You get hangups about the worlds weirdest things. Grumpy about the haircut of a character in a fan film, but down with the ridiculous beehive weave Yeoman Rand was wearing?
Why are you making this assumption? I never said I liked Rand's inverted basket hairdo (there's actually a line of dialogue in one of the fanfic stories I read 30+ years ago when someone asks, "Why is she wearing a basket on her head?" and Rand says, "Because I like wearing a basket on my head.").
It was my impression that episode of TNG was reduced to non-canon status after DS9 completely rewrote the Trill.
Links to this, please. If this were so, then someone would have mentioned it on TrekBBS (quite a few industry insiders post there). The only episode I know of that the producers have de-canonized is "Threshold". That's the one about Paris breaking the "warp 10 barrier", hyper-evolving into a salamander, kidnapping Janeway, they have salamander babies together, which Chakotay conveniently abandons while Janeway is in Sickbay being turned back into a human.
No, I'm not kidding. That's what the episode is about. And it's stomach-turning.
@warpus One thing that bugged me about the Trill episode was that it seemed to be emblematic of Star Trek's shift from science-fantasy to out and out space opera, with magic puddles and "journey into the mind".
There's nothing wrong with space opera when it's done well. Ben Bova and C.J. Cherryh and many other SF writers do fantastic space opera that's got numerous elements of what is considered "hard science" (astrophysics in Bova's case and genetics, endocrine system, sociology, astrophysics, and economics in Cherryh's case).
My own personal idea of why the Trill went in a different direction with DS9 is that the producers hired Terry Farrell, and once they picked their drooling jaws up off the floor, they realized that she couldn't act (they hired a friggin' acting coach for her) and, like with Kes/the Ocampa in Voyager, they just started throwing ideas at a dart board and writing episodes around them. So that's why the rules about Trills are different from the TNG episode, they differ during the run of DS9, and then it just got to the ridiculous extreme that she was essentially playing a feminine version of Curzon, who could outfight a platoon of Klingons.
Not only that, but the actress got quite a swelled head, and once carped in an interview about the storylines given to recurring characters at the expense of the main characters. Ex-cuse me? I found Dax monumentally boring, I don't care about anything she did, and DS9 did the best job of all the Trek series in developing their secondary and tertiary characters. They even had an episode focused on Vic Fontaine, a holographic casino/nightclub owner! (loved it, since I loved James Darren in
The Time Tunnel and it was wonderful to see him on DS9).
I don't think anything ever gets "de-canonized" like that. In one TNG episode they showed Klingons being a part of the Federation, and then later magically that was never mentioned again, like it never happened. Yet that original episode remains canon, somehow. Star Trek writers make a lot of continuity "errors" like that it seems, it comes with the territory.
That was a first-season TNG idea, and after Roddenberry fired or alienated all the original script writers and editors who developed and wrote some of the first season scripts, the show took a left turn at the planet Albuquerque and a lot of that original stuff was retconned. All you had to do was use "Klingon politics" as an excuse and you could have them say or do anything, no matter if it made sense or not.
That's why I came to detest Worf. TNG and DS9 became the Worf Show, and I am so thankful they never figured out a way to shoehorn him into Voyager because he would have eaten that show as well.
There is this sort of romantic attachment a lot of people seem to have to this idea that everything on screen has to tie in perfectly with every other Trek episode ever made. That's obviously a bit unrealistic, especially when you insist that all Klingons have the appropriate number of ridges on their heads and/or scrotums. And clearly the writers only care to a certain extent, as they quite open write episodes and then disregard them the next week, such as the Klingons in Federation thing I mentioned, or the Trill thing. Sure, some of these things will be later "explained" using some silly episode, which can often be a fun one... like DS9's episode where they went back in time and saw old Klingons who looked like humans. Completely unnecessary episode, but it was a fun one, so I don't mind it.
Have a look at the posts of
MAGolding over at TrekBBS. He's a goldmine of continuity-dissection, since many of his posts are resurrections of his essays on the subject that were published in the pro 'zine
Trek and professionally published in
The Best of Trek paperbacks in the '70s and '80s (most were published pre-TNG). It's fun nostalgia for me to be able to read his posts over there now and exchange the occasional messages, because my teenage self loved his essays 40 years ago.
However, he is
extremely detail-oriented, his posts are long, and can be a tough slog if you're not into the nitty-gritty details of why certain episodes aren't in the same continuity/timeline as others in the same series (and he's not even talking about time travel or the Mirror Universe). He basically dissected the TOS series to figure out all the minutiae of continuity/discontinuity among the episodes that the rest of us explain away as "error" or "the same actor happened to be available for both roles" and takes an in-universe look at them.
