Star Trek Discovery Hired People For Every Superfan’s Dream Job: Canon Fact Checker

Star Trek Discovery went to some pretty great lengths to make sure that it was properly sticking to canon.

Though I’m sure they went to their own experts to fact check their stories and all, the Discovery crew went the extra mile and brought on some superfans to double check their math and canon as they created the stories that will make up the forthcoming first season of Star Trek Discovery. Digging through so much dense material to make sense of it all certainly takes a dedicated fan (or just the right highly-paid person).

Anyone tangentially familiar with Lucasfilm and the Star Wars franchise already knows about their own archivist and Story Group whose sole jobs are to make sure that all the stories more or less line up with each other. Given how prolific the entire body of Star Wars work is, it’s no small task. But it certainly is dream job material, given how you may very well get to spend a lot of your time steeping yourself in lore and being a general know-it-all.

As anyone who has tried to write fan fiction (or written at all for the internet) can tell you, the moment you slip up on a fact (minor or major), there’s always someone there ready to correct you. So when you’re creating a brand new series with the hope that it can divert from some of the more traditional stories, you also end up treading a really fine (though still well-established) line between respecting canon and tromping all over it. Discovery producer Alex Kurtzman had a chat with CNET about just that, saying, “You have to respect canon as it’s being written. You can’t say, ‘That never happened.’ No, no no, you can’t do that, they would kill you. Star Trek fans would kill you. No, you have to respect canon. You have to understand the timelines and what the different timelines were and what the different universes were and how they all worked together. You have to keep very meticulous track of who, what, where, when and why. And we have people in the writer’s room whose sole job is to say, ‘Nope, can’t do that!'”

Judging by early peeks at the show, it looks like more than a few things will actually be fairly major departures from whatever might be considered “official canon” vis a vis the original series. Whether those changes will be respected and accepted by fans beyond the select group chosen by Discovery‘s creators obviously remains yet to be seen.

You can definitely judge for yourself when Discovery makes landfall this fall, September 24th on CBS.

(via Nerdist)

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