posted
For laughs...for kicks...for a way to keep my mind off certain unpleasent realities of the day, I've decided to try and construct my own, completely inclusive canon Trek timeline. This is partly in order to see just where the inconsistancies lie, and partly just to enjoy watching Roddenberry et al figure out just where this "Star Trek" show is going.
Anyway, some ground rules: I'm going in chronological order from the second pilot, so until I come to an episode I'm not recognizing its information. (Which is why my date for the series spans about two hundred years of possibilities.) Stuff that's in italics is either contradicted in the episode itself or based on unsupported conjecture on my part or information that does come from later episodes, or series, or guide books. Assuming I ever finish this, and people haven't beaten me to death for being pedantic and/or boring, these might get fancy color codes to separate contradictions from conjectures and so on. There are three sorts of dates used. One is absolute, dated from the second pilot. ST for Star Trek and BST for before Star Trek. (Even though we've got Star Trek before our Before Star Trek dates.) One is based on the current era dates that can be derived from the episodes. And the last is stardates, which are unreliable for reasons we're all aware. Finally, the numbers in parenthesis lead to footnotes.
Anyway, that's about it. I've done all of two episodes so far. Enjoy.
Where No Man Has Gone Before BST 400-200 "Nightingale Woman" written by Tarbolde on the Canopius planet CE 1996 (1) BST 210-190 S.S. Valiant lost CE 2006-2186 BST 33 Gary Mitchell born (2) Stardate 1087.7 CE 2163-2363 BST 31 Elizabeth Dehner born (2) Stardate 1089.5 CE 2165-2365 BST 23 Gary Mitchell born (2) Stardate 1087.7 CE 2153-2353 BST 21 Elizabeth Dehner born (2) Stardate 1089.5 CE 2155-2355 BST 15 Kirk and Mitchell meet, presumably at the academy (3) CE 2181-2381 ST 1 "Where No Man Has Gone Before" Stardate 1312.4-1313.8 CE 2196-2396
1.) Mitchell gives the date of the poem and then mentions it was the most romantic written in the "past couple of centuries." My purely arbitrary definition of couple is two to four. 2.) It seems highly unlikely that Mitchell and Dehner were 23 and 21, respectively, during the episode, regardless of the ages given on their files. 3.) Mitchell's description of his academy years make it sound like he had not met Kirk prior to attending. It is interesting to note that if Mitchell met Kirk during his first year, and we assume from evidence in TNG that most people go to the academy at the age of 18, Mitchell would be 33 during the episode, which seems like a more reasonable age for a Lieutenant Commander and possible XO. If we're adding ten years to Mitchell's age, it doesn't seem unreasonable to do the same for Dr. Dehner, making her 31.
We get two different and mutually exclusive stardate schemes here. The first, appearing on the personnel files Spock reviews, suggest that one stardate equals one year. By that scheme, Mitchell was 226 years old when he died, and the episode itself took over a year.
Kirk's date of birth, as given by his tombstone and as near as I can make out, is stardate 1277.1.
The Corbomite Manuver BST 250-200 Earliest days of space exploration (1) CE 1946-2196 BST 11 Kirk's first promotion to bridge officer (2) CE 2185-2385 ST 1+93 days "The Corbomite Manuver" Stardate 1512.2 (3) CE 2196-2396
1.) This is more or less how long Kirk says human starships have been using corbomite devices. Another assumption on my part is that "over two centuries" means at least two, but not more than two and a half, at which point we might round up to "almost three" instead. Not, perhaps, the most defensible interpretation, but there you are. This could be used to date the episode, but it has a number of problems we must overcome first. One, is Kirk talking about the earliest days of human space exploration or Federation space exploration? Arguably human, since the UFP hadn't been thought up by Roddenberry and company yet. Two, does earliest mean earliest overall or earliest that actually went anywhere? In other words, is he dating from Gagarin or Cochrane? Tricky, as there's a century just inbetween them. Lastly, seeing as how the whole bit was a bluff anyway, more than two centuries could just have been the first number that popped into Kirk's head. (Of course, assuming that it is a more or less accurate number, and that Kirk was speaking of Cochrane, this number easily fits into the "true" timeline. So, hooray.) One other thing to consider is that he might be dating from the time of the Valiant, in which case this episode adds to the pilot, but doesn't introduce any new timeline information. For now, we'll just go with the date derived from the pilot. 2.) McCoy tells Kirk that the captain was like Bailey 11 years ago. I assume here that the good doctor was speaking about their shared situation, that is, their first permenant seat on the bridge of a starship. But it is also possible McCoy was speaking of a shared rank, or a shared tendancy to spout off dramatic monolouges at opportune moments. I'm going to stick with bridge officer, though, as I think that was the intention. 3.) Another stardate scheme is presented. From the first captain's log to the second, 18 hours and 1.6 stardates have passed. Thus 1 stardate equals 11.25 hours. By this reckoning, about 93 and a half days have passed since "Where No Man Has Gone Before." Not entirely unreasonable, as three months seems almost enough time to refit the ship, change uniforms, and mix and match personnel, especially if the Enterprise returned to base immediately following their galactic barrier encounter, and didn't depart until just before this mission. Of course, it also means that Mitchell would have been only 105 days old.
