Recall the following experience, which I’m confident that you, dear reader, have had. You are hanging out with your friends and some turn in the conversion moves you to describe in detail an episode of Star Trek. Maybe you are in the den, or the school yard, or the cafeteria. Invariably someone in the group replies quite matter-of-factly, not intending to be rude at all: “You know it’s not real, right?”
At first blush, you are offended, maybe a bit embarrassed. Of course I know it’s not real! I’m not delusional. What’s your point?
Many of us have had this experience. But let us consider it from our non-Trekkie friend’s point of view. What did they see in us, in the way we talked about Star Trek, that made them think we believed what we were describing was real?
In fact, psychologically speaking, the Star Trek universe is a profoundly real place to Trekkies. Yes, it is just a TV show. Condeeded. And yet, we were there!
We were there with Kirk fighting the Gorn on Cestus III (and also the unnamed Metron planet). We’ve been in the storage compartments of K-7 (first with Captain Kirk and again with Captain Sisko). We’ve visited the aftermath of the Battle of Wolf 359 and the Battle of the Binary Stars. We spent countless hours bathed in the soft, colorful light and gentle warble of the Enterprise bridge (the NX, the 1701, the A, B, C, D and E). We can tell the speed she’s warping across the galaxy by the thrum of her engine room. We were there for all of it.
What happens when we are presented with new experiences that conflict with these very real memories? In fandom, these are fighting words. But why?
Your Brain on Star Trek
The writer and religious scholar Diana Pasulka has written extensively about how story and technology can have profound effects on belief and perceptions of reality. Check out her book American Cosmic, and an earlier essay The Fairy Tale is True. One chapter of American Cosmic, which in part explores how Star Wars inspired a religion with real-world followers called Jedism, compiles research that shows how the human brain creates cognitive models of events in the same way regardless of whether that event was experienced in the real world or witnessed visually such as in a piece of film or from a VR headset. She quotes neuroscientist Jeffrey Zacks: “It’s not the case that you have one bucket into which you drop all the real-life events, another for movie events, and a third for events in novels.” Memories are all built the same way, with neurons and dendrites; the more we revisit those memories the stronger the dendrite bonds become, and the more real those memories become for us. Of course, encoded in the memory of the event is its context, whether you saw it on the street or in the theater. No one really believes they were on the Death Star when it blew up, no matter how many times they’ve seen A New Hope (and all the other movies where the Death Star blew up.)
But this is not always the case. There are many examples of people who come to think they actually experienced something they had in fact watched on TV or heard a story about. This is because, as scholars at Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab wrote in their study, “the brain often fails to differentiate between virtual experiences and real ones.”
In Pasulka’s American Cosmic, she analyzes a sci-fi web series that reimagines World War I as an alien invasion. Extraterrestrials were digitally inserted into historical footage and vintage uniforms. She writes, “We know it is not real, but Zack’s research shows our brains process the information and then categorize these productions as equally realistic.” Pasulka writes that it is difficult for our brains to draw sharp distinctions between what is real and what is virtually real.
This chapter of her book cites Alison Landsberg’s idea of prosthetic memory, which she coined in an essay about the films Total Recall and Blade Runner. Lansdberg writes: “Cinema, in particular [has] the ability to generate experiences and to install memories of them–memories which become experiences that film consumers both possess and feel possessed by.”
I suppose that this is why genre fandom is so much fun, and becomes such a life-long hobby for many of us. It’s why the escapism of genre TV and film is so pleasurable. Because we perceive the visuals to be so real, we are literally escaping, swapping out one mundane reality for a fantastic one, at least for an hour or so.
Pasulka sums it up this way: “Exposure to films and media that mimic real life fosters belief and can impact memory. … fictional characters… exist as realities that inhabit our childhood and adult memories and inform our future behaviors. They are cultural realities, infused with meaning and emotion.”
Is there a better explanation for why we Trek fans love–really love–these characters, their ships and homeworlds as much as we do?
