Star Trek Chronology Dating.

Where did the Okuda timeline get its dates for the TOS
from? They obviously decided on production order for placement but where did they get the divisions in the seasons ( "A private little war" in 2267 and then "Gamesters of Triskelion" in 2268 for example).

 

It seems they took the production year and added three centuries - so each season was divided across two years, just like they were shot and televised.

Personally, I think they should have done the exact same thing with all the spinoff shows, too. In many places, this makes more sense than starting the season at the beginning of a calendar year.

(And I sort of prefer stardate order. For the spinoffs, it's the same as the production order and the intended airing order, with perhaps two meaningless random exceptions plus a confused first season of TNG. For TOS, it makes much more sense than either production or airing order, plotwise! )

Timo Saloniemi

 

Basically, the bulk of Trek's dating scheme hinges on three points:

1) In the first season TNG episode "The Neutral Zone," Data gives the current year as 2364.

2) In the third season TNG episode "Sarek" (presumably set in 2366), Picard notes that Sarek is 202 years old.

3) Subtracting 100 years from Sarek's age to make him 102 (or 102.437, as he said himself) as stated in "Journey to Babel," gives us a rough placement of the second season of TOS as taking place in 2266/67.

Pretty much everything in the Okuda Chronology builds out from that. YMMV.

 

'Course, the fact that Sarek's age was given as 202 in that third-season episode must derive from somebody in the writing team deciding that TOS must have taken place when it "Okudaically" did (after all, facts #1 and #3 preceded #2 in the real world). So the TOS years were decided first (even if not by the Okudas) and the 24th century part of the Trek universe was anchored on that after the fact...

Timo Saloniemi

 

^ Seems to be more of a mutual thing to me, given that they'd given a hard year for TNG in the first season, and once they decided to bring in a TOS character, that gave them the justification to attempt pinning down the TOS timeframe. Until that point, all we'd gotten was a nebulous "78 years have passed since the time of Kirk and Spock" (from the TNG Writer's Guide) as our only concrete clue as to when TOS and TNG take place in relation to one another, but without an anchor point at either end.

[/NerdAlert]

 

I had heard the 78 years after Kirk and Spock statement
which with "The Neutral Zone" placed that movie in 2286 (which makes no sense IMHO but still).

So if they arbritrarily took the production date and added three centuries is there a list somewhere of the production dates (as opposed to airdates).
Some of it certainly doesn't seem very sensibe, for example
Dagger of the mind in seaon 1 seems to be set after christmas then they have Miri and the conscience of the King squeezed in before the end of the year!

 

Why? The last TOS film before TNG premired was The Voyage Home which premired in 1986; and with STII:TWoK, the films basically stayed 300 years beyond the 'premire year. (The 82.XX stardate in the film is supposed to represent the year as 2282, etc.)

 

I thought that the date on the Romulan ale in TWOK (2283 - 15 = 2268) and Kirk's comment in TVH (the latter half of the 23rd century) was what was used to derive the 2260s for TOS. Not that I ever liked this particular retcon...

 

Mike's ass. Seriously. They have no authority. There is no serious date reference in TOS, other than a few inconsistent references to centuries past.

 

They do have some authority; that which was granted by Gene Roddenberry at the time of TNG's production.

Besides, it's as good a starting point as any, so what the hell...

 

Except that the Okuda chronology did make one minor mistake. They placed "Space Seed" in 2267, and Wrath of Khan in 2285. 18 years. Khan clearly says in the movie that he was "marooned here 15 years ago by Captain James Kirk". Since no onscreen dates were given in TOS, this should place Space Seed in 2270.

But, what the hell. Like I said, just a minor mistake.

 

But 15 years is a round figure, while 18 is not. The former could mean the latter, even if not vice versa.

...Anyway, TWoK had to be in 2284 or 2285 if not later, because of the date on the Romulan ale bottle. Clearly, that bottle was several years old, or otherwise McCoy's and Kirk's lines regarding it would make zero sense. Any attempt to place TWoK earlier than 2284 would go against writer intent.

Which as such isn't necessarily a bad thing, but in this case it wouldn't really help with anything. The movie seemed to adhere to the "airdate plus three centuries" thing that apparently had been the working assumption from TMP onwards, and seems to have been a popular fan interpretation of TOS as well during the intervening years. TWoK should thus be rather immobile, and the 15-year thing would be achieved by moving TOS to a later date - but that would ruin the underlying systematic, easy-for-the-writers approach, whereas the "Kirk rounded it down so that it wouldn't sound so bad" thing would preserve it.

That's one of the things that works better in stardate order. Only "Conscience" would be between "Dagger" and the new year in that order, and that presents few if any problems.