Therefore, in Mark Andrew Golding's essays (that's the name they're published under), the episode "Where No Man Has Gone Before" is in a different universe than all the others because of Kirk's middle initial being "R" instead of "T" (this is something that fans have debated for decades).
"Trials and Tribble-ations" was a fun episode, and was likely a very special one for David Gerrold, because he finally achieved his dream of guesting on a Star Trek episode (he's in one shot as an older crewman playing with a tribble; back in 1967 he'd written the part of Ensign Freeman as a walk-on/one-line role for himself, but the casting director hired someone else). This episode was made as an homage to TOS, for the 25th or 30th anniversary (I think; don't recall what year it was made, and too lazy to look it up).
It seems that Discovery is going out of their way to not contradict too many things fans would be upset about. Such as the Trill thing. The best thing they did is travel to the future where they can do whatever they want. I never liked the spore drive, but if it's in the future and nowhere else - cool.
If DiscoTrek is trying not to contradict things, it failed spectacularly, at least in the first and second seasons. In fact, Burnham's entire backstory is a huge retcon that I find spectacularly annoying. If they wanted her raised by Vulcans, they should have used someone other than Sarek as her foster-father. Bad enough that Spock never told anyone about Sybok until the fifth movie and the idiotic notion that Vulcan has "princesses" (I would have bought the idea that Sybok's mother was a Vulcan priestess, because those were already established in TMP, but Vulcan is NOT run by kings or queens or princes or princesses). But we're expected to believe that whoops, Spock also had a foster-sister who was able to join Starfleet - a military organization that TOS-Sarek profoundly disapproved of - and stay chummy with Sarek while Spock joined Starfleet and was basically disowned and shunned for 18 years?
No. I can't accept that. It shows a blatant disregard for a decades-long story arc that was so carefully established in the first two seasons of TOS, continued in the movies, and concluded in the "reunification" story arc of TNG.
This is why I maintain that there is no way in hell that DiscoTrek can possibly be in the same universe/continuity as TOS, or even TNG. There is absolutely no way it can ever "mesh seamlessly" with TOS, as the producers claim.
And don't get me started on spore drives or tardigrades. They were repulsive, stomach-turning things on the nuCosmos series, and I don't need them in my Star Trek.
There's no news about Dax being still alive. Since you aren't interested in Discovery, I'm assuming you're okay with spoilers here. The latest episode said that most joined trill actually died during the Burn, as the joined trill tended to be the ones adventuring and on starships. Tal, the symbiont in Discovery, has only been alive for ~5 lifetimes. I'm not confident on what the trill lifespan is, but I suspect the Tal symbiont wasn't even alive or had yet to be joined in the DS9 era.
What is the Burn? (and no, I don't care about spoilers; I knew the major storylines of Enterprise long before I decided to watch it).
What Discovery does retcon is the suitability of hosts. It was revealed in DS9 that symbionts are capable to be joined with far more people than the state claimed; they just lied to control demand, as there weren't enough symbionts for all possible and qualified hosts. Yet in Discovery's timeline, there aren't enough suitable hosts for all the remaining symbionts, and they have to reluctantly accept the potential of joining symbionts with other species (like humans). That doesn't really parse given previous info, unless something changed about trill suitability in the centuries between.
Gah. It's like warp drive moving at the speed of plot. This is moving to the whims of writers. It was established in TNG that humans aren't suitable long-term hosts for the symbiont, but I guess they retconned human biology as well.
What I got out of the Discovery episode is that Trill society is split between conservative factions that do not wish to deviate from the old ways and those more progressive faction(s) that want to consider other species in order to keep the Trill going. It seemed to me that those conservatives were the reason why this obvious solution (i.e. using other species) wasn't explored more beforehand.
Am I missing something in my analysis? The way I assumed this went down was right after the burn the Trill society looked inward and became a bit more closed off and suspicious of outsiders, the way it happened to Earth. That would have given the conservative factions more ammo to not deviate from the old ways.
Lots of Trek species have had the "conservative factions" thing going. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it's ridiculous. Like the "conservative factions" surrounding the teachings of Surak, in Enterprise, for instance, or the nonsense that mind-melds are some new, rebellious and dirty thing among Vulcans.
That's BS. It was established in TOS that such things were normal in Vulcan society for thousands of years... yet another bit of evidence why Enterprise and TOS don't exist in the same universe.