I guess everyone is free to believe what they want about canon. Roddenbery/Paramount/the Franchise/now J.J. Abrams will have to promote whatever view will keep the cash cow going. But I favor earlier rather than later. Otherwise, you can dismiss anything at any time. (Oh, wait, that’s what the new movie did.) To me, TOS is canon. TOS is the sine qua non. If TAS fits in then good, though I’m quite okay with dismissing most of it. I certainly think that Yesteryear should count. ST:II, ST:III, ST:IV are certainly canon, though I have concerns about some of the sillier stuff in IV. Unless they contradict the original show I’ll accept anything in the first six movies (though I’d like to forget V). Generations was heresy because of how it treated Kirk.

The first problem with TNG is the retconning that is done to put it in the 24th century. If TNG had just told their own stories without trying to tie back to the original universe they could have avoided a lot of continuity problems. If you don’t accept TNG as canon then you have considerably fewer contradictions.

V’ger (the series) was just a horrible mistake. Enterprise was interesting, but after all the canon violations that had gone before it was impossible to drop in a prequel without adding to the contradictions. I think DS9 probably was the best of the Trek spinoffs regarding quality of storytelling. In some ways its retcons may have hewed a bit closer to TOS than TNG did (for example, I appreciated that the Tribble remix didn’t “remaster” the Klingons’ foreheads).

As much as I hate what Abrams did to my favorite characters, considering what a mess the TNG-centric Trek timeline has become, did he really have any other choice to keep the franchise running? Well, yes, he did–he could have taken TOS as canon and based the new movie on that and ignored all the discrepancies introduced by the various spinoffs.

Of course, there’s the obvious: there is no “true” canon, all of it, yes, ALL of it, is FICTION. Shocking, I know. But for me, TOS is the established Trek universe, everything else is non-canonical embellishment. Some of that embellishment is entertaining and thought-provoking, some is schlock–kinda like TOS. Though IMHO the good/bad ratio of TOS is higher than any of the spinoffs, which is probably why it’s easier for me to take TOS as canon and take the rest with a grain of salt.

I always explained it to myself as perhaps meaning 20 years from the refit seen in “The Motion Picture”. In the movie, they said took “18 months of redesigning and refitting the Enterprise”, meaning just about 2 years from the finish of Kirk’s 5 year mission. Then in “TWOK” kirk says “there’s a man out there I haven’t seen in 15 years who’s trying to kill me…you show me a son who’d be happy to help him…”. To me that indicated quite a bit of time between “TMP” and TWOK, so in my mind, the line could still work with established Trek history.

That’s a cool bit of trivia.

I always thought that was wicked genius of them to make the alians that way. And using petite woman to build all that on was perfect. Highly advanced brains, with diminutive frames and bone structure.

Now if only this whole effort can be RE-re-mastered to a higher standard where new effects are concerned the NEXT time!

Let me give you the background — late last summer I was working on an episode of CSI (this is not about me — I promise) and I happened to ask a friend of mine (an FX make-up artist) a question. You see, In my biz (FX make-up) it’s widely accepted that make-up FX genius Dick Smith invented the use of bladders (basically hand made balloons used for breathing and swelling effects) on the movie The Exorcist. But, thought I, what about the pulsing veins in the heads of the Talosians in the original pilot of Star Trek. Well, my friend tells me to ask my boss, who’s been around for a while and also knows his film history. So I follow my bud’s advice.

My boss thinks for a while and goes, “You know what? You’re absolutely right. That effect had to be done with bladders, no doubt. And you know who did the make-up fx for that show? Johnny Chambers.”

John Chambers.

For those of you not quite as intimate with make-up fx as I am — John Chambers did the make-up for the original Planet of the Apes.

How cool is that?

I’d like to see another TOS/TNG crossover book with both of them.

1) Morrow has indicated that he just participated in the decision to decommission the Enterprise, and it makes no sense that he wouldn’t be familiar with her age;

2) If his objective was to emphasize how old she is, why round down instead of rounding up?;

and 3) Both Bennett and Nimoy claim it was their intention to retcon the vessel’s age to 20 years at that point.

I agree that it is contradictory to the dialogue in “The Menagerie”, but to me, that’s no different than the retconning of the movie era’s time period to the “late 23rd Century” in TVH.

The measurement of time passage has always been the shakiest element of Star Trek canon. But the precedent in such matters has always been to defer to the later entry. I rationalize it that way because I can always say that the method of dealing with it is consistent.

I think that’s better than cherry-picking which dialogue we will accept as canon, and which will be discarded or explained away.