So Kirk makes the same mistake TWICE in accepting promotion?

[Captain Clark Terrell]

In Generations, Kirk says to Picard, "Don't let them promote you. Don't let them transfer you. Don't let them do anything to take you off the bridge of that ship, because while you're there, you can make different."

I wonder if the issue with Kirk's return to the admiralty had to do with his being transferred rather than promoted a second time. What's always made the most sense to me is that Kirk wasn't demoted during TMP but instead accepted a lesser billet (line officer as opposed to flag officer) in exchange for the chance to command the Enterprise again.

After the Enterprise returned from her second five-year mission, Kirk was transferred back to the admiralty full time (at which point Spock was promoted and replaced him as Enterprise captain). The reasons for this aren't clear--although non-canon materials suggest that there was a major shakeup within the admiralty due to several botched operations by Starfleet Intelligence, a shakeup that led to Nogura's resignation and Morrow taking over as the C-and-C.

--Sran

 

[Cyclonus]

As a matter of fact, the Enterprise is already forty years old at the time of TSFS - it was commissioned in 2245, while the film takes place in 2285. (Again, these are the generally accepted dates from the Chronology.) In which case, the ship (already pushing thirty in TMP) was going to eventually become obsolete no matter how much updating and refitting Starfleet does.

As a matter of fact, the Constitution-class itself was obviously becoming outdated by the time of the TOS movie era, as evidenced by the launch of the obviously more advanced Excelsior and the early retirement of the Ent-A. No wonder we never saw a specimen in a NextGen episode.

 

[Ithekro]

Not having a "II" on the movie title does not mean it is not a sequel. The have been plenty of serials and films that were continuations of existing films and media without being "Name of Francise (insert number here): Add title here" Pratically all the science fiction serials of the 1930s didn't add a number to the film, just a new title. Same with the Japanese monster films and other films that used "Main character vs. new villain" style titles.

Even Star Trek's film rival at that time, Star Wars, wasn't "Star Wars II: The Empire Strikes Back" Nor was it called "Star Wars: Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back" It was called "The Empire Strikes Back", or "Star Wars: The Empire Strikes BacK" that Paramount decidede to add a "II" to the title does not change its content or meaning. It just keeps it one set different from its nearest rival of the age...>Star Wars.

 

[Trimm]

In terms of the Enterprise being a training ship in TWOK vs state of the art in TMP, just look at the evolution of technology today for an example of how that's possible. The cell phone I bought 5 years ago doesn't do half what my current phone does, to say nothing of the comparison to my first cell phone from 13 years ago. And even that primitive device was light years ahead of the first cell phones. So it is easily possible that the Enterprise went from cutting edge to schoolroom over the course of the 12 years between TMP and TWOK.

 

[RoJoHen]

It's not like Kirk was demoted in TMP. He took over the Enterprise because the threat required someone more experienced than Decker.

Once the V'Ger mission was over, Kirk was probably ordered to resume his Admiral duties, and at some point between TMP and TWOK, the Enterprise was turned into a training vessel, and Spock was promoted to Captain in charge of that training.

 

[Captain Clark Terrell]

As a matter of fact, the Constitution-class itself was obviously becoming outdated by the time of the TOS movie era, as evidenced by the launch of the obviously more advanced Excelsior and the early retirement of the Ent-A. No wonder we never saw a specimen in a NextGen episode.

Which is interesting given that so many Miranda-class vessels popped up during both TNG and DS9. It's possible some of them were old ships pressed into service because of the Dominion War, but if one type of ship from the 2270s-2280s can make an appearance, why not another?

--Sran

 

[Cyclonus]

Supposedly, Picard's Stargazer was originally intended to be a Constitution, but the producers wanted to distance themselves from TOS, so they dubbed over the dialogue in postprod and made it Constellation-class instead. (Can someone tell me whether or not this is true?) If so, that's too bad. We'd all have liked it if the Connies were still around in the NextGen era, if only on the margins. Surely they could still be used as transports or science vessels for civilian use, as we've seen with Oberth-class ships?

As for the Miranda-class, I guess we must assume that it's a newer type of ship, though otherwise I always kind of assumed that there were was a TOS-era equivalent back in the day. But it's old enough-I think we saw far fewer of them on DS9.

 

[Ithekro]

I seem to recall that Stargazer was to be a Constitution because they didn't think they could afford a new model, then they got a new model and needed a new name. Constellation is close enough to dub over the lines.

If there were as few Constitution-class ships as Kirk mentioned back in TOS, than there would be fewer and fewer in service every decade as things happen to them. There may still be a few left in Starfleet by TNG, but how likely is it that USS Enterprise will happen to run into one of the few old Constitutions left? They ran into a few Constellations, a few Ambassadors. One other Galaxy. Lots of Miranda and Excelsiors as well as Oberths. Then other newers ships from time to time (but mostly Excelsiors). Supposedly there may have been one at Wolf 359, but it did not survive.

