posted
Rumrunners, bootleggers, moonshiners... Given McCoy's heritage*, probably his sorta people.
* Southerner with authority problems who likes his liquor.
My point with using that date is that I highly doubt Nick Meyer was trying to overwork things with alien dates, so I spend my time working out how it would fit in as an Earth date instead of trying to figure out how it can fit in as a non-Earth date. I know something about alcohol, breweing, ales, and so forth. My observations and conclusions based on Star Trek II and VI are that Romulan ale is very dry, has a high alcohol content, and yet is very clear. I figure it's double-fermented from highly-sugared ingredients, and filtered prior to final bottling. That takes a while. Add in time for the border ship to be able to get over, back, and meet up with and deliver to McCoy, and that Kirk's birthday is in late March... *shrug* It pretty much has to be the next calendar year, and to allow fermentation/aging time, probably at least the year after that.
Going back the other way, I just re-skimmed my Chronology. No notes on "Day of the Dove" or "Friday's Child". Nothing in the notes for "Errand of Mercy" about the length of hostilities. A note c.2220 referring to Spock's line in Star Trek VI ("seventy years of unremitting hostility")... Nothing else. Is that whole McCoy thing from a later edition of the Chronology? Or is someone remembering something from one of those other episodes? I am unable to view "Errand..." or "...Child" right now, if someone wants to double-check...
Either way, that's before Kirk is born.
Kirk being born in 2233 lines up with him being/turning 34 in the first season of TOS if that takes place in 2266/7. I see that date as malleable, depending on when we're able to put TOS from other referents, so I'm not too attached to it. For me, since TWOK can't take place in 2283, and it's Kirk's 50th birthday, that means -- again, to me -- that he has to be born after 2233.
Here's a wacky idea. Maybe, due to Nero's appearance, George died instead of the Kirks going back to Iowa with their newborn son and ending up getting pregnant again a year or so later. Maybe this is Sam being born, but due to Nero's interference, they name him Jim instead. After all, in TOS, Sam was played by Shatner with a touch of grey at his temples.
Timeline stuff... I accept that Sam Kirk could be on Earth at school when Jim is born, or that he's off in school or university when Jim steals the Corvette. I can even deal with Chekov being born a few years earlier for some reason. But the Kelvin is very different from previously-established ships, inside and out. And I thought families didn't start coming along on deep-space missions until close to TNG's time.
See, there are premises they establish in this film that are at odds with background stuff from the existing canon. They shouldn't have tried to tie it in with the Prime Trek-verse. THey should have just done a full-on nu-BSG-esque re-imagining. New viewers wouldn't know the difference, old viewers would be less frustrated at trying to rationalize their sloppiness, and I could get back to eviscerating the movie on basic filmmaking/storytelling points.
That's why I don't want to reference this film to work out the Prime universe chronlogy.
--Jonah
-------------------- "That's what I like about these high school girls, I keep getting older, they stay the same age."
--David "Woody" Wooderson, Dazed and Confused
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quote:Originally posted by Peregrinus: I highly doubt Nick Meyer was trying to overwork things with alien dates
[...]
and it's Kirk's 50th birthday
I understand your approach, and I too consider behind-the-scenes intent to be important, but that is a double edged sword. You essentially seem to value the intent of Meyer/Bennett over that of their successors. If anything, it ought to be the other way around: the intent of the franchise's current caretakers should be seen as more definitive than that of those who no longer hold any creative input. I think one has to recognize that retconning is an ongoing process and that previous material must be constantly reinterpreted in the light of new context as it is established. In general, I think more specific or more recent datapoints must take precedence over less specific or older ones, except possibly in cases where an explicitly clear preponderance of evidence precludes this.
The Okuda timeline certainly has its glitches, and TPTB have seen fit to modify or deviate from it as deemed appropriate--Icheb's "Q2" line being an example--but by virtue of being easily accessible to those holding creative control it has formed and is likely to continue to form an underlying basis for canonical datapoints. I do not think it is appropriate to discount these datapoints simply because they were devised on that (or any) basis. Except in some rare instances, as mentioned above, rather than think of them as mistakes we should consider them revisions or clarifications.
quote:Going back the other way, I just re-skimmed my Chronology. No notes on "Day of the Dove" or "Friday's Child". Nothing in the notes for "Errand of Mercy" about the length of hostilities. A note c.2220 referring to Spock's line in Star Trek VI ("seventy years of unremitting hostility")... Nothing else. Is that whole McCoy thing from a later edition of the Chronology?
The most recent edition of the Chronology (1996) lists Klingon first contact as 2218, giving as a source a line by McCoy mentioning that Klingons and humans had been adversaries for 50 years in "Day Of The Dove" (TOS). This was the source of all the hubbub at the time of the ENT premiere. However, no such line is to be found in "Day Of The Dove" at all.
quote:After all, in TOS, Sam was played by Shatner with a touch of grey at his temples.
