technology level to make things interesting again. Star Trek being "hero-centric" or not really has no bearing on that issue.
-Roddenberry being humanist isn't unknown to most Trek fans, nor was it what I was asking about. I was asking about the idea that humans in Star Trek were on the cusp of ascension, when theres multiple episodes across the franchise that say the exact opposite. Humans are a long way out from that, and yet can still get these incredible powers via various means. Meaning something like Sukal could have happened since you don't need to be nearly god-like to get these sorts of powers in Star Trek.
And nobody is dumping on TOS. Pointing out it was visually flawed due to the time it was made, and that other shows have changed how things look, isn't dumping on it. Its just recognizing it had flaws.
And nobody is dumping on TOS. Pointing out it was visually flawed due to the time it was made, and that other shows have changed how things look, isn't dumping on it. Its just recognizing it had flaws.
and yet people do in the same fashion you just did sir....
for the time, it had no flaws, based on what was available in terms of FX/tech and such.
we could argue that car brakes prior to anti-lock were flawed, and yet they were not, as they did what they were meant to do at the time. technology has aided in a higher, more safe, and stronger braking system. akin to how recent tv shows/movies, etc have been a beneficiary of technology and computers.
so to compare todays trek with that of first trek, and say it had flaws, is not a valid argument.
Extending your analogy, however, Phoenix would appear to be arguing that since the first brakes did not have antilock technology, adding it later is a retcon that ruins the very concept of braking. All brakes should always be built the way there were the very first time! It's canon!
Also, Phoenix appears to have a considerable amount of backstage information about the mindsets of the original producers, and about later CBS personnel, which they enjoy repeating without ever once providing a citation to the original source of the data. Instead, it's always "common knowledge" that "everyone knew at the time", which translates to "gossip". It's why I gave up even trying to discuss such things with them - they won't listen to any information that contradicts their own firmly-held opinion, which tends to be backed by such gossip.
An ad hominem attack? You do know that those are the last refuge of people who have run out of valid arguments, don't you?
That wasn't an ad hominem, as it wasn't meant to be an insult. It was just an observation.
Trying to cast aspersions on the person arguing an opposing point to imply that their point is not valid or otherwise undermine or deflect from their point by doing so is the very definition an ad hominem attack. It does not require malice. Look it up if you don't believe me.
- No, the only time warp has been shown as fundamentally different has been in Kelvin with their transwarp-like warp, and the stuff starting with DSC which appears to function as some sort of otherspace drive because of the issues I went into detail already in earlier comments.
What you are describing as various retcons during the in the TOS and Berman eras are no such thing, they are simply the engineering changes as the drives evolved in favor of speed using the same warp theory that TOS did.
And none of the Berman era Treks had ships travelling in "tubes" unless they were using something like Borg transwarp conduits. You may be mistaking the light bloom that happened when TNG and later ships did that extremely rapid acceleration they used when going into warp for a 'tube' but it isn't one, and neither is the view of the nearby stars streaking by a "tube" that they are travelling in.
Care to point out the "tube" the Enterprise-D you claim TNG used for warp in the first section of the following video? I chose it because the stardrive section makes that hairpin turn and you can see the stars stop flashing by when it turns even though they did the whole separation and turn while in warp in Encounter at Farpoint:
The consistency at the warp theory level is with TOS thru ENT, the Kelvin movies and the Kurtzman stuff are the outliers.
- It is not "my" explanation of how warp works, I simply passed along what the official explanation was at the time the shows were made and pointed out some of the flaws in the bubble of subspace nonsense. If DSC warp is a subspace drive, then it is a change from all of the traditional Treks.
-No, Fluidic space is not subspace, it is a different dimension entirely with its own natural laws. Underspace is possibly a kind of subspace judging by the name but going into it takes you completely out of normalspace unlike warp which never leaves normalspace, and it does not resemble subspace as it was used in TNG at all. And the Mycelial Relm appears to be a plane, not a dimention, just the superstring layer of the regular dimension that has some kind of connection to the superstring layers of neighboring quantum realities.
What has being out of phase have to do with it? People and ships have gone out of phase in various episodes and none of those episodes have allowed them to break physical laws except for having limited interaction with unphased objects. In fact, some of the technobabble said that they were still bound by all the normal rules, they were just shunted off into their own phase of normal space. That means that the speed of light is still the speed of light when phased.
Never has any of the traditional Treks shown that warp takes them out of normal space into subspace in regular operation. Time, on the other hand, is connected to warp in numerous ways in the span of traditional Trek shows, including outright dialog in The Cage and some of the flood of technobabble later shows are known for.
It was also described that way in the original series bible though I know a lot of people take the old Paramount simplified rule of thumb canon thing being only what was in the live action shows (which they did not even completely follow themselves) so literally nowadays that they don't think anything from behind the scenes is valid despite it being what the writers were working from.
