So, the other day I saw this tweet by Paul Sutherlin:
“thinking about the poor fans who have to find a way to incorporate the insane shit
that happens lower decks into the very serious star trek wiki today”
And it got me to thinking. If I ever ran a Star Trek show, I would make it one of
my missions in life to drive nitpicking canon-obsessed fans out of their minds.
Contradictory backstories, Irreconcilable
inconsistencies with the rest of the Trek franchise and within the series itself,
ship's scale and speed changing without explanation, set the show in the prime
timeline but have a random background character dressed in a Kelvin-style uniform.
Sometimes phasers shoot beams, sometimes they shoot pulses. Parallel Earths everywhere. Flames
shooting out the back of the nacelles for one episode then never seen again.
Do a time travel episode where they go back to the 1990s and the Eugenics Wars are definitely
happening, then do another episode in the same era a few seasons later where they definitely aren't.
Have one of the characters be a huge fan of the TV show MacGyver,
then do an episode where MacGyver appears and is treated as having been a real historical
figure all along, then goes back to being a TV character again after that episode.
Establish a very specific and obvious naming convention for the ship's shuttlecraft
fleet — like, they’re all named after cities in Florida — maintain it rigidly for six seasons,
then suddenly in season seven, there’s a shuttle called the Chicago.
Introduce a character with the Starfleet rank of lance corporal.
Change the rules of the holodeck every time it appears in an episode. Sometimes
holodeck food is real, sometimes it's holographic. Sometimes you can't walk
into the walls while a program is running, sometimes you can. Etc.
Stardates have random numbers of digits and sometimes multiple decimal points,
and occasionally fractions.
Set the show in the early 25th century, but then have someone refer to an event that took place
in the 21st century by saying "That was over five hundred years ago!"
Eternia, Etheria, Cybertron, and Care-a-Lot are clearly visible on star charts.
Ship's chief of security is referred to in passing as "a veteran of the Earth-Minbari War."
Background of one shot includes a Klingon petting a tribble without incident.
U.S. history includes all actual presidents, plus randomly inserted fictional ones.
One episode hinges on the ship getting lost in the epsilon quadrant of the galaxy,
which is treated as though it's always been there, and then is never mentioned again.
Sometimes ghosts exist, sometimes they don't.
Midway through the fifth season, the ship casually uses its spore drive,
which has never been mentioned before and is never mentioned again.
Someone makes mention of "the first captain of the original
starship Enterprise" and it's the name of a character we've never heard of.
Klingon blood is a different color every time we see it.
Vulcan blood is always red when we see it, but always referred to as being green.
The Chancellor of the Klingon Empire is played by a puppet,
which is never acknowledged as the slightest bit unusual.
Similarly, for one episode the captain of the ship appears as an animated character. This has
nothing to do with the plot of the episode and is never acknowledged by any of the other characters.
Sometimes Vulcan is still there, sometimes Vulcan was destroyed by Nero.
Archive photos of Spock are seen at various times throughout the series, and each time Spock
is seen, he's played by a different actor: Nimoy, Quinto, Peck, animated Spock, Jeffery Quinn, etc.
The events of the William Shatner novels are treated as canon.
One episode makes reference to "Admiral Janeway's wedding."
A wedding photo is briefly seen, where the bride is Kathryn Janeway and the groom is Tuvix.
Jonathan Frakes guest stars in an episode as a completely
new character whose resemblance to Will Riker is never acknowledged.
Everything that happens on The Ensign's Log is also canon.
The Federation is suddenly a constitutional monarchy.
One episode includes a subplot where a member of the crew
asks the captain for a raise because he can no longer afford the rent on his quarters.
At one point a character says, "As my great-grandfather's uncle always used to say,
'With great power comes great responsibility.'"
One character is a member of an alien species said to have extremely unusual feet,
and the others are always talking about how weird his feet are, and then we finally see the feet
and they're just normal human-looking feet and no one else even says anything about them.
At some point someone just casually mentions that Klingons can survive in space without spacesuits.
The commander-in-chief of Starfleet is one of those giant tardigrades,
who talks in a normal human voice.
Mormonism is canonically the one true religion,
and there's a Federation embassy on Kolob, which is variously referred to as a star and a planet.
Every time the ship's dedication plaque is visible, it says something different,
sometimes changing between shots in the same scene.
Every once in a while, characters casually refer to each other by their actors' real names.
The first officer returns to the ship following a vacation and someone asks,
"So, how was Jurassic Park?"
Odo and Clayton Endicott III are established as having been the same person.
Stage occasional flashbacks to the TOS era, which is sometimes depicted as looking like TOS
and sometimes looking like Disco/Strange New Worlds. Also, established TOS characters appear,
played by new actors who are the wrong ages and wearing the wrong color uniforms.
This doesn't really fit with the intentional inconsistencies gimmick, but I think it'd be
neat if the captain's catchphrase for ordering the ship to warp was "Step on it, you nut."
Suddenly and without explanation, everyone stops quoting Shakespeare.
On a remote planet in an uncharted region of space, the crew discovers a marooned man who turns
out to be the real Tom Paris, whose identity was stolen by Nick Locarno nearly thirty years ago.
This character is played by Martin Sheen.
Worf is inexplicably a member of the crew for one episode, then never seen or referred to again.
The ship visits Nervala IV, where it turns out there's a third transporter duplicate
of Will Riker who was just too nervous to introduce himself last time anyone was around.
He is rescued and decides to go by Chet.
It turns out Deanna Troi was adopted, is 100% human, and never had any empathic abilities.
The fiction surrounding The Onion is canon, and T. Herman Zweibel is still alive.
The Borg assimilate Earth and our heroes are unable to stop
it and Earth is just kinda like that from then on.
The crew discovers evidence that Ben Reilly WAS the real Peter Parker all along.
Also, Data was actually Lore, Lore was actually Data, and B-4 was another one of
Noonien Soong's biological sons pretending to be an android because he liked the attention.
The Temporal Cold War degenerates into a Temporal Prank War, resulting in the opening
line of the Gettysburg Address being changed to "Four snores and seven jeers ago . . ."
It turns out Narek and Narissa aren't actually brother and sister, they're just kinky as hell.
One episode includes a character making passing reference to "the time Scotty killed that hobo."
The sitcom Perfect Strangers is now Star Trek canon, and two members of the crew are direct
descendants of Larry and Balki and are also played by Mark Linn-Baker and Bronson Pinchot.
Whenever possible, real star systems and celestial objects would be referenced as locations, but
completely inaccurately. This would be done specifically to irritate Neil deGrasse Tyson.
In the final episode it would be revealed that the entire series had in fact taken
place in the Kelvin universe, and someone would say "It sure is a shame
that the old timeline was completely destroyed when this one was created."
I came here today, and I chose violence.