passinglurker

That is a strawman argument, I didn't claim this is a different timeline, in fact I claimed just the opposite. Altered is not the same as Alternate. Key events that are remembered and influential are still intact, while superficial details like whether NX-01 was named Dauntless or Enterprise deviate with little consequence.

I'd take up that wager they used the same actor for zefram cochrane to do the traditional new series handoff, they cast him as involved in the NX-01's multi decade development program before he disappeared.

Except total unaltering is impossible you can put the big history book events back into place (ie zefram cochrane invented the human iteration of warp drive) but the butterflies are still set loose (ie zefram cochrane was told about the enterprise-E by time travelers and was shown it through a telescope in order to gain his trust and cooperation, a century later a hitherto unmentioned ship of the same name and rough silhouette would be launched supplanting Dauntless as the name associated with the NX-01 registry.) Our time travelers don't notice the differences when they return home because they are so far removed from the altered events that the fog of history essentially covers things up.

You're moving the goalposts asking for such explicits beyond what is reasonable. Why would they need to spell it out for you in an interview when they have the actors say "these events weren't supposed to happen" repeatedly on screen? Are all viewers expected to familiarize themselves with every entertainment news article around and about a film or TV show in order to understand it? These things should be intuitive, and if what is intuitive isn't the writer's intent then that's just a failure on the writer's part.

This timeline is Altered not Alternate They did the same thing for First Contact, and ENT add just enough time travel to excuse not making the show into a history documentary yet none the less its considered part of the same story as everything that was made before but came later in the timeline.

ENT's trip to 1944 between seasons 3 and 4. Or in other words what must be the writer's "you made us make this temporal cold war cake and by koala we are gonna make you eat it" letter to the execs.

TNG had the strong implication that holodeck technology was pretty new, in the first season, at least at that level of sophistication.

It wouldn't be the first time TNG-1 would be retconned by DS9/VOY/ENT/TNG-3+ though. While less extreme It was a bit like the early DIS/PIC of its day.

Lower decks had a

spoiler

rogue AI attacking a starbase

, but no mass fleet hijacking.

I'm not really a fan of "it only looks overdesigned cause its supposed to be alien to you!" That they did with early Disco klingons and have done so far with SNW's Gorn. That line of thinking works for one off antagonists like V'ger, but these aliens are effectively supposed to be recurring characters and and making them and thier ships big balls of (sometimes asymmetric) noise means they all just start looking uniformly chaotic on top of being hard to replicate and recognize outside watching the show.

While I welcome the more flexible interpretation of TOS visuals to make a world that is more immersive and functional while still keeping the color, and perceived campiness, I'd draw a hard line against making a genuine "Re-TOS" as it were. The idea of overwriting, or demoting old performances strikes me as a path to perpetual reboots and origin story retellings like we see with comic book superhero's, and seems a tad rude to trek's own past and how it got here.

Its also pretty unnecessary, folks often talk about how they want to see the old stories updated for a modern audience, but its often the case that the same stories have been retold with different characters and places already throughout trek's subsequent series, and as a result we are flush with ways to retell TOS's hit scenarios without crossing that line. Naked Time(TOS) vs Naked Now(TNG) vs Singularity(ENT) would be a commonly cited example, and we even already saw SNW demonstrate one such way to go about this with "a quality of mercy" a time traveling what-if reimagining of "balance of terror" had pike been captain and not kirk.

I accept and expect paramount to still be making at least one show set in the 23rd century for as long as SNW and its successors do well, but these should be used to look forward and expand on the time period not backwards at where we've already gone before.