I know that the space around the ship moving and carrying the ship along with it thing is counter-intuitive, but it has long been a popular way getting around the speed of light problem in sci-fi, though leaving normalspace for a hyperspace or subspace has been the favored way of doing it in movies and TV.
In written sci-fi both types are still used quite often, in a few (non-Trek) novels they use both realspace and otherspace (I am using "otherspace" in a general sense, not as a particular one) drives at the same time and in at least one of those some of the ships mounted both types of drive on the same ship because each had their own advantages and disadvantages.
- I don't want to go deep down the rabbithole of IP but in a nutshell the Star Trek IP was always owned by Desilu and still is, the only thing that has ever changed was the name. When Gulf+Western bought the studio they changed the name to Paramount Television and placed it in the corporate tree with (but subservient to) the Paramount Pictures studio they already owned.
Next Viacom (who owned the CBS network) bought Paramount from Gulf+Western but never changed the name, which caused confusion when Viacom split and kept Paramount Pictures while spinning off Paramount TV with CBS who tacked "CBS" on the front of the name until a few years ago when they dropped all mention of Paramount from the name so now it is just known as one of the CBS Studios group.
Through all of that, ownership of Star Treknever actually changed hands, the studio was just passed from umbrella to umbrella so they took orders from different corporate higher-ups along the way. Until CBS changed the name again "Paramount" referred to two different studios, which is what confuses a lot of people since both the names started with the same first word.
- You still don't understand what I am talking about I see. What I said about DSC s3 was on a plotting and writing FRAMEWORK level, while you are looking at it from the point of the lore from inside the fictional universe, they are totally different things. Trying to argue it from opposite sides of the fourth wall just does not work.
From that framework level the way dilithium was treated was the way I described, like it was all tied together and that planet acted like a control hub for the purposes of the plot structure. At that level, which comes before anything is put on the page, the dialog, the action, and the visuals don't mean anything at all, they are the stuff tacked onto that framework later that gives it a (hopefully unique and entertaining) character. Stories can be analyzed like most other things can be, and the framework can be seen by doing that.
-The hero on the pedestal is not necessarily a character as such, it can be the whole ship like it became in the movies. The key factor here is that they stopped writing about the hero ship as being one, albeit famous, ship in a service (Starfleet) to being the "flagship" of Starfleet and that apparently nothing significant ever happened that did not require the hero ship to fix it. It is a form of fanservice and it was one of the things that dragged Trek down a bit even after that pedestal was passed to other ships (and to a slightly lesser degree a space station) in other times.
It is ironic that a lot of the push towards the pedestal was due to a misunderstanding of why the Enterprise was called a flagship in Phase II. In Phase II Kirk was an admiral, and whenever he had to go out in the field to handle something personally he used the Enterprise as his command ship, what is called planting his flag on it (which came from a sailing warship convention where the command ship was identified by the admiral's flag up with all the other flags and pennants and whatnot used for signaling and identification back then).
The movie division executives mistook that to mean "flagship" in the business sense instead of the military one and from interviews and articles it apparently fed into the fanservice idea along with the other nostalgia factors they were trying to use to force a "cult hit" movie to rival Star Wars.
Unfortunately they never did break away from that and it led to the weird thing of defining blocks of time for each pedestal (with exception of Voyager which was separated by distance instead) for each hero group, with the minimum amount of overlap. That is why everything has to be either a prequel or sequel rather than being about another ship and crew in the same timeframe (and yes, it was probably another factor in DSC jumping to the far future in addition to the damage control factor).
- That "cusp of ascension" didn't mean that it was only a few years away, it meant that they had the potential (like many others) and were close enough to it that extraordinary things (like psionics hitting the barrier and surviving, or getting a nudge from other ascended beings) was enough to trigger a sort of half ascended state. It isn't that much different from Stargate and Babylon5 in that respect.
-And yes, TOS contempt is a real phenomenon, enough so that has been talked about and analyzed in psychological and social sciences publications. Also Moonves (who greenlit DSC) and a number of others have expressed contempt for TOS and often other traditional Trek, so yes, there has been a lot of dumping on the traditional Treks, especially TOS.
And nobody is dumping on TOS. Pointing out it was visually flawed due to the time it was made, and that other shows have changed how things look, isn't dumping on it. Its just recognizing it had flaws.
and yet people do in the same fashion you just did sir....
for the time, it had no flaws, based on what was available in terms of FX/tech and such.
we could argue that car brakes prior to anti-lock were flawed, and yet they were not, as they did what they were meant to do at the time. technology has aided in a higher, more safe, and stronger braking system. akin to how recent tv shows/movies, etc have been a beneficiary of technology and computers.
so to compare todays trek with that of first trek, and say it had flaws, is not a valid argument.
Extending your analogy, however, Phoenix would appear to be arguing that since the first brakes did not have antilock technology, adding it later is a retcon that ruins the very concept of braking. All brakes should always be built the way there were the very first time! It's canon!