These two concepts–the brain perceiving Star Trek experiences as virtually real, and the emotional charge of those memories, particularly how they are tethered to childhood–are the reason Star Trek fandom is saddled with “the canon wars.” It’s why terms like reboot, Prime vs. Kelvin, visual vs. conceptual canon, and canon agnosticism are fighting words in online conversations. Now that Star Trek is closing out its fifth decade with a tsunami of brand new shows and movies, this has implications for how we integrate our old memories with new ones, and how we enjoy new shows like Strange New Worlds, or whether some of us even can.
“Not My Star Trek”
Let’s come out with it. There is a minority of fans who recoil in disgust or gloomy disappointment when they are faced with a new version of Star Trek. Here we are talking about a particular type of hardcore Trekkie, the one who says, whether in anger or sorrow, “this is just not my Star Trek. It’s not the way I remember it.” But many more long-time fans find themselves in intermittent conflict with new Trek. Breaks in canon can make any of us feel alienated from new versions. We raise all manner of arguments about betrayals of trust, and lazy writing. It is perfectly legitimate to have these feelings, and many of us have at one time or another. And we have a point, because we were there.
This is not just a problem of the loudest voices arguing on the internet. But even if it were, those that do not care much about canon wars must admit that those voices have a lot of power. The engines of the modern film industry have been geared to run on internet buzz. Success or failure depends a lot on the voices in social media. Fear of incurring the wrath of those voices is the reason J.J. Abrams invented the Kelvin Universe. It is the reason that Discovery did a mid-series course correction that put over 900 years between the creative team and any potential canon dispute. And yet, that same creative team decided to jump back in the lion’s mouth with a spinoff show–Strange New Worlds–set on the classic 1701 Enterprise just a handful of years before Kirk is to assume command.
The online fan community may well be the reason Strange New Worlds was even greenlit. Anson Mount’s Captain Pike, introduced in Discovery’s second season, was universally beloved by fandom, even the fans who liked to grouse about Discovery. Credit due to Mount’s skill and charm. But also this: it is as easy as falling off Pike’s horse for fans to accept that Jeffery Hunter’s Pike and Mount’s Pike are the same person.
SNW will be far more entangled with TOS than DSC ever could have been. Spock–THE Spock, not alternate-timeline Spock but Nimoy’s Spock–is a central character. We also know that Uhura, Nurse Chapel, and even Kirk himself–Shatner’s Kirk–will be reprised as their slightly younger selves played by new actors. At this point it’s pretty clear that the showrunners intend to depict how the original crew came together. A lot is riding on whether fandom can accept these characters and their ship as the same beloved versions from half a century ago.
The emotional and imaginative barriers that our past Trek experiences erect against new Trek are very real, and they are hard to break through. For many of us, our shields are up. But it is important that we try to lower them. At the end of this essay I offer ways to do that. But first: what are we fighting about when we fight about canon?
A Short History of Visual Canon
A lot of this boils down to what Larry Nemecek calls visual canon, which is the idea that the physical, visual, and aesthetic depiction of the Star Trek universe needs to remain aligned across the various iterations of the franchise. If a ship or a planet looks a certain way in one series, it needs to look similar if not exactly the same in the next series, or else the viewer–who, after all, has virtually been there before, will suffer cognitive dissonance. The negative emotions stirred by this dissonance not only block the fan from entering the story world of the new version, it makes them feel the previous show, and their connection to it, is being denigrated.
Let me give what is by now a non-controversial example. When CBS re-edited all the effects shots from The Original Series with new CGI effects, I recall being mildly repulsed when I first saw the new CGI Enterprise. Every line of it was exactly the same as the original shooting model, but because it was clearly not that model–not what I remember–it seemed less real. The color was off a bit. It wasn’t grainy!
But now, I only watch the updated versions of those episodes on my Blu-rays. I appreciate all the new angles and perspectives of that beautiful ship. The tiny CGI characters you occasionally see walking past the windows from outside the ship have wandered into my imagination. I’m building new memories with those old episodes.
