A lot of Sherlock Holmes fans are pretty big nit-pickers on continuity.
Science fiction (other than, perhaps, purely hard SF) and fantasy are set in worlds with different rules than our own. But once the rules are established, the writers are expected to play by those rules.
Continuity errors are, in a sense, a world’s failure to abide by its own rules.
The obsession over continuity and minor details is so pervasive in science fiction franchises and Star Trek in particular is so pervasive that it inspired an entire film:
Not really; it can be traced back at least to the Sherlock Holmes stories where fans aggravated author Arthur Conan Doyle so frequently with nitpicking continuity details (such as how long it would take Dr. Watson to get to Dartmoor from London, or the chronological sequence of the stories) that in a 1890s “Bill Shatner fan outburst” of pique, he killed off the character once and for all…and then had to bring him back to life, which caused even more continuity issues. Diehard fans of the Sherlock Holmes stories are even familiar with “The Game”, in which background details from the stories are analyzed to attempt to develop a self-consistent chronology despite the fact that Doyle clearly paid virtually no attention to details between the stories (including the fact that Dr. Watson gets married and moves out of 221b Baker Street and then later returns with no explanation whatsoever) and in fact only rarely referenced events from other adventures parenthetically on a few occasions in the later stories to appease readers.
And I’m pretty sure this wasn’t a new trend even in the Victorian Era; there were probably nitpickers and fanfickers going back to Giglamesh. Certainly the Christian Bible is full of efforts to try to harmonize the various stories and attempt some effort at chronological and ecclesiastical consistency (the Gospels in particular, even if they contract each other in many details), and there is a massive industry of people arguing the various find points of scriptural interpretations, notwithstanding all of the spinoff franchises and splintering of Christian fandom.
The James Bond movies should really just be viewed as independent stories which happen to use some of the same characters and (sometimes) cast with the same actors. Prior to the Craig films there was almost never any genuine effort continuity between the movies save for minor references such as Sylvia Trench returning in the beginning of From Russia With Love after her brief introduction in Dr. No. Although the main staff of MI-6 were consistent for a long portion of the run (Lois Maxwell as Moneypenny through A View To A Kill, Bernard Lee as “M” until his death after Moonraker, and Desmond Llewelyn as “Q” starting from From Russia With Love all the way into the Brosnan era up to The World Is Not Enough, only absent in Live And Let Die even if they did have to find convoluted ways of having him appear in the story, and of course Judi Dench and Samantha Bond in the Brosnan films), there were only nodding references to prior significant events (“Remember when I kept a megalomaniac from nuking the US Gold Repository at Ft. Knox, or when I recovered the nuclear weapons that Her Majesty’s Air Force misplaced? I should probably get a knighthood for that.”) and no effort at any real continuity, never mind having the main actor swap in and out with obvious changes in appearance and age and the problematic issue of having a ‘secret’ agent that appears to be world famous in some films and able to operate under cover in others.
Other characters never appear in more than two films with the exception of CIA contact Felix Lighter who is almost never played by the same actor twice and not even making the effort in similarity between actors. They also cast the same actor for different, significant roles, such as having Charles Gray playing a contact in You Only Live Twice and then featuring as some variation of Blofeld in Diamonds Are Forever, Maude Adams being a lead in The Man With The Golden Gun and the eponymous quasi-villain in Octopussy (also appearing as an extra in The Living Daylights), and Joe Don Baker as arms dealer Brad Whittaker in The Living Daylights and then Bond’s CIA contact Jack Wade in two of the Brosnan films. The risible effort of retro-continuity in the Craig films (“I am the author of all of your pain!”; even Christophe Waltz can sell that stupid line) just illustrates how unnecessary and even detrimental continuity is to that series.
