Well, in terms of scale, one that must be considered is time; only Doctor Who has been ongoing as long as Star Trek, and its protagonists home world and entire species was annihilated off screen as backstory, notwithstanding the fact that backstory was written four decades after the show first aired. The biggest problem with Star Trek continuity is reconciling TOS with Next Gen and the rest (e.g. Zephram Cochrane looked nothing like James Cromwell in the TOS episode "Metamorphosis," and the biggest argument for a genetic link between Romulans and Vulcans is that Spocks dad was one of the former. )

Once we get beyond TOS, beaming the entire senior staff down on every away team is the exception more than the rule (and even TOS routinely lampshaded it with Spock or someone reminding Kirk captains should remain onboard, only to have him thumb his nose at regs.) Star Trek has certainly had its share of large fleets in epic space battles (the Borg conflict featured several,) but the inexplicable tendency to implement experimental tech on flagships, combined with the flair for the dramatic, naturally encourages focusing on the one or two cutting edge ships crewed by main characters. For that matter, there is no law that says a fleet of many average ships is better than one super-ship; it might be unwise to put all ones eggs in one basket, but there are valid reasons to do so in an environment where life is impossible without artificial support and travel between population centers can take centuries even at light speed.

From a technical perspective, one reason I prefer Trek to Wars is because the latter is pure science fantasy, with not even weak attempts to explain how any of the "tech" works. It is basically swords and sorcery in space, hence Darths & Droids and the "ten foot laser-pole." Obviously, there are limits; I do not expect fiction writers to be better at physics than actual physicists are, and if warp drive were currently possible we would not be talking about a manned Mars mission two decades from now (maybe....) If Star Trek cannot pass professional scrutiny, however, no SF can without just ignoring technical details completely; none makes even token efforts to address the vast distances of interstellar space beyond hand-waving it with warp drives, worm holes or hyperspace that rarely receive even cursory description.

Yet if changing views of both writers and astronomers made Star Treks continuity tenuous over the course of four decades, the solution was not for Abrams to just start punching gaping holes in it. In the current continuity, "Amok Time" never happened (raising the question of whether Spock could even have survived the period depicted in that episode) and Picard aiding Spocks attempt to re-unify the Romulans and Vulcans is similarly off the table. Realistically, even Picard and the rest of the Next Gen cast is off the table, because the continuity was not only altered, but at a time when Kirk was still a cadet and Spock a young officer. The only good I can see coming of that would be revisiting Enterprise, which I thought a fine premise and show until the pressure for ratings started prompted its writers to do the same thing with a temporal war that DS9 did with the Dominion.


I totally blanked on Tarkin; for some reason I always do. Maybe I can use Tarquin from OotS (or Republican Rome) as a mnemonic. I can see why it would be called the Thrawn Trilogy, but Dark Force Rising still seems too great a name to be wasted on just one book.


I see; surprised Lady Isa never mentioned any of that, as obsessive as she was about Bab5. The one thing I liked about that show was the silent space battles, for reasons you surely appreciate.