this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2024
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TenForward: Where Every Vulcan Knows Your Name
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It's not well explained, but Humans were actually spacefaring for a while before WWIII bombed Earth back into the Stone Age.
And Humans agreed to a ceasefire then achieved warp-flight before they found out that there were other bipedal races flying around out there.
And they were very fuckable. Soon after, world peace was achieved.
Shran: "Why a Vulcan?!"
Archer: "Because they're cute."
There's a whole movie that focuses on the events leading up to First Contact with the Vulcans, it's called Star Trek: First Contact.
The whole movie focuses on the 24-hour period prior to first contact.
It doesn't really explain what Earth was like before half of it was nuked.
A lot of this?
Not true. Cochrane and his people were armed to the teeth and ready to fight in First Contact.
From the movie, when Picard was leading Lily to the egress port:
Lily: "Why did you break the ceasefire?"
Picard: "We didn't attack you."
Lily: "Who did?!"
Yeah, they were armed to the teeth. After a nuclear war, I can't blame them even years after the fighting had stopped.
There was also probably a shit ton of looting and roaming gangs even through the military action had ended.
I don't think that she meant a global ceasefire. That wouldn't have made sense when it came to a local firefight between a handful of people. The implication to me was it was a ceasefire between themselves and other local groups now that society in North America had broken down.
And North America, that specific part of North America, is literally all we know about in that time period.
cracks knuckles
During the first scene in 2063:
Lily: "It's an ECON!"
Cochran: "After all these years?"
ECON = Eastern Coalition. As in the majority of the Asian countries why allied against the West in WWIII. It wasn't a local skirmish, it was a Borg Sphere in low-Earth orbit that anyone under nightfall in the Northern hemisphere would have seen just as clearly as Lily did.
Since it was something up in the sky, her first thought was an ECON satellite bombarding America again. Cochran immediately expressed shock at the idea since there hadn't been an attack like that in "years."
While society had broken down, I think there was some form of communication that got news from one part of the world to the others. And I think every major power had stopped fighting - largely because there was almost nothing left to fight with. Exhaustion forced the world into a ceasefire. And any new fighting on that scale would have been seen by a lot of people and gotten whispered through makeshift rumor mills.
All that was left was domestic altercations between disorganized bands of desperate people. So peaceful groups like the one living in the missile complex in Montana still had to arm themselves. But the war proper ended some time ago.
We don't know what Eastern Coalition means. For all we know, that meant people from the Eastern half of the former United States. It could mean a coalition of survivor groups to the east of them.
We know almost nothing about WWIII. We know that it killed millions of people, although the number keeps changing. We know that it was not the same as the eugenics wars. We know that in some places, society breaks down and soldiers are controlled with drugs.
We really don't know much other than that. We certainly don't know that it was a war of Asia against the West.
Audio commentary for First Contact confirms that it means an unspecified alliance of Asian nations. Early version of the script simply said "China". But that was changed to the more vague "ECON" for obvious reasons.
Extra fun fact: In beta canon, the ECON was the same group of Asian nations formerly controlled by Khan.
Sorry, audio commentary is not what is on screen, nor are early versions of the script. Only what is on the screen has been determined by TPTB to be canon.
Which is the same reason why Saavik is canononically not half-Romulan despite that being scripted and a line even being filmed. The line was cut, so she's not half-Romulan.
They may have intended that to be the case when they made the film, but the very fact that they did not make it explicit opens it up to new possibilities. For the first time ever, in SNW, we hear about a "Second Civil War." Maybe the Eastern Coalition was one of the two nations that was the result.
There are many examples in the past of things that were intended to be mentioned on-screen which are then contradicted later on specifically because they are never mentioned on-screen.
You don't have to be sorry, because I don't have to agree with you. :)
Creator's intention is absolutely valid, and only when and IF it is directly contradicted by (as you described) on-screen canon, is it no longer a factual aspect of the fictional universe.
There's a difference between an early draft of lore being canonically changed (Valares was suppose to be Saavik, but the actor wouldn't come back. So the lore was changed to make a new character,) and artist's intention that didn't get explicitly demonstrated or spoken aloud and to date nothing has been canonized to the contrary (The bloody Cadet that Scotty brought to the bridge was his nephew.)
How do you feel about the novelizations of movies and episodes?
Which creator do you mean? First Contact had three credited writers, which does not include script doctors. It also had Jonathan Frakes directing and he could make his own creative decisions. And then there were the executives above them, who also had a say. So if some of them agreed with your assessment and others didn't, and clearly some didn't, who is right?
Similarly, if it's scripted in Star Trek II that Saavik was half-Romulan and Nicholas Meyer said he thought that was stupid and cut it out, who was right there?
If you play the "they never DIDN'T say it" game, you go into all sorts of nonsense areas, rather than just take a "we don't know that yet, maybe we will one day" position. It also gets rid of tired arguments when people get mad that Zephram Cochrane isn't from Alpha Centauri like Metamorphosis implies but doesn't explicitly say.
Yes.
I'm playing the "They DID say it, but for one reason or another couldn't articulate it directly" game.
Another aspect of canonical artists' intent is the series bible. Gene Roddenberry (in)famously wrote a Star Trek bible very early on that laid out the ground rules for how things worked, what terminology to use, etc. Then during the TNG/DS9/VOY run, that bible was passed to and cared for by the Okudas. And they also added their creativity and understanding and fixes to it.
All of THAT is also canon, even the things we don't yet know about. Because that's the collaborative intention of the creators for the franchise. Things like audio commentary and interviews, and deleted scenes, and extra information written in novelizations, are the little tidbits we DO find out about that are suppose to be part of canon.
This is all to say, Earth - as best we know, using canonical on-screen and off-screen information - had been in a years-long ceasefire.
AND it wasn't even a tenuous ceasefire because the sight of what was mistaken for an ECON weapons platform, a nuclear ICBM leaving and returning back to Earth, and actual, factual ALIENS arriving wasn't enough to make anyone start shooting again, thankfully.
You are now being blatantly dishonest by taking that question out of context. I specifically asked you which one should be correct when they disagree.
"Yes" is not an answer to that, which I am sure you very well know, which is why you cut the rest of the paragraph off to make that devoid of context.
I hope you are not resorting to trolling.
If that's the only thing you want to address, I don't need to say any more than I have.
I enjoyed this debate, I truly believe and stand by what I've said (both the in-universe minutiae and the real-life understanding of what encompasses an artist's work), but I think you're taking it too seriously.