Here\u2019s a entertaining and wide-ranging essay (\"The Science of Consistency: Shabana is periodically taken aback when I take great umbrage at some \"minor\" mistake on her part concerning the key narratives of sci-fi\/fantasy\u2013I\u2019d share them, but they\u2019re too painful to recount\u2013so I can relate to this quip:<\/p>\n The fictional universes depicted in movies like the Star Wars or Star Trek series tend to get very complex (for beginners: the former features Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader, the latter Captain Kirk, the Enterprise, and a loyal crew made up of people like engineer Scotty; if you get them mixed up, you are worthless<\/strong>). <\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n I wouldn\u2019t go that far\u2013I am a tolerant person, after all\u2013but such mistakes clearly indicate that one has been out of touch for too long with the holy texts of the genre.\u00a0 <\/p>\n The author also captures perfectly the different psychological import of continuity questions for the diehard fan and the average person:<\/p>\n That complexity means that\u2014inevitably\u2014the occasional \u201ccontinuity error\u201d occurs. In normal movie parlance, a continuity error means one of those embarrassing moments when, say, the bandage on an actor moves from the right hand to the left hand between scenes due to a mistake by the makeup department. For science fiction fans, though, continuity refers to the overall logical and historical coherence of our beloved fictional universes<\/strong>.<\/em> If Scotty witnesses Captain Kirk\u2019s death at the beginning of Star Trek VII, it is extremely troubling to some of us\u2014those who care, those who have intellectual integrity and the discipline of logic!\u2014if Scotty is awakened from suspended animation approximately seventy years later in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation and asks whether Captain Kirk is still alive. Scotty should know that Kirk isn\u2019t! Something is wrong! It doesn\u2019t add up\u2014<\/strong><\/em>yet it must! It must!<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n There are many other gems of insight and deliciously nerdy examples of continuity objections, mostly concerning Star Wars and Star Trek.\u00a0 Here\u2019s an unexpected example from a different genre:<\/p>\n The TV show Dallas famously erased an entire season by claiming it had all been a dream (though they neglected to make changes in the spin-off show Knot\u2019s Landing, on which characters briefly mourned for a Dallas character killed off during the erased \u201cdream season\u201d).<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n And here\u2019s an interesting observation that explains the constant temptation in comics to trample on continuity:<\/p>\n there is a constant tension in comic books between the desire for the characters to accumulate interesting historical baggage and the desire to retell their basic, streamlined stories and <\/em>this time get it right.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n So it\u2019s worth a read if you\u2019re interested in such things.\u00a0 <\/p>\n While we\u2019re talking about continuity, here\u2019s my own catch (and one that I haven\u2019t seen anybody else mention, perhaps because it\u2019s too trivial).<\/p>\n I think Star Trek Next Gen changed its approach to the reintroduction of the Romulans.<\/p>\n In a relatively early episode of STNG, Episode 26: \"The Neutral Zone\"<\/a> (Boy, the web makes research easy sometimes.\u00a0 All that took was a Google search under \"\u2019star trek next generation\u2019 romulans reintroduction\"<\/a> to dig up the episode in question.), the Federation re-encounters the Romulans again after the treat ending a long war centuries earlier.\u00a0 \u00a0Without getting into the plot\u00a0 (which you can see at the link provided), the interesting thing was that the way that Romulan bird of prey <\/a>was portrayed as utterly dwarfing the Enterprise in size.\u00a0 When it decloaked dramatically, it must have been 10 times larger.\u00a0 I think that and the ominomous tone of the exchange between Picard and the Romulan captain clearly implied that the Romulans had outstripped the Federation in terms of technological development and that, consequently, the Federation was in trouble.\u00a0 In subsequent episodes, however, birds of prey were normal sized and Romulans were otherwise portrayed as being on the same footing technologically as the Federation.\u00a0 I detect a change in the geopolitical backdrop.<\/p>\n I welcome comments from fellow believers.\u00a0 In sci-fi, not Islam.\u00a0 (What do Avari-Nameh<\/a> and Von Aurum<\/a> think, I wonder?)<\/p>\n
\nOn fictional universes and the fans who rationalize them\"<\/a> by Todd Seavey) by a sci-fi buff about the challenge of maintaining continuity in science fiction and how inevitable such mistakes are in a fictional creation of any scale.<\/p>\n\n
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