ParamountĬonsider Strange New Worlds, Paramount+’s sensational Star Trek prequel set during the captaincy of Christopher Pike, who preceded Captain Kirk aboard the Enterprise. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds has deftly navigated a galaxy filled with canon-obsessed Trekkies, surprising us every step of the way. If fans won’t accept stories where canon makes less sense, then by God, these shows will bring the canon to make more sense. How can storytellers possibly play or progress under the weight of all that baggage-and still please today’s demanding audiences, too? Some mega-franchises have found a solution where canon isn’t a restriction, but rather, a foundation. The Trek universe has got to the point where you can’t play anymore." You want to have it all in your head and just play. As Ron Moore, a longtime Star Trek writer who later rebooted Battlestar Galactica, put it, "It’s frustrating to be in the writers room and tossing out stories, then having to stop yourself and go, ‘Does this work? Does this violate continuity?’ And having to call people and check encyclopedias and look up information. This is the problem with storytelling in the age of the mega-franchise-all too often, the impulses of abiding canon conflict with the impulses of making art. When storytellers are held hostage by their own audiences, it undermines their ability to do what artists do best: explore, revise, play. It’s not hard to see how this obsession with canonical fealty has hamstrung Marvel and Lucasfilm, two franchise juggernauts whose every innovation is punished by a fan meltdown. Somehow, canon is at once a collective orthodoxy and a personal totem, inflected with each viewer’s own biases and desires-even their own bigotry, too.Ĭanon has a big problem, and the call is coming from inside the house. In one memorable dust-up, Star Wars fans petitioned for Disney to erase The Last Jedi from the franchise’s canon altogether. Abrams or Rian Johnson, backlash is swift and vociferous. Increasingly, fans have become canon’s militant enforcers when those seeking to enlarge canon stray across its perceived guardrails, like J.J. In this age of massive cultural production, of sequels and prequels and cinematic universes, where does canon start and stop? Do novelizations, video games, or other ancillaries count-and who gets to decide? When new entries to the canon subvert or “retcon” the established universe, what’s to be done with those unruly fictions? After all, when storytellers dare to expand canon, whether by disrupting the narrative or simply shining a flashlight into its underexplored corners, there can be hell to pay. Its definition is simple-the term refers to a fictional body of work and its established facts-but that’s where the simplicity ends. The 10 Best Fantasy TV Shows to Watch Right NowĬanon is scripture canon is king canon can do no wrong.
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