Funny how this prequel ends with the captain of Enterprise (E or Soverign class ???) making a grand entrance (a former underling of Jean-Luc Picard), but ALL this takes place BEFORE Kirk even finishes his academy training.
Unless I read the synopses VERY wrong,
Captain Data appears at the end of Part
One. The final part (Part Four) ends with several of the principals from TNG watching Ambassador Spock disappearing into the artificial singularity, assuming he's lost forever, and all of this takes place in the 24th Century of TNG, so I'm not really sure what you're saying. This is why I wanted Panther to weigh in. Memory Alpha is a wiki site; I've never actaully read the prequel. I'll tell people what I think about something, and perhaps why I think it, but I make a point of never telling people they have to like the same movies I do. People like what they like. The whole
Twilight phenomena completely eludes me, but millions of readers love it. I read the first novel, and it seemed to me a retelling of the
Snow White mythos, which goes back at least as far as Alexander Pushkin; farther really. Every time Bella launched an exposition about Edward's "smouldering eyes" I heard, "Some Day My Prince Will Come".
Anyway, IMHO, the biggest obstacle the new
Star Trek material, is the crushing weight of it's own continuity, and all the online nerds waiting for one slip-up. These are my own friends I'm talking about, so I know their ways. When I was a little boy reading Marvel Comics, if you could catch the staff in a continuity error, you got what was called a "No-Prize" and your name got printed on the letters page, which was a great honor. This was before the internet and the on-line "communities" where like minded critics could network in real time. For some reason, this took a real prosecutorial turn in the portions of the Trek community, which is why I don't call myself a Trekkie, a Trekk
er or anything of that ilk; just someone who enjoys the shows and stuck with them, just like I stuck with dinosaurs. Nevertheless, I have very good friends who treat the
Star Trek "canon" like the monks in
The Name of the Rose treat Holy Scripture, which I simply refuse to do. I'm not kidding here. I've seen some real mudslinging on the fan sites, which is one of the reasons I'm a charter member of SOH and not a snark page; there's the occasional dust-up here, but on the whole things remain civil.
I've been a research assistant at the post-graduate level, and believe me, the canon of "Greatest Writers Who Ever Lived" made plenty of continuity errors. Chaucer rewrote the Homeric cyclein
Troilus and Cressida to reflect comtemporary mores, and William Shakespere rewote the rewite. Both are
full of anachronisms. In
Julius Caesar (I lectured on it this Fall) Shakespeare has Roman Senators wearing Renaissance doublets. To me, picking nits is part of the fun. I want my No-Prize, but it isn't Aristotle's lost treatise, and I'm not going to set anyone on fire for heresy. Just my opinion.
JAMES