For much of Trek’s history, visual canon was never a problem fans had to deal with because as the production of the franchise moved from the 1960s to the 1990s the Star Trek universe moved into its own future. In the late 1970s there was a need to update the 60s sets with cutting edge, movie-budget designs, which was explained away “in universe” as an eighteen-month refit of the 1701. (If you think about it, such massive structural changes to a spaceship seems pretty inefficient, like it might have been easier to build a new ship from scratch; in any case, such a “refit” by Starfleet was never depicted again.–agh I wrote this before Star Trek: Picard’s ‘Stargazer’ episode, which is a whole other canon debate!)
The budgets for the initial movies helped update and upgrade Star Trek’s set and production design, which carried over into the Berman era of the late 80s to early 2000s (TNG/DS9/VOY/ENT). Many TNG sets were redresses of TOS movie sets. Still, these shows never saw the need to erase or update the beloved 60s designs. Three out of four Berman-era series revisited the 1960s-era bridge set exactly as it was–exactly as we all remember it. The fact that Picard, Sisko and Archer were on Kirk’s bridge was not discordant at all. They were just visiting a place we ourselves had been many times, and we got to experience the thrill of going back there vicariously through them.
It must be noted that those episodes were all one-off, nostalgia-driven specials. If Berman and his team had needed to set all or part of their contemporary series on those classic sets, appealing to contemporary audiences week after week–which is the case for Discovery and Strange New Worlds–those creative teams would have made different decisions about how much to match the style of TV sets dating to the Johnson Administration.
The real debate over visual canon came with the advent of Enterprise in 2001, the first Star Trek prequel. Here we have starship technology set a century before Kirk’s Enterprise that is obviously smoother, sleaker, less clunky, animatronic and grainy than what we know Starfleet will look like in one hundred years. It’s telling that the design of that series’ ship was not based on retrograde notions of what early Starfleet vessels might look like (as if you could go back and ask Matt Jeffries what his ship’s predecessors would have looked like…). Instead, the NX-01 was based on a sleek, modern ship designed for the recent and popular movie Star Trek: First Contact (which was itself a visual upgrade on the TNG-look of Starfleet fueled by movie budgets). Berman’s team at least tried to strike a balance by adding retrograde flourishes. The sleek ship design was merged with structures from WWII airplanes, and the interior sets were modeled on 21st Century submarines and the International Space Station.
Some props were made to look similar to TOS but sleeker. I admit I found myself insulted when Berman told us that audiences would only accept fliptop communicators on a modern show if they were tiny, because they would look ridiculous compared to (at the time) modern flip phones. Today our phones are larger than the 1960s communicators.
This brings us to the current CBS/Kurtzman-era of Trek. Because Discovery was set ten years before The Original Series, the showrunners had to update the visual look of the 23rd Century. If they had slavishly recreated the 60s design aesthetic, many viewers would have been confused as to what they were watching. As the flagship series of CBS’s new streaming service, it was imperative that viewers of all stripes, especially non Trekies, feel like they were having an exciting experience watching a cutting edge TV show. Also, design teams are creative people who want to create something new, not make museum replicas of other artists’ work.
An interesting creative decision that the DSC production team made was to base its visual style for Starfleet on the original TOS movies from the 70s and 80s, even though the timeframe was before the iconic 60s era designs. There are numerous visual call backs to graphics, models, and props from those movies. The shuttlecraft and communicators are nearly identical. While some fans chafed at the dissonance with TOS, it’s actually easy to imagine the USS Discovery being a 10 to 20 year predecessor of the movie era-Enterprise.
Just like in 1979, when Roddenberry advised fans to imagine that the Klingons always looked the way they do in the new movie, it’s possible to adjust our head canon to imagine that Starfleet always looked like it did in those movies as well.
This was, of course, controversial among fans. As we know now that the DSC producers decided that the debates over canon, and the resulting negative internet buzz, was producing too much of a distraction for the show. The mid-series time travel jump silenced those debates. But at the same time, the producers launched a new show–Strange New Worlds–set so much closer to TOS than early viewers of DSC could have imagined. Now, we’re right on the bridge!
