Interesting read on Metaphilm.com about what is considered ‘canon’ in science fiction. All about inconsistencies in our favourtie films, tv shows and comics.

If Scotty witnesses Captain Kirk’s death at the beginning of Star Trek VII, it is extremely troubling to some of us—those who care, those who have intellectual integrity and the discipline of logic!—if Scotty is awakened from suspended animation approximately seventy years later in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation and asks whether Captain Kirk is still alive. Scotty should know that Kirk isn’t! Something is wrong! It doesn’t add up—yet it must! It must!

Scotty, for example, must have been so addled by his time in suspended animation that he temporarily forgot that Kirk was dead (that’s the explanation fans came up with, and it’s now accepted as canonical by the Trek staff themselves, I believe). Aaaah, that’s better. All is consistent. All is well. (Or at least, all is well with that particular slip-up—on the other hand, the latest Star Trek TV series, Enterprise, is in the middle of a two-part episode, even as I write these words, that is designed to explain once and for all why the Klingons in the 1960s Star Trek series are swarthier and have less-lumpy foreheads than the Klingons in the movies and the newer Trek TV shows. It is important that we know.)

Its great when normal fans try and come up with answers all by themselves. via