Seems it was more than just a touch of grey. He looks at least about ten years older than Kirk to me, but as I said we really have no way of knowing exactly.
quote:But the Kelvin is very different from previously-established ships, inside and out...there are premises they establish in this film that are at odds with background stuff from the existing canon. And I thought families didn't start coming along on deep-space missions until close to TNG's time.
Come on, though, that's no different from people saying as much about the NX-01 and other stuff on ENT. Just because something is not as we expected based on extrapolation, that doesn't make it a continuity error or evidence of an altered timeline.
quote:They shouldn't have tried to tie it in with the Prime Trek-verse. THey should have just done a full-on nu-BSG-esque re-imagining.
Ugh. I'm not exactly drooling over what we got, but I would have hated that soooo much more. I can't abide that kind of thing, but of course either way it's a matter of personal taste.
-MMoM
[ May 29, 2009, 04:36 PM: Message edited by: The Mighty Monkey of Mim ]
-------------------- The flaws we find most objectionable in others are often those we recognize in ourselves.
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posted
Ah, turned the page. There it is -- 2218. Definitely need to check the other Klingon episodes and see if that's a mis-attribution. Either way, that would only support Spock's line from Star Trek VI indication that sustained hostilities had existed since c.2220 -- nothing ever indicated we were immediate enemies, though, as far as I know...
And my interpretation of Meyer/Bennett v. later creative heads is... the people who come after should work hard to not contradict the work of those who came before. You can take things in a different direction if you disagree with it, but don't contradict it. Even though it's a fictional universe, it has to have integrity or it's chaos.
And I am annoyed at Mike and Denise for the halfway research they did on the Chronology. If you don't have time to delve, farm it out. There are lots of things in the novels that are common koine to later authors and become tacitly accepted, even though they never appear in an episode or film. Uhura's and Sulu's first names, Kirk's hometown, McCoy's bitter divorce and the ex-wife and daughter he leaves behind to join Starfleet... That all was consistently in the novels (in the case of that McCoy example, all the way from the original character thumbnail) before it ever appeared onscreen.
I think the "screenwriters reserve the right to use or overrule any novel material" defense applies to a degree, but when something is consistently carried forward from work to work to work over decades, when you can ask any serious Trek fan "what's Uhura's first name" and get the same answer, it should, de rigeur, be incorporated into the official canon. The Okudas' ignroing it because it hadn't been on-screen was weak.
I know this is purely my opinion, but I think it is the responsibility of even later creative heads to fix the errors of those who came between them and the original creators of particular elements. This is also why I retcon Okuda's ship registry scheme to allow for what Jeffries intended back in the '60s up through the transition time circa Star Trek IV. I allow for real-world human factors, like misunderstandings, lack of research, and personal politics, and try to correct for those factors and come up with something that is internally logically consistent. And no, I don't think non-sequential registries are internally logically consistent. That's a feeble way to try to rationalise one single (to that point) production gaffe -- the Constellation.
But I'm rambling now. I'm going to let this stand, and see if I can re-focus on the subject at hand.
--Jonah
[Edited to fix typos.]
-------------------- "That's what I like about these high school girls, I keep getting older, they stay the same age."
--David "Woody" Wooderson, Dazed and Confused
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quote:Originally posted by Peregrinus: Either way, that would only support Spock's line from Star Trek VI indication that sustained hostilities had existed since c.2220 -- nothing ever indicated we were immediate enemies, though, as far as I know...
Picard in "First Contact" (TNG):
"Centuries ago, a disastrous first contact with the Klingon Empire led to decades of war."
I find it singularly ironic that the event's portrayal in "Broken Bow" (ENT), which garnered so much scorn at the time of its airing, actually fulfills in spades the conditions laid out by all previous references: (1) more than two centuries before 2367, (2) marked by disaster from the standpoint of either a diplomat or a starship captain, and (3) ultimately but not immediately leading to 70 years of unremitting hostilities ending in 2293, more than two decades of which comprised periods of outright war.
[ May 30, 2009, 02:25 AM: Message edited by: The Mighty Monkey of Mim ]
-------------------- The flaws we find most objectionable in others are often those we recognize in ourselves.
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Right. Sorry, I was trying to say there that nothing I've ever seen said the Federation and Klingon Empire were always enemies, right from the get-go. I didn't think I needed to point to Picard's like again as indicating that first contact got things off to a rocky start, but the "unremitting" part didn't come along 'til later.
Hell, might have been interesting to see the Battle of Axanar or the Axanar Peace Mission in this film -- the stuff that ended the Four Years War, where Garth of Izar fought and beat the Klingons, and the Peace Mission being something Kirk went on as "a new-fledged cadet"...
--Jonah
-------------------- "That's what I like about these high school girls, I keep getting older, they stay the same age."
--David "Woody" Wooderson, Dazed and Confused
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posted
Right, I wasn't arguing with you, just elaborating on (though hopefully not belaboring) the point.
And I completely agree that an interesting and entertaining film about Kirk's background could have been made, in accordance with previous references, without the need for the contrivances we ended up with. I'm not going to spend my time crying over spilt milk, though. (No offense; I don't mean that in a condescending way toward you.)
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