No, not at all. Rather it is that there needs to be a development path that is followed between the first brakes and antilock brakes instead of the antilock brakes becoming the only brakes that ever were. And no, I don't mean they have to burn show time to technobabble that path explicitly, ad nauseum, just that whenever in the era of a particular type of brake they use that brake or make sure the viewers know that it is an exception (like a prototype) and not the norm.
Comments
Star Trek has always been really consistent in showing that other FTL methods have some critical flaw
-Solar sails are super slow.
-Quantum Slipstream needs a resource rarer then dilthium, and that takes years to artificially produce, to operate.
-Soliton waves are highly unstable, and can destroy planets.
-The Vaadwaur's underspace corridors, and similar things, are very limited to only certain parts of the galaxy.
-Transwarp puts intense pressures on ships passing through it, so much so that not even the Borg can use it all the time, and rely on normal warp travel to get around areas.
DSC treats warp drive and, especially dilithium, like magic which isn't much better (though to be fair, The Expanse treats physics like magic to some extent when it comes to the ringmaker's tech, though they do a better job of it).
Season 3 feels like it started out as a "what if" story of the type popular in fantasy stories where the author thinks "what if magic arbitrarily changes this law of nature" or "what if someone did X and it caused magic everywhere to do Y". JJ Abrams did the same thing, taking that process from the fairytale end of fantasy and applying it to science fiction in the one-season wonder Revolution and a few others, and as far as I know of it has never really caught on with science fiction fans unless handled very, very carefully (like in The Expanse with the fusion damping thing and the speed limit, or in the original version of the movie The Day The Earth Stood Still).
There are a few precedents in Trek of that kind of thing, like Q and his ". . . just change the gravitational constant of the universe . . . ", but those already have the support of a trope fairly common in sci-fi, that of the incredibly advanced alien antagonist who cannot be beaten by force but rather has to be dealt with using guile or logic.
That does not apply to the dilithium "crybaby" plot though, and it just comes across as careless arbitrary writing or the quick, simple setup needed by a standalone short story (which would be a bit short for even a single traditional episode, those are more like novelettes) much less an entire season (which is more or less the equivalent of a novella to novel length story).
DSC S3 was pretty much just the plots of Star Trek: Final Frontier, and Star Trek: Federation, merged together. Its the idea of the future of the Federation that many seemed to agree made sense.
Why not though?
We have seen in Trek previously, with characters like Gary Mitchell, and Charles Evans, that otherwise normal people getting absurd powers via any number of means isn't unheard of. Or even particularly uncommon. Now both of them managed to be stopped before they could do massive damage to the larger galaxy, but with how often it happens it makes sense that someone, somewhere in the galaxy, would have this happen to them, and not be stopped before they could do damage(intentional or not)
It treats it a lot differently, especially compared to TOS, which DSC was originally set as an immediate prequel to. In TOS, warp drive is seamless and the ship never left normal space (with a few well-delineated exceptions cases due to engine abuse), and they only used impulse drive at all in a few episodes (usually they would just enter and leave orbit using warp drive).
The movie era, with Paramount Pictures calling the shots instead of Paramount TV (which was Desilu with a new name) and wanting Star Trek to be more like Star Wars they complicated things and introduced a lot of problems like ships cruising along in interstellar space on impulse (as if they could actually get anywhere in less than decades that way) like Excelsior was doing in The Undiscovered Country , and the drives lost a lot of their versatility, maneuverability and had that weirdly long windup, but still they generally treated it as a normalspace drive.
The Kelvin movies don't really count, since while they apparently use a form of transwarp instead of warp (and both the VFX and the travel times support this), they are in a different quantum timeline from the rest of Trek.
DSC treats warp like it is a hyperdrive in that going to warp is an automatic getaway free card like they are jumping out of regular space and into some other space. At the very least they apparently are not able to see outside the warp bubble very well and so do things like drop out of warp into the middle of massively dense asteroid fields without seeing they are there.
Conversely, TOS/TNG era ships would see the asteroids a long way off and simply go around (unless they are chasing someone like Mudd who mistakenly thinks going into the field will shake pursuit of course). Also, like Star Wars It turns out that they cannot always communicate properly in DSC warp either and had to "drop out" of it to contact what turns out to be the USS Enterprise.
The transition away from TOS style warp with their UFO-like hairpin turn and sudden stop maneuverability can be explained well enough by a watershed level breakthrough in warp speed that started gaining traction in the 2270s and led to experiments like the Excelsior (which in the Excelsior's case was not 100% successful but still drove warp tech to higher levels), but apparently had side effects that markedly reduced maneuverability and made the use of impulse while in tight spaces like near planets necessary (along with the change to tying weapons into the warp core instead of the impulse stacks slowing combat to sublight).
Also, warp in s1 and s2 DSC is just as anomalous for the period it was set in as the aesthetics are since they were based on an apparently flawed idea of the warp used in the 2290s from The Undiscovered Country movie instead of even attempting to use the era-appropriate version of warp as the starting point.
