Yes.

And no.

You don’t need every tiny detail to be right. But if you’re just doing whatever the hell you want, changing literally everything, and most importantly, changing a thoughtful and positive show with great characters and stories into a simple CGI driven pre pew show with a bunch of anti social ashhats as your main cast… Then don’t call it star trek. Then make your own show, call it what you want.

Don’t take existing characters and strip them of everything that made them great and then whine about toxic fandom if fans call you out.

I’m not on Reddit, I don’t know how the fandom is, but on Reddit I’d say “now queue the down votes and bans” because new trek fans there apparently don’t like people who remember what star trek was.

meh

I think what’s more important then canon is something like an analog of continuity from calculus. A function can be continuous everywhere, which is analogous to having perfect adherence to a canon. It can also have major discontinuities (like 1/x at x=0), which I think of as like a reboot. There are even single-point “removable” discontinuities (like x²/x at x=0), which can be fixed by adding a single point to a function, are more analogous a tiny detail being wrong that doesn’t affect anything else and can probably be fixed with a simple retcon if anyone even cares.

You can do all kinds of calculations that depend on continuity of a function as long as they’re restricted to parts of the function with only removable discontinuities. Similarly, you can tell perfectly good stories in a broken canon as long as the story doesn’t focus on things in the canon that are broken. Each individual story needs to maintain its own continuity (or else we say it has plot holes), but discontinuities between stories don’t matter as long as stories feel like Star Trek to the audience.

Of course, feeling like Star Trek is very subjective, and feeling like a bunch of connected stories share the same continuity can be very satisfying, but overall, I agree with Nimoy that fans should just relax and not let discontinuities ruin their enjoyment of a good story.

Oh the irony that this quote is in response to the negative criticism of the Kelvin movies.

Even if those movies had not been fun, even if they had not birthed a new generation of Star Trek fans that went on to discover the classics and literally revived the Star Trek franchise, even if they had not been genuinely interesting stories unto themselves… they allowed Leonard Nimoy to reprise his role as Spock one last time, they allowed Majel Barrett to reprise her role as the voice of the ship’s computer one last time.

So, for those reasons, I am glad we got them how we did and when we did. Star Trek might still be shelved otherwise.