As for Star Trek, continuity from story to story was never a consideration until later in The Next Generation, and the only real effort of maintaining any kind of continuity along the entire run of a series was Deep Space Nine, largely due to the fact that the series occurred in a more-or-less stationary location with a backstory that was threaded deeply into the overarching story, and given that it has never been considered the most popular of series, it doesn’t seem that it mattered all that much. The original series was not even remotely consistent within its own run, is certainly not particularly consistent with the characterization or style of the first six films, and might as well be in an entirely different narrative universe from the TNG/DS9/Voyager-era shows and movies. Enterprise completely breaks continuity with everything that came before it, and the less said about the JJ Abrams films and more recent television revivals the better. The efforts to explain inconsistencies such as why Klingons look different between various versions actually produces more problems than it solves, and I have yet to figure out how tribbles haven’t completely taken over the entire galaxy given their physically incomprehensible reproductive rate and seeming inability of technomagical Federation technology to eradicate them. In fact, the only rational explanation for Star Trek as a whole is that it is actually occurring within a holosuite in Quark’s bar as a narrative exercise by fledgling RPG author Jake Sisko trying to develop his worldbuilding skills and playing around with different styles to delineate eras.
Stranger
Benny Russell neglected to trademark the term Star Trek in the 1950s, so it has become a sort of game among science fiction writers to come up with stories which almost but do not quite fit in with his original work.
Russell seems to have gone through periods of accepting this as an homage and resenting that other more traditional (i.e. White) authors had more commercial success with his concepts, leading up to his profanity laced acceptance speech at the 2013 Nebula awards when he was presented with the long belated SFWA Grand Master award.
The Baker Street Irregulars would like a word with you. As would the fandoms of, well, pretty much every work of literature probably all the way back to the Epic of Gilgamesh.
True, but the Baker Street Irregulars were a very small group of people. Nowadays it’s an obsession by fans of any TV show.
You didn’t anyone being concerned about continuity in the Thin Man films, for instance. Or Captain Video.
The book “Tune in Tomorrow” by Mary Jane Higby, is the author’s recollection of the days of radio shows.
She describes that a network went to great trouble and expense to make a model of the fictional town Stanwood from one of their soap operas “When a Girl Marries”. They network executives then showed the model to the writer/owner of the show, explaining how it would be a great help in preventing errors in continuity. … And in the next episode the writer had her characters move to a new town.
I love heard interviews about the making of the radio show Gunsmoke - apparently they kept track of things like how many steps it is from one place in Dodge to another
Lots of continuity errors in Andy Griffith.
Nitpick Andy?
And Barney and Opie and Floyd and Aunt Bea?
Never!
…so that they could destroy him?
I came in to mention exactly this. And it’s not just the Baker Street Irregulars – there are lots of other Sherlock Holmes fans out there, and they’ve all been obsessed with continuity, to the point of explaining away Doyle’s obvious gaffes as part of his effort to disguise the true events, or, for example, giving Watson the middle name of “Hamish” to explain Doyle incorrectly using “James” as his name in one instance. They became positively obsessed with this sort of thing, and were just as bad as the most rabid science fiction or fantasy fans.
I’m not sure if any other detectives were the subject of such scrutiny. Rex Stout was frequently as careless as Doyle over details about Nero Wolfe – the diameter of his oversized globe changes from story to story, as does the address of Wolfe’s brownstone, but I’ve never encountered any Wole fans so bothered by these discrepancies that they came up with elaborate theories to explain hem.
I think probably classicists have them beat. There have been whole bookshelves of thesis, journals and books written on inconsistencies in classical literature. and what can be inferred from them about the cultures that wrote them.
I’d love to read a bit about those, but without wading through tomes of “ClassLit”. Is there a reader-friendly article on that?
.
Now I’m picturing early readers retconning Gilgamesh: “Well, actually, when Ishtar said he’d made the Uruk run in 12 leagues…”
One that immediate springs to mind having just listened to the relevant episode in the excellent Literature and History podcast, is the shade Agamemnon in the Odyssey, and how Odysseus commiserates his murder by his wife Clytemnestra. Without once mentioning that he 100% absolutely had it coming and basically got off lightly, seeing as he’d brutally sacrificed his and Clytemnestra’s daughter Iphigenia (after tricking her into thinking she was going to marry Achilles so she would be brought to where she was to be sacrificed) to ensure his fleet to could sail to Troy. This is because that is actually a later story, that post-dates the Odyssey and Illiad (though that doesn’t explain why generally the character of Agamemnon in the Odyssey is a more sympathetic figure than the one in the Iliad who is kind of a dick)