But the baseline differences in how warp is treated in each show is not the main part of the point. Dilithium is.
In most of TOS it was a critical part of warp drive because it regulated the matter/antimatter reaction that powered it, it did not have any other use besides the fact that in the presence of powered equipment it reacted in a way that showed up on sensors as another source of power (apparently without actually emitting any power or the necklace full of them would have burned Elaan).
There was one single episode, The Alternative Factor, where dilithium was treated differently and introduced the idea of an "artificial dilithium matrix" that could be charged in special charging stations and store power. It was used in the phaser banks and possibly some other systems (a popular fan theory ties it in with the power readings in Elaan of Troyius and postulates that it is essential to the broadcast power system like they used in The Cage to power the dismounted ship phaser). Also those flat paddle-shaped matrix units (they used acrylic cutting boards for the props) could be placed in an adapter in the dilithium chamber in a pinch.
The rest of TOS ignored the dilithium matrix thing just like how a few other one-episode McGuffins in later series (like the VOY "can't turn in warp" nonsense) were ignored and forgotten.
DSC goes totally gonzo on dilithium and presents it as some kind of substance that is all connected wherever it is and that there is a magical motherload that somehow controls all "active" dilithium everywhere, like killing the First Vampire kills all other vampires in some horror stories.
And how is that supposed to make the feel any less like they used the fantasy magic "what if" schtick?
BTW, the popularity of the idea of a post-Federation story is probably had more to do with the myth that Andromeda was supposed to be Star Trek after that fall, and likening it to how Sir Conan Doyle killed off Sherlock Holms because the only stories the publishers wanted from him were more Holms stories and he was tired of writing them.
While Roddenberry had trouble selling anything after Star Trek the same way Doyle did after the Sherlock Holms stories, he was not tired of it, the problem was that Paramount wanted him to change it into a psuedo-Star Wars with primetime soap backbiting elements and other nastiness added in.
Gary Mitchell, Elizabeth Dehner, and Charles Evans were able to get those powers because one of the tenants of Trek was that Humans (and Vulcans apparently) were on the edge of ascension so the nudge from high-end (for humans) psyonics hitting the barrier could push them into a sort of half-ascension, as could ascended aliens deliberately awaking those powers. Eventually material peoples end up as energy beings similar to the way they did in Babylon5 (it is actually a rather common trope in sci-fi).
Roddenberry was a humanist and he put aspects of that into the core of the show (which is also the reason that all of the transhumans have severe flaws like the overriding ambition, ended up slaves to their machines, etc.).
Anyway, the difference is that particular villain trope is essentially a battle of intelligence/trickery, not passive like the "crybaby" plot point. Roddenberry liked the folk stories (like The Hairy Man ones) and made a rule that no episode could ever be resolved by resorting to brute force, it always had to have a clever way around it as the solution like those folklore stories.
The long "magic box" buildup of the main plot does not help either, when the anticipation builds up over the course of a dozen hours the viewers expect something truly profound and when it turns out to be something pedestrian like the "crybaby" thing it sours the whole season with a sense of underwelmingness.
Well they are. The whole "science" behind warp is that you are existing normal space, to enter a subspace bubble. This is why time dilation doesn't affect them despite going many times faster then light. They aren't in normal space to be affected by it, they are in a subspace pocket.
And as I recall that was a result of the Enterprise being damaged, and suffering various issues, not the DSC being at warp. If you're talking about the scene at the end of DSC S1/beginning of S2.
This, as far as I can see online, was never mentioned in canon. And just represents a fan explanation to try to justify the difference of visuals/mechanics when the realty is they just changed it.
And all the other shows retconed that, and were rather consistent about that retcon. So DSC is following the most current canon established before it started. You can't keep citing aspects of how TOS did things when those aspects of TOS haven't been canon for decades.
The last part isn't what happened in Discovery at all. The dilthium planet Sukal was on wasn't some motherload that controlled all dilthium everywhere, nor did they state as such. Sukal got his connection to dilthium/subspace by being exposed to the high concentrations of radiation/dilthium on the planet. His cry resonated at the same subspace frequency as diltihum does, causing it to go inert. But the dilthium on the planet wasn't some "master control" dilthium. And that's not even that hard to believe. You can use high frequency noises to crack crystals IRL if you hit them with the same resonance frequency as the crystal itself has.
Because nothing about it changes anything about the setting's established canon, and is consistent with past canon. So its not really "fantasy" any more then the rest of Trek is.
I can't speak to the Andromeda thing, since I haven't heard of it, but I don't really think thats the issue. I think the issue is that Star Trek had kind of run into a dead end. By the time Voyager ended we had warp 9.99 ships, the Federation had explored over 1/5 of the Galaxy, made peace with all the major powers in local space, defeated the major badguys of the other quadrants, and generally done so many different aliens, and artifacts, and anomalies, that it was becoming harder to write a credible threat to the ships/crews. The obsession with prequels following Voyager, and various attempts to destroy the Federation in the future after ENT, were likely just a way for the writers to tone everything back down to the point they could write stories that felt like they had real impact/threat.
