Daystrom Institute
Welcome to Daystrom Institute!
Serious, in-depth discussion about Star Trek from both in-universe and real world perspectives.
Read more about how to comment at Daystrom.
Rules
1. Explain your reasoning
All threads and comments submitted to the Daystrom Institute must contain an explanation of the reasoning put forth.
2. No whinging, jokes, memes, and other shallow content.
This entire community has a “serious tag” on it. Shitposts are encouraged in Risa.
3. Be diplomatic.
Participate in a courteous, objective, and open-minded fashion. Be nice to other posters and the people who make Star Trek. Disagree respectfully and don’t gatekeep.
4. Assume good faith.
Assume good faith. Give other posters the benefit of the doubt, but report them if you genuinely believe they are trolling. Don’t whine about “politics.”
5. Tag spoilers.
Historically Daystrom has not had a spoiler policy, so you may encounter untagged spoilers here. Ultimately, avoiding online discussion until you are caught up is the only certain way to avoid spoilers.
6. Stay on-topic.
Threads must discuss Star Trek. Comments must discuss the topic raised in the original post.
Episode Guides
The /r/DaystromInstitute wiki held a number of popular Star Trek watch guides. We have rehosted them here:
- Kraetos’ guide to Star Trek (the original series)
- Algernon_Asimov’s guide to Star Trek: The Animated Series
- Algernon_Asimov’s guide to Star Trek: The Next Generation
- Algernon_Asimov’s guide to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
- Darth_Rasputin32898’s guide to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
- OpticalData’s guide to Star Trek: Voyager
- petrus4’s guide to Star Trek: Voyager
view the rest of the comments
The existence of time travel and the idea of a Temporal Cold War suggests that any given future is just one of many possible futures. The events in Discovery are canon, insofar as they did happen, but whether future Star Trek properties will take the Discovery future as a given is a more open question. Discovery was written very deliberately to avoid being constrained by canon, but that also means that the events are narratively very removed from the rest of the franchise.
My guess is that whoever ends up in charge of making the next chapter of Star Trek will want to establish their own timeline going forward for the same reason that the Discovery creators did, and they’ll largely ignore the easily-ignorable Discovery events, at least as relates to the far future. The alternative is either to set the next series in an even more distant future, which comes with its own issues, or setting it before the 31st century and having to write around a whole bunch of barely-established future canon that only applies to Discovery. I could be wrong, but it seems like the path of least resistance.