However, if one goes by the stardates, one is then also tempted to treat them like TNG era stardates: that is, a date XY000 would correspond to the end of summer and beginning of season, while a date XY999 would correspond to the end of the season. In that case, "Dagger" comes in early spring which is perfect, and there's no rush regarding the following episodes. That theory spreads out the TOS episodes across the whole five years, without really affecting any of the conventional anchorpoints...

Naturally, the Okudas didn't put much weight on stardates, which indeed were arbitrary back then. But by sheer coincidence, treating the TOS stardates as non-arbitrary solves half a dozen TOS chronological contradictions and oddities while creating essentially none in return. (There's one real case of stardate overlap there - but we know Kirk jumped back and forth in time during the early years of his mission, so... )

Timo Saloniemi

 

Basically STII - STV are, according to the films narrative supposed to occur within a reasonably short space of time from one another, yet they range from 2285 - 2287.
this seems troublesome. According to the Chronology Kirk's Birthday is in March 2233
and STII occurs around his birthday ( personally I think that 2283 does make more sense given he is 50 but thats just my opinion. I believe that the delivery of the line "well it takes this stuff a while to mature" was meant to have an ironic delivery like if someone looked at a bottle of cheap plonk dated 2010 and declared it a good year.) STIII then follows on more or less straight away, there is time for the cadets to be reassigned etc but it cannot be more than a few weeks. lets say that it occurs in may and give it six weeks ( which I feel is a stretch but for the sake of arguement...).
ST IV follows "in the third month of our Vulcan exile" which following this would seem to be Around august (three months have not yet elapsed so it could be july still) this
places the movie in 2285 still.
ST V makes it worse, this is set in 2287. Now the narrative indicates that the Enterprise A was taken around the block then returned to spacedock. I realise we can posit gaps here and their but the movies do not FLOW that way.

It seems to me that STII was set in 2285 but STIV was stated to be in 2286 simply because of the statement that it was set 78 years before TNG (and was thus pinned down by "The Neutral Zone" logic be damned). similarly STV was probably set in 2287 simply due to the statement Nimbus III was set up 20 years ago and so its placement had to be 20 years after "Balance of Terror" .

 

Dialogue in "Where No Man Has Gone Before" establishes that that episode cannot take place any later than 2196.

 

.

how so?

 

I think that Nightingale Woman was "written by Tarbolde on the Canopius planet back in 1996"--and it's "one of the most passionate love sonnets of the past couple of centuries." I guess if you add two centuries to 1996, you come up with the notion that the episode takes place in 2196. (I don't know how precise Gary Mitchell was being or how infallible he is. Heck, even I say America was founded two centuries ago, when it was actually about 234 years ago. So if someone says "America was founded two centuries ago," I guess they can never, ever say that after the year 1976.)

 

see one of the things I hate is the way when we look at continuity we take every statement as FACT. so if KIrk says 15 years it can't mean 12 or 18 or whatever

fo example I would say I was at uni 15 years ago but it was actually 18-14 years ago

now Spock I will take as acurate ( because he DOES work things out precisely - but the avarage person does not ).

 

Normally I would agree. But in the case of TWOK, both Khan AND Kirk state that Khan was stranded 15 years ago. The argument that it was "15 Ceti Alpha V Years" falls apart since Kirk also stated it was 15 years ago.

The Okuda Chronology created a problem by insisting that TWOK happend after 2283, which is solid based on the date on the ale, AND that TOS happened EXACTLY 300 years after the series aired. If they had not insisted on this dating of TOS it would not have created the issue at all.

 

Establishing a chronology takes a lot of work as you take every little bit of evidence and decide how much weight (accuracy) to give it. Is it a specific figure or an average rounded off reference?

A couple of things I started from:
- I put the episodes in order of stardate which really helped some issues (as Timo already mentioned earlier). And I included the TAS episodes.
- I accepted WNMHGB happened before the five-year mission.
- Except for WNHGB all the TOS and TAS episodes make up the five-year voyage with just a bit left over. This means the major events (episodes) happened on average about every 18 days or nearly three weeks. Some events happened closer together and some farther apart.
- I accepted the five years loosely and came out with something between five to five and a half years for the voyage.
- I didn't accept the 2266-70 time for the five-year mission but rather placed it starting sometime in mid 2271 and ending in late 2276.

 

This works. I didn't agree with Okuda's explaination that he set TOS in 2266 simply because it was 300 years after 1966.

Using Data's date of 2364 for the first season of TNG makes more sense anyway, because it falls under another one of Okuda's stated rules, using onscreen dates as "offical".