Its honestly not that different then the problem I think STO has now. When you have a big galactic alliance of every major power from most of the galaxy its hard to write a story that creates a believable threat to them.
I've never seen anything suggesting Roddenberry believed humans were on the cusp of ascension. Even early TNG had Q imply that was a long way off for humanity. And Charles got his powers because he was gifted them by higher beings, not because he was himself near a higher state of being. They could have given those powers to anyone of any species. Humans had solved most social ills on Earth, but physically we were ages off from being energy beings or w/e.
And I think most people nowadays will agree that Roddenberry's ideas on transhumanism were pretty flawed, and morally questionable. Which is likely why future Trek shows like DS9, and ENT, went to lengths to portray the exact opposite ideals.]
But here's the thing, Sukal wasn't a villain. Many Star Trek episodes were focused around the idea that what seemed like a villainous act was just another alien race doing something without knowing how, or even that, they were harming others. This was a key point on being able to reach peaceful conclusions in many episodes. You're trying to narrowly define the trope Sukal was into something it wasn't, when the thing it was is itself a common Trek trope.
Where did you get that weird idea? The problem is that DSC treats warp like NONE of the other Trek shows did, not just TOS, and all the Paramount Treks used the same warp as TOS did, it was just faster at the expense of adding other limitations. They even had warp-chase combat in TNG a few times and it was fairly common in ENT once Reed figured out how to balance the warp field, shields, and phasers to allow it (before that it was mainly shown by the Suliban warp strafing them). So no, warp was not "retconned" by anything as late as the ENT TV series.
No, that is not how warp works at all. Though subspace transtator circuitry is obviously used in the machinery that produces the warp field since transtators are the basis of all their advanced tech (according to dialog in A Piece of the Action), the warp bubble does not transfer the ship into subspace.
They have shown both subspace and hyperspace in Trek before, and it is nothing like warp. Subspace has that weird druglike effect on regularspace people as shown in Schisms along with other weird effects. They bring subspace particles into normalspace (like the nadions that phasers fire) and have also brought bubbles of subspace into regular space in the various Treks for various purposes, but those were always done with the deflector dish/sensor array unit which actually IS a subspace-based device (as in subspace radio and whatnot).
If the ship actually went into subspace it would become immaterial from the point of view of the regular dimension like the spherebulders did in ENT (if they had any presence left in normal space at all while at warp) so Enterprise-D would not have needed to mount the phase cloak to get out of that asteroid in The Pegasus. Also if they were travelling in subspace they would have the solanogen-based lifeforms and the sphere builders to contend with all the time, which they don't.
The explanation of how warp works was always (up until recently at least, Kurtzman probably has other ideas about it but that is a CHANGE from all Treks made before 2009, not something that would work in a retcon without causing all kinds of compatibility problems with the previous stories) that the warp bubble used a time effect to manipulate a small area containing the ship into sort of sliding along in the desired direction in relation to the rest of space, carrying the ship and anything else in the field with it. The ship itself never goes faster than the speed of light though it seems to from an outsider's point of view so there is no problem.
The dependance on time as part of distance and speed is what the "time warp factor" was all about in The Cage, TOS simply dropped the word "time" from the dialog. It is also why disrupting the field, like with gravity effects, causes a ship to move through time in addition to or instead, of distance. And yes, it might seem a bit hokey to some people because it is an old sci-fi novel staple and the hype about Alcubierre drive (which works in an entirely different way).
As for the communications thing, it turns out that the Enterprise was damaged, sure, but the Discovery crew did not know that was the case before they dropped out of warp to attempt to clear up the signal. That decision to drop out of warp to make it easier to communicate was apparently the go-to solution in DSC which indicates that they have problems communicating in warp often enough to make that so.
It was, however, the official explanation that Paramount would give, and it was even on startrek.com during the Berman era of Trek, and the writers were held to it when writing episodes. Any mention that FTL combat never happened in TOS was corrected out of scripts, even the episode The Battle had to dance around the point and not state directly that TOS style FTL combat never happened, and had to be content with stating that the double-image trick using warp on a target whose sensors were down was what was new.
No, as much as TOS-haters would like it to be otherwise, it was never retconned in anything before NuTrek. If it had been then a lot of the older episodes would not work for one thing, and also Paramount was trying not to split the fanbase because it would hurt their ratings and thus lose them money. If it has gone out of canon at all then it would be since 2017, not "decades".
And yes, I am aware that the dilithium planet is not stated to be some unique central control, what I said was that in the plot mechanics it functioned as if it was. Maybe I did not phrase it clearly enough, it happens sometimes.
