As many followers of this blog will be aware, I have had more than one run-in with the gatekeeping crowd and their self-anointed guardianship of the Star Trek fandom regarding the franchise’s latest entry, Star Trek Discovery. It is not enough for them to be critical of the show (which is fine by the way, nothing should be off limits for criticism), they continue to do whatever they can to push their narrative that it’s not really Star Trek and, by extension, that fans of DSC are not really fans of Star Trek. This attitude rather spits in the face of the spirit and meaning of the franchise and is incredibly elitist.
The latest bid to try and force Star Trek fans into accepting the dishonest position that Discovery is somehow a reboot is to deliberately distort the meaning of a recent interview with producer Alex Kurtzman. The interview was quite clear – writers will develop stories in other mediums – such as books and comics – to further the adventures of Star Trek characters, however the novels and comics have never been part of the Star Trek ‘canon’. Sometimes there is a break between the on-screen appearances of certain characters and when those characters return to TV or film, it is impossible for the producers of TV shows and movies to maintain continuity with the non-canon novels and other material. To put it more simply, what Kurtzman was saying is that he and the DSC writers are not trying to deliberately contradict novels and other media, but given the volume of this material and, given that they are not beholden to it, contradiction is inevitable. The interview can be found here, so you can see it for yourself.
Naturally, gatekeepers took this interview and ran with it as meaning Discovery’s writers had no intention of keeping the show consistent with the rest of the Star Trek canon, despite Kurtzman’s comments not implying this particular narrative at all. Things were not helped by the misleading title of Digital Spy’s article, however the same site recently posted another article which points out that this is a journey to connect to TOS. Yes, there are some differing visuals. Yes, the show offers up some slightly different takes on what we’ve seen before. This would not be the first time Star Trek has suffered from inconsistencies. This hardly breaks the franchise, aside from the small number of gatekeepers who seem determined to fracture it with divisive statements and comments that mislead.
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