the m0vie blog

Sky is showing Star Trek all this week, and I’ve had the chance to catch it again – great movie. However, it’s got me thinking about the big furry beast which is continuity. Obviously continuity is a big thing within films – making sure the actors and sets look the same from shot to shot – but it becomes a whole other beast when you kick that up a level and are dealing with continuity between distinct individual works. Take the whole Star Trek saga, for a moment. Assuming you discount the hundreds of books, the entire animated series, the unproduced spin-off, various tie-ins and specials, you’re still left with over 600 episodes of television filmed over forty years and eleven feature-length movies which all have to line up nearly perfectly. And if they don’t, you get rampaging fans complaining it’s the end of the world. As much as my inner nerd loves that sort of continuity, I have to confess that I really don’t mind too much if one or two things are sacrificed in order to tell a good story.

Can we put that entire movie where Kirk kills God out of continuity?

And, I have no shame in admitting, my inner nerd loves that stuff. I love watching The Simpsons and spotting Frank (aka “Grimey”) Grimes’ tombstone from time to time. (For those not in the loop, Grimes appeared once, was driven insane by Homer and killed himself trying to pull off an idiotic stunt Homer wouldn’t have thought twice about.) But here’s the thing: The Simpsons don’t really care too much about continuity. Sure, some things stay in the very core of the series – Lisa’s choice to become a vegetarian (and, to a lesser extent, a Buddhist), Homer’s heart surgery – but most others just slide by. Psychiatrist Marvin Monroe, for example, has been dead and not dead. Doctor Nick Riviera was killed in the movie, but appeared perfectly fine the following year. Spider-Pig (or Harry Plopper) was a major plot point of the movie, and has appeared once since (in the credits, no less). And none of this necessarily makes the show any weaker.

Obviously, I think that continuity deserves to be maintained for big things – character development and growth would be the main thing, but is arguably generally the most frequently ignored aspect of continuity. Which is somewhat ironic – writers can throw in a reference to an obscure reference made over a decade ago, but can’t keep the character consistent from episode to episode. Keeping within the Star Trek franchise, Kathryn Janeway was a woefully inconsistently-written character on Star Trek: Voyager, a show which prided itself (sometimes unfairly) on having excellent continuity.

And I like big events to remain internally consistent – there’s no point shaking up the status quo without sticking to your guns. Killing a main character, changing the setting (or the rules), these are all events which deserve to have consequences which carry on to future adventures. I would have been ticked, for example, if Star Wars: Return of the Jedi started with Han back among the rebels, pretending nothing happened.

On the other hand, I don’t believe that little details of continuity should hamper a story currently being told. I don’t really mind that the fact that Romulans look like Vulcans was a major plot point in the episode of the original series where they debuted – Balance of Terror – and yet in the recent movie (a prequel), nobody cares that Spock looks like their attackers. Throwing that in would have slowed down the plot and distracted from the point of the movie.

Sometimes fan arguments can run amok...

Truth be told, I believe that stories should stand on their own. I think that any story relying on continuity to give it meaning or importance is deeply flawed – in fact, this was a problem with a large part of the later Star Trek spin-offs like Star Trek: Enterprise. A character isn’t interesting because he was “Kirk’s childhood hero”. He’s exciting because he’s exciting of himself. Make him interesting on his own terms. Tell me exciting stories, not ones taylored to fit in missing blocks of continuity. If you can fit in those blocks and tell me a fascinating story at the same time, I’ll love you – but the story should always come first. Without that, you’ve got nothing.

I also don’t, for example, think that somehow “rebooting” a movie series invalidates what came before. Even though Abrams’ Star Trek effectively wipes the slate of everything that’s happened in the franchise – about 550 of those 600 episodes – I don’t mind, because I don’t believe it invalidates the series in any way, shape or form. It isn’t as if the movie makes them any more fictional, is it? Episodes like In the Pale Moonlight, The Best of Both Worlds, Darmok and The Inner Light will still be television classics.

I appreciate that the time-travel element of Star Trek was thrown in to help appease fans – an acknowledgement that their classic conception of the show survives, personified by Leonard Nimoy’s Spock – but I frankly didn’t think it was necessary and probably convoluted the narrative more than a little bit. Still, I appreciate the gesture to fandom (even though, as with many, it will be rejected out of hand by the die-hards it was intended to appease). It renders the movie more than simply a “reboot”, but a “sequel” as well. From a continuity perspective, all the big events in Star Trek still happened – they just serve as backstory to one particular character. That’s 600 hours of televised backstory to a supporting character, which must be a record of some sort.

I don’t know, I’m just waffling. But this is the kind of stuff I find absolutely fascinating to digest and think about. Yes, I do  need to get out more.

Filed under: Movies, Television | Tagged: background, canon, continuity, films, star trek, star trek universe, star trek: enterprise, star trek: the original series, stories, storytelling, Television |