“I think it’s an excellent sign of personal progress that you’ve acknowledged that it’s a matter of opinion.”

There’s that old reliable Star Trek Fan condescending attitude of late…

Anything else can only be considered Canon once it has appears in a Star Trek TV Series or Movie. Simple as that!

Thank you for the correction

#87 BK613

Thank you for pointing out that my analysis still attaches.

Corrections and refinements aside, I stand by what I wrote in the original post (i.e., the actual point of the thing). ; )

I think it’s an excellent sign of personal progress that you’ve acknowledged that it’s a matter of opinion.

By the end of 2005, only the 13 episodes of the first season and ten episodes of the second season had aired in the U. S.. That is all that Peabody applies to. Not the last half of season 2 nor the 3rd and 4th seasons.

No one that you are “arguing” with has said that the show didn’t start out well, only that it went down hill from there.

Aside from the terrible quality of recent Trek books (I cannot tolerate the TNG relaunch. It is dreck), you’d be instantly increasing the canon by a massive amount–something like double to quintuple its current size. Everything ever made thereafter would be doomed to choke on this enormous body of work (often very bad), and the free, open, sparsely populated Trekverse would instantly be crowded out by all the many, many different speculations and possible histories already recorded in the novels.

This has happened to Star Wars, where we saw the prequel movies suffering mightily because of their obsession with the EU canon. We’ve seen Star Wars video games have to tie themselves in increasingly complicated knots to find new adventures that Rogue Squadron can take during the movie timeline. And, of course, we’ve seen the long decline of the Wars novel series from the glory days of the Thrawn trilogy to the depressing state of today, where one can’t even enter into the present Legacy of the Force series without first absorbing twenty years of unwanted and often terrible book canon. This very fact continues to work to the detriment of the quality of the current crop of books, and the vicious circle continues.

If you want to make the books a part of your own personal canon, that’s fine. There are many books in my personal canon. But official canon *must* stick to the filmed works and very, very little more (say, the “Mosiac” Voyager novel or the upcoming “Countdown” comics)–and flirting with them by more than the occasional hat-tip is just plain dangerous. For the good of the franchise, the various sub-properties ought to remain as fragmented and uncoordinated as possible. If they can occasionally deliberately kick sand in each others’ faces, so much the better.

Yeah, it is a little wild-eyed crazy, isn’t it? :P

Wrong. The episode “33″ won the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation.

Peabody Awards are for an entire series, not given out for single episodes.

From the Peabody website:

Battlestar Galactica (SCI FI)
,
Battlestar Galactica is not just another apocalyptic vision of the future but an intense drama that poses provocative questions regarding religion, politics, sex and what it truly means to be “human.” The saga is set in motion when Cylon robots revolt against their creators with a devastating series of nuclear attacks. What’s left of the human race, fewer than 50,000 refugees, roam the universe in a fleet led by the spacecraft Galactica. They must re-imagine their society even as they search for a new home. This dramatic premise, coupled with the threat from a new form of humanoid Cylons, affords diverse narrative and philosophical possibilities. Writers Ronald D. Moore, Toni Graphia, David Weddle, Bradley Thompson, Carla Robinson, Jeff Vlaming, Michael Angeli, and David Eick take full advantage to give us plotlines that are deeply personal and relatable, while never compromising their affinity and passion for science fiction. Moore, Graphia, and Eick are the executive producers. Harvey Frand is the producer. Directors Michael Rymer, Marita Grabiak, Allan Kroeker, Rod Hardy, Sergio Mimica-Gezzan, Robert Young, Brad Turner, Edward James Olmos, Jeff Woolnough, and Jonas Pate dazzle us, giving us a show that captivates on multiple levels. The cast includes Olmos, Mary McDonnell, Katee Sackhoff, Jamie Bamber, James Callis, Tricia Helfer, and Grace Park. For pushing the limits of science fiction and making it accessible to all, Battlestar Galactica receives a Peabody Award.

BSG won the Peabody for 33, an early episode in the first season, before the series went massivly down hill. Started out great, no doubt.

BSG defined itself by being anti-Trek in a lot of ways. The show was anti techno, anti-(over)optimism, anti-canon, anti-alien-of-the-week, and so on. And it was cool. But the counter-virtues of BSG digressed into vices. The pessimism became overwhelming – the show became anti-humanist (not in the postmodernist sense, but in the “people suck” sense). The bold lack of concern with continuity resulted in dropped plot lines, retconning, and contradictions. The singular enemy resulted in the perpetual deferral of the alleged “plan”. The show is ending as a caricature of itself.

Trek digressed into well-known cul-de-sacs. BSG set out to boldly avoid these traps and fell into traps of its own. I think the lesson is that virtue (as Aristotle taught) is found midway between extremes.