Coming soon: "Mudd's Women" or "Tomorrow is 85 Days Ago." (Note: It's unlikely I'll be able to come up with joke titles based on stardate inconsistancies for every episode, so enjoy them while you can.)
Registered: Mar 1999
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Please open an office on our station. But you MUST do it in the second ring from the right. There is no choice here. That's where we've said you're gonna be, and that's where you'll be.
Lurkers
Your only choice is to go all the way back, as far away from Security as possible. That's so that you can't trouble our command staff too much. We don't want stories involving lurkers, period!
Ambassadors
We want you out of reach of any potential troublemakers! So we'll put you right here in the middle, and simply block access from all sides. Nothing will trouble you. Everyone who wants to talk to you will JUST HAVE TO TAKE THE Core Shuttle.
posted
I have written fanfiction about 5 year old super-powered girls that doesn't feature underage cartoon sex!
-------------------- Yes, you're despicable, and... and picable... and... and you're definitely, definitely despicable. How a person can get so despicable in one lifetime is beyond me. It isn't as though I haven't met a lot of people. Goodness knows it isn't that. It isn't just that... it isn't... it's... it's despicable.
Registered: Mar 1999
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A. I think that Kirk met Mitchell fifteen years before the episode "Where No Man Has Gone Before". They would later become friends at the Academy when the older Kirk taught a class. In the episode, Kirk said that he had known Mitchell for fifteen years, not that they had been friends for fifteen years.
B. The medical records are for the U.S.S. Enterprise . Gary Mitchell's record is older than Elizabeth Dehner's. In the conference, Dehner said that Mitchell had served for years with Spock. So, Mitchell is older than his records indicate. How much older is not known.
C. The dates given on the tombstone may not indicate birth and date, but rather commission of a rank and the ending of a rank. The "C." at the beginning of the dates I think is a big clue. This "C." I think stands for "Captain". This is confirmed by the stardates. 1277.10 is after 1089.5, not before 1087.70. If we accepted the stardates as birthdates, then Kirk would be considerably younger than Mitchell or Dehner.
Registered: Sep 1999
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posted
A.) Well, that's what I said, more or less. The reason I suspect they met at the academy is because Mitchell doesn't sound as if he knew Kirk by anything but reputation at the time.
B.) The record says, right on it, "age: 23." I'm not sure what you're getting at. I find it rather unlikely that the records are out of date. This is the 23rd century, after all. And the stardates can't really tell us anything.
C.) Again, stardates aren't a good way to date things. Also, putting the years Kirk was a captain on his tombstone is an incredibly bizarre act. Even more so, that c. doesn't stand for captain. It stands for...uh...something calender related. Honest! I just can't quite remember what.
Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
Of course, the tombstone was created by Mitchell, and he might have simply got the Captain's age wrong. Or it could have been a joke; maybe Mitchell called Kirk "baby-faced Monkey fucker", and so he gave him a tombstone that gave him the age of a baby.
Or maybe he cocked up. He apparently didn't know the middle name of his friend of 15 years (or at least a few), so it's possible.
-------------------- Yes, you're despicable, and... and picable... and... and you're definitely, definitely despicable. How a person can get so despicable in one lifetime is beyond me. It isn't as though I haven't met a lot of people. Goodness knows it isn't that. It isn't just that... it isn't... it's... it's despicable.
Registered: Mar 1999
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quote:Originally posted by Sol System: B.) The record says, right on it, "age: 23."
I don't have the episode to look at, but is the record in question something that could have been made when Mitchell WAS 23 rather than being current, or am I missing the point of this argument over the age on the record?
-------------------- "Well, I mean, it's generally understood that, of all of the people in the world, Mike Nelson is the best." -- ULTRA MAGNUS, steadfast in curmudgeon
Registered: Feb 2001
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posted
Well, here's the thing. The record was paper, it seems, scanned in, or something. One page even had circles drawn on it in pen.
But. This is supposed to be 200 years in the future. I have a hard time believing that the Enterprise has her computer banks stuffed with .pdf files that aren't even up to date.
However, I'm not sure what the point of all this is. Obviously Mitchell and Dehner weren't fresh out of their teens during the episode, so whether the record is wrong or old doesn't seem to make a difference to me.
Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
I would think that it would almost certainly be out of date. Who makes a permanent record that asks for "age", and then updates it every year? If it were just a generic record that was updated every time something changed, it would simply have the birthdate on it. I would guess those records were made back when Mitchell and Dehner entered Starfleet, or something.
Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
Speaking of the records, doesn't anyone find it strange that only a corner of Mitchell and Dehner's personnel records are shown? IF you observe the top line, you will notice that the line is not complete.
Registered: Sep 1999
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