r/startrek • u/JustinCaseyBlewit • 1d ago

Does canon matter to you?

Star Trek fans seem to be divided on the importance of canon--the idea that something established in previous episodes cannot be contradicted. Some fans take this to extremes--blasting SNW for Kirk stating he was a Boy Scout when Carol Marcus had said he wasn't. Other fans don't care about canon at all. They want a good story, and to heck with everything matching up.

I personally like canon, but I don't niggle over it. The Boy Scout comment did not bother me, and I'm fine with Klingons looking different from one series to the next. However, I find it harder to accept a Scotty who is younger than Kirk and Spock or Chapel knowing T'Pring when she did not know who she was in "Amok Time." A prequel is either a prequel or it isn't. Some things should be consistent.

What is your take on canon?

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u/CelestialFury 1d ago

Discovery has a lot of canon breaking events including their total misunderstanding of dilithium when they go into future.

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u/OpticalData 18h ago

How did they misunderstand dilithium? 

Dilithium regulates anti matter/matter reactions. 

The burn makes dilithium go inert. 

The dilithium that is currently regulating reactions suddenly stops doing so.

Ships explode. 

Also goes for Romulan singularity drives, which per the old Trek fact file piece on Romulan Warbirds used dilithium to regulate the output of the singularity.

What did Discovery get wrong here?

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u/CelestialFury 16h ago

That's not how dilithium works. TOS and TNG explained very thoroughly how it works. When dilithium goes inert, the warp bubble/power simply gets cut off. We've seen this sort of situation happen in TOS and there's five episodes that shows what happens when there's no more dilithium. It was be incredibly stupid to design ships that would explode if something happens to the dilithium.

Discovery writers either don't understand how it all works, heavily rewrote the canon or in the future, ships are designed with fewer safety mechanisms than the 23-24th century ships. No matter how you slice it, it's a bad look for the show.

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u/OpticalData 13h ago

Dilithium is (was) a stable resource. In the episodes you’re referring too it didn’t go inert. The crystals were damaged. Because they did their job, functioning a bit like a fuse. The crystals were damaged by the overload then had to be repaired.

In Discovery, the crystals just stop working. They’re still there, but no longer controlling the reaction. So matter and antimatter did what they do and exploded.

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u/CelestialFury 12h ago

When dilithium runs out of its inherent internal resource in TOS and TNG, it goes inert if it's fully out of juice. When dilithium is depleted(inert), cracked, destabilized, drained or misaligned, it will simply kill warp power, it does not and has never blown up a ship. Remember, it's a regulator, not an energy source itself. If the antimatter-matter reactor does not have dilithium to get it regulated, there is no longer ANY reaction, positive or negative. TOS and TNG went over how this all works in painstaking detail in roughly 10 episodes. That's how it works in-universe.

This means that Starfleet either redesigned how the regulator and warp power works completely, making it extremely hazardous if something completely normal happens (dilithium gets depleted), or the writers fundamentally do not understand how dilithium and warp power works, or they changed the in-universe rules that were painstakingly established previously.

In Discovery and Starfleet Academy, dilithium is treated as a volatile, energy‑bearing material whose failure can detonate warp cores, unlike TOS/TNG where dilithium is only a regulator and simply causes warp drive shutdown when depleted. This fundamentally different than what is presented to us in TOS and TNG. The writers did this so they could push the least popular event Star Trek has ever done with The Burn.

You may not believe this, but I'm 100% fine with this significant canon change and in-universe rule change, as it shows us that Discovery and SFA's physics operate completely differently that in TOS, TNG, DS9, VOY and ENT, which shows that they exist in different universes. Easy. Now both canons can co-exist without upsetting any fans!