Does Discovery's Latest Tech Break Canon?

But maybe they shouldn't be.

By Scott Collura

Spoilers follow for Star Trek: Discovery's latest episode, "Lethe."

Last night's episode of Star Trek: Discovery (read our review here) had a cool scene where Captain Lorca (Jason Isaacs) puts Lt. Ash Tyler (Shazad Latif) through his paces as the pair find themselves in a gunfight with the dreaded Klingons. As the two Starfleet officers stalk through the corridors of a Klingon ship, phaser rifles blazing, they take out a bunch of enemy soldiers with precision military skill. And then, as the strike comes to an end, the image of the last batch of Klingons wavers and they, and the ship around them, disappear. The Discovery computer then announces "hologram battle simulation complete" as we realize that Lorca and Tyler have been in exactly that -- some kind of holodeck training program.

But wait a second. Did they even have holodecks during this time period?

Lots of fans have been freaking out about this. Of course, the seemingly discordant tech and uniforms of Discovery have been a sore spot since before the show even debuted. Since Discovery is set about 10 years before the time of the original show featuring Kirk and Spock, there's no getting around the fact that things have been updated for the new series. But much of this can be explained away if you try hard enough. In the case of the holodeck simulation, however, it seemed as though Discovery's writers had actually broken canon, since Captain Kirk's Enterprise didn't have that technology on The Original Series. It's not that simple, however...

You see, Kirk's Enterprise did have that tech. Sort of. Depending on who you ask.

After the classic show was cancelled in 1969, Star Trek was revived for a two-season animated series in the early 1970s. The show featured most of the original actors reprising the voices of their characters, including William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy, and Trek creator Gene Roddenberry and TOS writers like D.C. Fontana, David Gerrold and Samuel A. Peeples were all involved in the show. It was in The Animated Series episode "The Practical Joker" that the concept of a holodeck was first introduced on Trek.

It wasn't called a holodeck but rather a "recreation room," but it functioned essentially in the same manner (it even malfunctions in the episode). So depending on if one considers TAS canon or not, this technology did exist on at least some Starfleet vessels during the era of The Original Series and Discovery. One wrinkle in this situation, though, is that Roddenberry himself eventually went on the record as saying that The Animated Series wasn't canon. CBS seems to recognize the show as being canon these days, however, and in fact many aspects of TAS have been incorporated into later versions of Star Trek. Even Discovery pulled from it with Burnham's reveal a few episodes back that her adopted mother used to read Alice's Adventures in Wonderland to her and her brother. (That brother would be Spock, who said in The Animates Series that his mother was a fan of Lewis Carroll's work.)

Additionally, Star Trek: Enterprise, which is set about a hundred years before Discovery, establishes that some alien races have holodeck tech. And knowing Captain Lorca, it wouldn't be a surprise if he acquired this technology for his own purposes. Just look at his menagerie and its collection of rare and dangerous species and weapons.

Still, that doesn't full resolve the questions surrounding holo-tech in Trek. Commander Riker, who of course would later make great use of the holodeck for training exercises and, ahem, various other activities, is more or less astounded by the technology when he first experiences it in "Encounter at Farpoint," the Next Generation pilot. And that show is set around a century after Discovery. You'd think a guy like Riker would've at least had a working knowledge of the holodeck if the tech had been around since the days of Lorca and Kirk.

Ultimately, as with many aspects of Discovery, the use of the holodeck becomes a take it or leave it kind of proposition. If you want to believe that it can fit in to the timeline, you can make it work. And if not, well then you can do that too. I, for one, choose to believe.

Computer, end program.

Talk to Senior Editor Scott Collura on Twitter at @ScottCollura or listen to his Star Trek podcast, Transporter Room 3. Or do both!

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