The trick of pretending that TOS looked more like the movies than we remember still may be helpful, but SNW producers have promised fans that there will be many callbacks to 60’s design elements. The shuttlecraft, communicators and tricorders now look nearly identical to TOS.
Conceptual Canon–It’s not Just Visuals
The sensation of realness also rests on consistency in concepts, historical facts, and even a character’s attitude and tone of voice. The problem we are all faced with is that the historical record of the Star Trek universe is strewn across at least 41 distinct seasons of television, usually in bits of dialogue that only a handful of fans remember. Some of those bits were written as long ago as 1964.
One line of dialogue in one long-ago episode implied that the Romulans gave the Klingons cloaking technology at a certain date. If that fact is ingrained in your head canon, and a later episode (DSC’s The Battle of the Binary Stars) shows cloaked Klingon ships prior to that date, you are pulled right out of the story.
For some, the Federation-Klingon war depicted in DSC’s first season did not fit with their conception of the recent past of TOS. Some felt that the devastation was just too widespread and brutal to match the society we saw in the 60s episodes. I’ve heard fans comment that the war depicted in DSC’s first season was also discordant with how Kirk described the events that happen in the episode that introduced the Klingons, The Errand of Mercy, in TOS’s first season. During peace negotiations, a Klingon ship attacks the Enterprise, Uhura announces that Starfleet has issued a Code One order, and Kirk says: “Well, there it is. War. We didn’t want it, but we’ve got it.” Mind you, ‘in universe’ these events were ten years apart, and there is no canonical reason there could not have been a brutal war with the Klingons in DSC’s time period. The dissonance for some fans was that if the war we watched on DSC actually happened in Kirk’s past, when he got to that moment in Errand of Mercy, he would have had a less laid back reaction. An entire concept of canon is conveyed by the actor’s tone of one line of dialogue.
I had a similar reaction to Enterprise. That show premiered when I was in college. When I was a boy I watched an episode of The Next Generation called First Contact. In it Picard has to explain to a new species why his crew was spying on them. Doing his dramatic-Picard voice, Patrick Stewart spoke these lines:
“Chancellor, there is no starship mission more dangerous than that of first contact. We never know what we will face when we open the door on a new world, how we will be greeted, what exactly the dangers will be. Centuries ago, a disastrous contact with the Klingon Empire led to decades of war. It was decided then we would do surveillance before making contact. It was a controversial decision. I believe it prevented more problems than it created.”
The very first contact between Humans and Klingons had never even been mentioned before. That one line conveyed how cool it would be to know that story, and also how epically tragic that encounter must have been–the stuff of legends with consequences that reverberated through the centuries. But when I saw the famous encounter finally depicted, in the premier of Enterprise, it did not live up to what was in my imagination at all. As a result, the realness of Enterprise was lessened for me. All because of how Patrick Stewart delivered one line of dialogue in one episode that had nothing to do with Klingons.
Thankfully, the reverse of this phenomenon is more common, and it creates a wonderful sensation. If you watch DSC’s The Battle of the Binary Stars and TOS’s Arena together, then Kirk’s almost irrational fear of a Gorn invasion begins to make sense. Now we know he is thinking about Michael Burnham and the start of the Klingon war ten years earlier. In destroying the Gorn ship, he is faced with the same dilemma she was, and he makes the same choice she did. Also, the Pike storyline in DSC synchronizes perfectly with the original character arc introduction in The Menagerie. When canon is used in this way, it creates beautiful harmonies across the generations. It is arguably the entire point of doing prequels in the first place.
This dissonance or harmony also occurs every time an old character is recast by a new actor. There are now so many of these that CBS producers have coined the term “legacy characters.” With SNW, another prequel, we are entering a phase of the franchise where some characters–like Pike, Kirk, and Spock–are on their third iteration. Whether it is Sarek, or young Guinan, or Harry Mudd, fans chaffe if the new actor doesn’t look, sound, or feel like the original. (The less said about the great but pasty-white Benedict Cumberbatch replacing Kahn’s Ricardo Montalban the better.)
