this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2023
15 points (89.5% liked)

Daystrom Institute

3451 readers
1 users here now

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:

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
williams_482@startrek.website
Equals@startrek.website
LibraryLass@startrek.website
khaosworks@startrek.website
15
Is Prodigy still canon? (startrek.website)
submitted 1 year ago by adamkotsko@startrek.website to c/daystrominstitute@startrek.website
27 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

As you may have heard, Paramount cancelled Prodigy, halting production on its almost-complete second season, and removed the show from its service. The primary reason to do this, other than to streamline their content in light of the service's upcoming merger with Showtime, was to generate a tax loss -- a disturbing trend among streaming services.

Placing the commercial question aside, this has implications for the franchise. If Prodigy has effectively been deleted from the historical record and is no longer available to watch, is it still canon? The last time something equivalent happened was when the original Animated Series was unavailable for decades, and it was largely not treated as canon by subsequent shows. Nowadays it is counted as official canon (which introduces some complications), but it's also widely available. The likelihood that they will tell a story in the future where this makes a difference is low, but it's still worth clarifying.

What do you think?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] majicwalrus@startrek.website 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Prodigy is canon insofar as everything is canon when it happens on screen. I like to think of the canon containing all Star Trek works right down to your fan fiction novel or your "head canon" with some things being more canonical than others and with those things which are seen on screen either as a film or TV episode are the most canonical of the canon. Prodigy still fits that bill. I doubt that there will be anything as canonical that would "undo" what Prodigy did. But if that happened we would just incorporate the conflict into the canon like we always do.

[–] theinspectorst@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I like to think of the canon containing all Star Trek works right down to your fan fiction novel or your "head canon" with some things being more canonical than others and with those things which are seen on screen either as a film or TV episode are the most canonical of the canon.

This is how Star Wars Expanded Universe canon worked before the Disney acquisition and canon wipe. Every piece of Star Wars media (movies, TV, books, comics, games, etc) was some form of canon, but there existed different tiers of canon, with the movies in the top tier. Everything in any tier was considered fully canon, unless it was directly contradicted by something in a higher tier. I thought it was quite a cool system.

After the Disney acquisition, they switched to a binary form of canon - the movies, the 2008 Clone Wars show and everything subsequently produced by or under license from Disney was canon; everything else (including decades of Expanded Universe novels) was not.