The fantasy genre "arbitrary what if" effect has nothing to do with canon, it has to do with the feeling that they used an out-of-genre technique, in this case the fairytale arbitrary change thing that is the basis of a particular class of magic systems in the fantasy genre.
The Andromeda/Federation myth is not talked about anywhere near as much as it was back when the show was still going, so it is not too surprising that you never heard of it.
I agree that Paramount TV had a problem with post-VOY stories because of the over-expansive hero-on-a-pedestal scripting that they inherited from the movie division, in fact they recognized that they wrote themselves into a corner which is why they went prequel (to ENT) instead. DSC was perfectly positioned for a strong comeback if they would have used TOS as a style/writing technique basis for the show instead of The Undiscovered Country which came with all of the pedestal baggage the movie division heaped on.
That added to all the "up yours TOS fans" stuff (remember the "NO ROUND ENGINES!!!" signs and other examples) and attempts to coattail all of (the then) currently popular shows like Game of Thrones, the Kelvin timeline stuff, and TV sci-fi shows like Dark Matter and Killjoys at the same time that turned the show so generic, it made enough of a damage control problem for CBS that they felt they had to take it into the future.
I don't agree with CBS that the move was the only option (or even the best option), they had plenty of ways to fix it, but that is another matter.
Unless you were enough of a fan back in the 1970s when convention talks were being published and behind the scenes stuff like copies of the original scripts and memo compilations and whatnot were being sold by Roddenberry to have seen them then it is not surprising that you never heard about it, stories about how much an egotistical jerk he could be are far more popular fare nowadays so things like his humanist beliefs get lost in the noise.
All I will say is that, from the wording of your posts, you seem to have a deep seated persecution complex in regards to anything being changed from TOS, which I think has heavily skewed your opinion on things regarding the various retcons made in later shows. Things like the lack of round engines in DSC isn't an "up yours" to TOS fans, and changes to how warp drive works aren't just perpetuated by "TOS haters" and I can't even imagine how you would come to that conclusion in the first place. Nor am I sure how you came to the conclusion that going into the future was "damage" control given that the first two seasons of DSC were incredibly popular worldwide. Damage control would imply it was doing bad, and they were trying to salvage it. When that simply isn't the case.
An ad hominem attack? You do know that those are the last refuge of people who have run out of valid arguments, don't you?
And no, I do not feel "persecuted", I just get annoyed by people dumping on a really great groundbreaking show just because it came out before modern production technology made SFX so cheap and easy. And TOS contempt is a real thing, there have been a lot of papers written about the phenomenon, and in recent years it has gotten much worse from the polarization of the rift in the fanbase.
I could go into a long discussion of Hollywood damage control and the signs that it is being used, but it would take too long and be too much typing for today, so maybe I will take it up later, but probably not. I will briefly say this however: some of the simplest signs (besides articles written about it happening on a particular show, which has also happened concerning DSC) are when production stops for the season then suddenly starts up again like what happened in season one of DSC, and massively different treatments of adjacent seasons, and both of those have happened in DSC (including an entire setting change between second and third season).
And no, I don't hate DSC, I actually like it though I don't think it really stands out from all the other modern sci-fi shows such as Dark Matter, Killjoys, Pandora, the Lost in Space reboot and others.
I had a number of arguments regarding your last post.
-None of the other Treks used the same kind of warp TOS did. Just to name the most high level changes. In TOS they used warp everywhere, even inside systems, and near planets, with impulse power only being rarely used. In TNG, and all later Treks, warp was used for travel between systems, while impulse was used in systems/near planets. Unless you were leaving the system entirely. In TOS warp travel just looked like the ship was moving through space normally. Starting in TMP, and carrying over to all later Treks, the use of warp drive put the ship in a tunnel, or other visual spatial distortion, to signify it was no longer moving through space normally.
DSC warp, DS9 warp, VOY warp, Kelvin warp. Its all pretty consistent with each other, and very obviously not how TOS warp is.
-Your explanation of how warp works isn't accurate at all. Warp works by creating a subspace bubble around the ship to take it slightly out of normal space. This allows it to go many times faster then the speed of light, since its no longer affected by the laws of normal space. They even state they are in fact going faster then the speed of light multiple times throughout the franchise. You're also wrong in that being out of normal space would mean they have no presence in normal space. We have seen numerous times throughout the franchise that you can be out of phase with normal space in various ways and still be seen/interact with it in various means. Its not an all or nothing situation. Likewise we have seen the warp bubble be affected, and it not cause them to time travel, because time is not inherently connected to warp travel. You can use warp, along with other factors, to achieve time travel, but its not directly linked to time in such an easy manner.
-Subspace is not a singular thing, its a name given to a large number of various realms ranging from Fluidic Space, to the Vaadwaur Underspace, to the Mycelial Realm. Going into subspace doesn't automatically mean you suffer drug like effects. It also means you're unlikely to run into the Solanae, or the Sphere Builders, unless you intrude on their specific subspace realms, which normal warp obviously doesn't.