DSC faced the unique challenge of having to replace a TOS character for the first time without the fig leaf of a parallel timeline. Ethan Peck’s new version of Nimoy’s Spock will be at Pike’s side on Strange New Worlds. Because Nimoy’s Spock is so ingrained in the fan imagination, the DSC creative team knew they had to gingerly hold our hands through the acceptance process. They put Peck’s Spock in a beard and compromised mental state to blunt the “That’s not Spock!” reflex until the writing and the actor had a chance to put us at ease and work his new Spock into our imaginations. It worked. And I for one appreciate the effort.
Afterall, we know these people. We have spent an unknown number of hours in their presence. We are intimately familiar with their faces, their verbal tics, their posture, their attitude, their essence–all things an actor brings to the role. New actors don’t want to be mimics. They find a new essence for the character, I might add, based on the needs of the script they were paid to act, not the script written long ago.
It goes without saying that all of this is a matter of taste. Every fan reacts differently to canon. But since Star Trek lives so vividly in the imagination, and since the franchise does not reset like a comic book universe (a point the current producers keep insisting upon), the experience of canon cognitive dissonance, as well as canon harmonies, is very real and isn’t going away. It will be a dominant feature of the franchise for as long as we are lucky enough to be able to watch new Star Trek.
A Way Forward
So if you are a fan suffering from canon dissonance sensitivity syndrome (CDSS), I have a prescription for you.
Before treatment begins, you must first decide if you are ready to be cured. This means you are open to making new Star Trek memories that will lay alongside the cherished ones that have been long ingrained in your imagination. If you are too focused on your old experiences in the Star Trek universe, you will block yourself from having new experiences that are happening right now.
It might help to channel the Vulcan principle of infinite diversity in infinite combinations. That idea is not just about being tolerant of others who are different. It is a mental practice that helps you eschew false dualities. Can you hold two contradictory thoughts in your head at the same time, or an infinite number of them? If you can, at a certain point you begin to realize that they are not as contradictory as they first seemed. All is part of the fabric of your imagination. If you can accept that, then you are ready. Here is what to do.
Step 1: A few minutes before the new episode begins, sit quietly and clear your mind. Try plexing, if that helps. Prepare your brain to enter the story world no matter what. No negotiations with the creative team. No play-by-play nitpicking. Take the chips off your shoulder for just that one hour each week.
Step 2: When the episode starts, let it come to you on its own terms as a story and as a unique, contained viewing experience. Instead of seeking out canon red flags, seek out the storyteller’s cues about what the story wants you to think and feel about what is happening on screen. Follow their breadcrumbs. Go along for the journey they have laid out for you.
That’s it. It sounds simple. But what happens next is the most important part, and it is no longer in your hands. If the creative team honored their source material, if they worked hard to tell the best story they possibly could, then a new and lasting Star Trek memory will have been implanted in your brain. And that memory will integrate with all the older ones all by itself. Even if there was a canon flub or discontinuity. None of that will matter if the story is good enough, because your head canon (your imagination) will be a richer place for having the new memory.
And what if the creative team did not work hard enough to meet you, to honor your fan commitment and your openness? What if they told the story poorly? Or made canon decisions that served their immediate personal and professional needs and not those of the collective fan community? No need to get mad. Their penance is that their story will be forgotten and seldom revisited. On its own accord it will fail to connect with its intended audience, and it will leave no trace in our brains or our hearts. That story will fade and die.
There is no need for us to dance on its grave. No need, for hate’s sake, to spit our last breath at thee. We just walk away. Practicing emotional openness to new Trek will help let go of any bitterness about canon, but more times than not, it will help form yet more pleasurable memories.
This is especially true now, because, thankfully, the current leadership of the franchise are not hacks. Star Trek’s current crop of storytellers are committed to telling rip-roaring, meaningful Star Trek stories, and also honoring all of the old ones that replay in our heads. There is more room in there than you think. Keep it open.