Spoiler Warning: There are spoilers ahead for Star Trek: Lower Decks – including the series finale.
Just a relatively short piece today. First of all, I hope you had a very Merry Christmas! Yesterday was the big day, and I had an enjoyable time stuffing my face with a bit too much turkey and Christmas pudding! However you chose to celebrate, I hope you had a fantastic day.
Now, on to the weirdest piece of Star Trek “news” that I’ve seen in a while!
I’m not fully caught up on Star Trek: Lower Decks, but apparently one of that show’s final episodes contained a kind of crossover or “multi-verse” story. As part of that storyline, at least one Klingon character appeared to “transition” from the more familiar Search for Spock/Next Generation style to a style closer to that seen in Discovery’s first season.
I’ve touched on this before, but the fairly extensive redesign of the Klingons became a sore spot for some Trekkies – particularly those who were already inclined to dislike Discovery. I don’t feel that, on its own, the Klingon redesign ruined Discovery for anyone, nor turned away potential viewers. But it became one piece of a bigger conversation about how Discovery was playing fast and loose with Star Trek’s internal consistency and “canon.”
A writer for the website Giant Freakin Robot has decreed that “Star Trek just erased an entire series from canon,” citing the aforementioned appearance of a redesigned Klingon as evidence. Let’s clear that up right now: that is not true! Love it or hate it, Discovery remains an official part of Star Trek’s canon – and with a brand-new spin-off series set at Starfleet Academy featuring several Discovery characters being well into production, I don’t see that changing any time soon.
So let’s repeat that, in case anyone missed it: Star Trek: Discovery has not been erased from canon!
I’m not Discovery’s biggest fan, to be honest with you. Take a look at my recent review of the show’s fifth season, or my critique of the decision to set the show in the mid-23rd Century when it was first being put together as examples of how critical I can be of the series. But Discovery wasn’t awful across the board; the show got a lot of things right, and even if you don’t enjoy every character or every storyline, there should be at least something for most Trekkies to find interesting or entertaining across the show’s sixty-five episodes.
But even if there isn’t, and even if you hate Discovery and everything it stands for as a series… that doesn’t magically make it “non-canon.” By all means, criticise Discovery. And if you want to go so far as to say it’s not part of your personal head-canon… go for it. Trekkies have been doing that since The Next Generation and even The Animated Series were airing. Heck, there’s still a contingent of fans today who subscribe to the idea of a “Roddenberry canon,” only considering films and seasons that Gene Roddenberry personally worked on to be part of their unofficial head-canon. So you’ll have company if you choose to disregard an entire series!
This argument seems to hinge on a few frames from a single episode – the briefest of clips which showed a Klingon changing from the more familiar visual style that began in The Search for Spock to the newer look from Discovery’s first season. That is simply not “evidence;” certainly not enough to declare than an entire five-season TV show is “non-canon.” It’s wishful thinking at best – and a clickbaity lie at worst.
Ordinarily I wouldn’t cover something like this, but unfortunately the original article has been picked up and cited by numerous other blogs, websites, and social media channels, leading to a kind of snowball effect. People I know who don’t even watch Star Trek have asked me about Discovery’s status, and I’ve seen too many people taking it at face-value and assuming it’s true – even though it clearly isn’t, and simply reading the original article would’ve told them that! I felt a need to push back against this spiralling story and make sure that the truth is out there… even if it’s just on this one tiny corner of the internet.
There could be a larger conversation to have here about whether, in time, every Star Trek story should be considered canon. With the franchise closing in on 1,000 episodes and films, Star Trek can feel incredibly dense and convoluted for new fans, and that’s an issue that can arise. Trying to figure out how to get started with a franchise like Star Trek can end up being offputting, so there’s a case to be made for either removing some of the older stuff or just starting with a clean slate.
And that’s exactly what the Kelvin timeline films tried to do, if you think about it. They stripped away much of what had come before with the aim of rebooting Star Trek for a new audience after several years of declining viewership. Your mileage may vary when it comes to enjoying those films… but they brought in a bigger audience than Star Trek had ever seen at the box office and turned a massive profit. So there’s something to be said for a reboot, sometimes! But that’s probably a longer conversation best had on another occasion.
If you desperately wanted this news to be true and for Discovery to have been cancelled, overwritten, and officially stripped out of the Star Trek franchise… well, sorry to burst your bubble! But there’s a lesson here in fact-checking things we read online, not getting swept up in a snowballing news story, and not trusting a random article written by some guy on the internet! And yes, I’m aware of the irony of me making that kind of statement!
So Discovery remains an official part of canon. As Star Trek continues to grow, some parts of Discovery will simply be rolled into the broader lore of the franchise, while others may simply be left by the wayside. That’s the way it’s always been, quite frankly, and you don’t have to look far to find characters, factions, and entire storylines that were tried in one episode or film and never revisited. If you don’t like some aspect of Discovery, I’d say don’t worry – there’s a reasonably high chance that it will never be so much as mentioned again!
And to the original writer of the clickbait article, as well as to everyone else who jumped on it without bothering to check if it was true: please try to do better. The Star Trek fan community doesn’t need nonsense like this!
The Star Trek franchise – including Lower Decks, Discovery, and all other properties discussed above – is the copyright of Paramount Global. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Trekking with Dennis 