-Paramount is not the holder of Trek canon CBS is. And nothing in the shows actually suggests any such change in warp/warp combat happened in-universe. They just changed how warp worked in later shows, and how warp works in DSC is far more consistent with every other show from TNG to ENT, with ENT not acting like TOS at all despite being before it.
-The plot mechanics of DSC's 3rd season didn't treat the dilthium planet like it was some sort of hub. If it treated it like it was a hub then there would have been a plot point about how the dilthium there was super special, and all other dilthium in the galaxy came from it, or something along those lines. No such an implication was made, either in dialogue, or the actions of Sukal. This idea of it being treated that way is completely made up. Any large amount of dilthium anyone could have caused the same results. And nothing changed about dilthium in Star Trek with this plot point, so claiming this fantasy "what if" trope doesn't really work either. Its no more a "what if" then if they used omega to destory subspace across the galaxy.
-The problem with Star Trek had nothing to do with a "hero on a pedestal" writing. And even if it was, going "back to" TOS style writing wouldn't fix that because Kirk in TOS was the definition of a "western cowboy action hero on pedestal". TOS was made as a space western, with Kirk portrayed as an overly romanticized cowboy in space. Star Trek has been that from the beginning. The issue was that between the hundreds upon hundreds of episodes they had run out of ideas since they had done most everything already, and had found solutions to most problems you could think of. They needed to reset the technology level to make things interesting again. Star Trek being "hero-centric" or not really has no bearing on that issue.
-Roddenberry being humanist isn't unknown to most Trek fans, nor was it what I was asking about. I was asking about the idea that humans in Star Trek were on the cusp of ascension, when theres multiple episodes across the franchise that say the exact opposite. Humans are a long way out from that, and yet can still get these incredible powers via various means. Meaning something like Sukal could have happened since you don't need to be nearly god-like to get these sorts of powers in Star Trek.
And nobody is dumping on TOS. Pointing out it was visually flawed due to the time it was made, and that other shows have changed how things look, isn't dumping on it. Its just recognizing it had flaws.
Also, Phoenix appears to have a considerable amount of backstage information about the mindsets of the original producers, and about later CBS personnel, which they enjoy repeating without ever once providing a citation to the original source of the data. Instead, it's always "common knowledge" that "everyone knew at the time", which translates to "gossip". It's why I gave up even trying to discuss such things with them - they won't listen to any information that contradicts their own firmly-held opinion, which tends to be backed by such gossip.
Trying to cast aspersions on the person arguing an opposing point to imply that their point is not valid or otherwise undermine or deflect from their point by doing so is the very definition an ad hominem attack. It does not require malice. Look it up if you don't believe me.
- No, the only time warp has been shown as fundamentally different has been in Kelvin with their transwarp-like warp, and the stuff starting with DSC which appears to function as some sort of otherspace drive because of the issues I went into detail already in earlier comments.
What you are describing as various retcons during the in the TOS and Berman eras are no such thing, they are simply the engineering changes as the drives evolved in favor of speed using the same warp theory that TOS did.
And none of the Berman era Treks had ships travelling in "tubes" unless they were using something like Borg transwarp conduits. You may be mistaking the light bloom that happened when TNG and later ships did that extremely rapid acceleration they used when going into warp for a 'tube' but it isn't one, and neither is the view of the nearby stars streaking by a "tube" that they are travelling in.
Care to point out the "tube" the Enterprise-D you claim TNG used for warp in the first section of the following video? I chose it because the stardrive section makes that hairpin turn and you can see the stars stop flashing by when it turns even though they did the whole separation and turn while in warp in Encounter at Farpoint:
The consistency at the warp theory level is with TOS thru ENT, the Kelvin movies and the Kurtzman stuff are the outliers.
- It is not "my" explanation of how warp works, I simply passed along what the official explanation was at the time the shows were made and pointed out some of the flaws in the bubble of subspace nonsense. If DSC warp is a subspace drive, then it is a change from all of the traditional Treks.
-No, Fluidic space is not subspace, it is a different dimension entirely with its own natural laws. Underspace is possibly a kind of subspace judging by the name but going into it takes you completely out of normalspace unlike warp which never leaves normalspace, and it does not resemble subspace as it was used in TNG at all. And the Mycelial Relm appears to be a plane, not a dimention, just the superstring layer of the regular dimension that has some kind of connection to the superstring layers of neighboring quantum realities.
What has being out of phase have to do with it? People and ships have gone out of phase in various episodes and none of those episodes have allowed them to break physical laws except for having limited interaction with unphased objects. In fact, some of the technobabble said that they were still bound by all the normal rules, they were just shunted off into their own phase of normal space. That means that the speed of light is still the speed of light when phased.
Never has any of the traditional Treks shown that warp takes them out of normal space into subspace in regular operation. Time, on the other hand, is connected to warp in numerous ways in the span of traditional Trek shows, including outright dialog in The Cage and some of the flood of technobabble later shows are known for.
It was also described that way in the original series bible though I know a lot of people take the old Paramount simplified rule of thumb canon thing being only what was in the live action shows (which they did not even completely follow themselves) so literally nowadays that they don't think anything from behind the scenes is valid despite it being what the writers were working from.
I know that the space around the ship moving and carrying the ship along with it thing is counter-intuitive, but it has long been a popular way getting around the speed of light problem in sci-fi, though leaving normalspace for a hyperspace or subspace has been the favored way of doing it in movies and TV.
In written sci-fi both types are still used quite often, in a few (non-Trek) novels they use both realspace and otherspace (I am using "otherspace" in a general sense, not as a particular one) drives at the same time and in at least one of those some of the ships mounted both types of drive on the same ship because each had their own advantages and disadvantages.
- I don't want to go deep down the rabbithole of IP but in a nutshell the Star Trek IP was always owned by Desilu and still is, the only thing that has ever changed was the name. When Gulf+Western bought the studio they changed the name to Paramount Television and placed it in the corporate tree with (but subservient to) the Paramount Pictures studio they already owned.
Next Viacom (who owned the CBS network) bought Paramount from Gulf+Western but never changed the name, which caused confusion when Viacom split and kept Paramount Pictures while spinning off Paramount TV with CBS who tacked "CBS" on the front of the name until a few years ago when they dropped all mention of Paramount from the name so now it is just known as one of the CBS Studios group.
Through all of that, ownership of Star Trek never actually changed hands, the studio was just passed from umbrella to umbrella so they took orders from different corporate higher-ups along the way. Until CBS changed the name again "Paramount" referred to two different studios, which is what confuses a lot of people since both the names started with the same first word.
- You still don't understand what I am talking about I see. What I said about DSC s3 was on a plotting and writing FRAMEWORK level, while you are looking at it from the point of the lore from inside the fictional universe, they are totally different things. Trying to argue it from opposite sides of the fourth wall just does not work.
From that framework level the way dilithium was treated was the way I described, like it was all tied together and that planet acted like a control hub for the purposes of the plot structure. At that level, which comes before anything is put on the page, the dialog, the action, and the visuals don't mean anything at all, they are the stuff tacked onto that framework later that gives it a (hopefully unique and entertaining) character. Stories can be analyzed like most other things can be, and the framework can be seen by doing that.
-The hero on the pedestal is not necessarily a character as such, it can be the whole ship like it became in the movies. The key factor here is that they stopped writing about the hero ship as being one, albeit famous, ship in a service (Starfleet) to being the "flagship" of Starfleet and that apparently nothing significant ever happened that did not require the hero ship to fix it. It is a form of fanservice and it was one of the things that dragged Trek down a bit even after that pedestal was passed to other ships (and to a slightly lesser degree a space station) in other times.
It is ironic that a lot of the push towards the pedestal was due to a misunderstanding of why the Enterprise was called a flagship in Phase II. In Phase II Kirk was an admiral, and whenever he had to go out in the field to handle something personally he used the Enterprise as his command ship, what is called planting his flag on it (which came from a sailing warship convention where the command ship was identified by the admiral's flag up with all the other flags and pennants and whatnot used for signaling and identification back then).
The movie division executives mistook that to mean "flagship" in the business sense instead of the military one and from interviews and articles it apparently fed into the fanservice idea along with the other nostalgia factors they were trying to use to force a "cult hit" movie to rival Star Wars.
Unfortunately they never did break away from that and it led to the weird thing of defining blocks of time for each pedestal (with exception of Voyager which was separated by distance instead) for each hero group, with the minimum amount of overlap. That is why everything has to be either a prequel or sequel rather than being about another ship and crew in the same timeframe (and yes, it was probably another factor in DSC jumping to the far future in addition to the damage control factor).
- That "cusp of ascension" didn't mean that it was only a few years away, it meant that they had the potential (like many others) and were close enough to it that extraordinary things (like psionics hitting the barrier and surviving, or getting a nudge from other ascended beings) was enough to trigger a sort of half ascended state. It isn't that much different from Stargate and Babylon5 in that respect.
-And yes, TOS contempt is a real phenomenon, enough so that has been talked about and analyzed in psychological and social sciences publications. Also Moonves (who greenlit DSC) and a number of others have expressed contempt for TOS and often other traditional Trek, so yes, there has been a lot of dumping on the traditional Treks, especially TOS.
No, not at all. Rather it is that there needs to be a development path that is followed between the first brakes and antilock brakes instead of the antilock brakes becoming the only brakes that ever were. And no, I don't mean they have to burn show time to technobabble that path explicitly, ad nauseum, just that whenever in the era of a particular type of brake they use that brake or make sure the viewers know that it is an exception (like a prototype) and not the norm.