 

[gottacook]

So it is easily possible that the Enterprise went from cutting edge to schoolroom over the course of the 12 years between TMP and TWOK.

But... there was no 12 years between TMP and TWOK. No time passed at all. They each could have begun on the same (Earth) day. The events of TMP really ought to be regarded as a pocket universe or a different time-track or something. I have seen arguments that the Spock of TWOK must have first lived through the events of TMP to have become who he is, but this is more a matter of belief than of internal evidence.

All this strict adherence to the published chronology of 20-odd years ago, which represents one or two people's attempt to make everything fit to that point, is beyond my comprehension. The chronology was written to sell books, and did so. But by Occam's Razor, the complete reboot (which may well have included a ship different from that in TMP if it had been made in the CGI era) makes the most sense.

Of course I know that not every sequel has a "II"; I also know that Nick Meyer had used the II for his Khan movie when he was still calling it The Undiscovered Country (as reported in Variety at the time) - which means that someone had seen fit to remove the II during the process of re-subtitling the movie TVOK and finally TWOK. I interpreted this to mean a de-emphasis on the sequel aspect, which surely corresponds to the new uniforms, new bridge decor and display technology, absence of any story elements in common with TMP, etc.

It just occurred to me that the "II" could have been re-attached to TWOK for the same reason that Ford (this is going back more than 40 years; my apologies) called its new-for-1974, Pinto-based sporty car the Mustang II rather than simply a Mustang. There had been three or four previous generations of Mustangs, each larger and less efficient than the last. So in that case, Ford's use of II was specifically intended to connote a fresh start, with a new, smaller, more modern-appearing car that promised better fuel economy while still including design cues that evoked earlier Mustangs.

 

[Ithekro]

In the last 30 or so years that I've been paying attention, I've never come across anything in particular that would have TWOK retcon TMP out of existance for the purposes of telling the tales of Kirk and his crew.

 

[Timo]

In Star Trek Generations we learn that after some unspecified amount of time commanding the Enterprise after TMP, Kirk retired and met Antonia.

Or then he met Antonia and started thinking about retiring.

The wording is ambiguous on that. Kirk never speaks of retiring in that movie or any other; he speculates about whether to "return" to Starfleet or not. Is that returning from a decade of retirement - or returning to office on Monday?

No other Trek source suggests Kirk would ever have retired from Starfleet, until an undisclosed timepoint between ST6:TUC and ST:GEN. He went AWOL a couple of times, but none of that amounted to retirement in dialogue or consequences.

I have no problem with the idea that young(ish) Rear Admiral Kirk is fond of his high rank before, during and after ST:TMP, and merely agrees to being briefly busted to Captain for the chance to fly the Enterprise one more time before returning to his highly satisfactory desk job of playing with the entire starship force.

It's only a decade later that he starts to get tired of being the Academy Commandant or whatever; it's his friends who see that this is the case, though, while Kirk himself appears unaware of the proper remedy to his depression. He doesn't hate holding flag rank, he probably doesn't even hate being Academy Commandant, but he really likes it when he gets an Enterprise cruise as a birthday present. Yet he still wouldn't consider giving up his rank and status if not for the movie events that make him feel young again - and even then, it takes the next movie events that result in Starfleet forcing his hand before the newly found dream of starship command becomes reality.

Kirk in the movies is not a spoiled brat. He tries that one out in ST:TMP, but it doesn't become him; he continues his adult career afterwards. But McCoy is free to play the anti-Boyce here, arguing that Kirk can throw his career to the nearest spatiotemporal anomaly and instead have fun with his life. And after three movies' worth of wrangling, Kirk agrees.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[J.T.B.]

It had no impact on retirement benefits

Um... until 1980, retirement pay was calculated on base pay at retirement. Which would have been higher for the next grade up, no?

"Tombstone" promotions were on the retired list only. So an active commander, for example, would retire and then in the next Naval Register would appear on the retired list as a captain, with a notation indicating the "tombstone" status. They never actively served in the higher rank, it was essentially a courtesy title.

Edited to add underlined.

 

[enterprisecvn65]

None of this changes the fact that Paramount didn't add the II to TWOK until the last minute (or after the last minute, in the case of the theatrical release prints).

This whole discussion really ought to take into account the time displacement that is supposed to happen in FTL voyages. One year's subjective elapsed time for someone on the Enterprise may not be a year for a guest star, after all.

But I still think the full-reboot hypothesis fits the greatest number of "facts" and is the most logical reason why Kirk would be at a desk job at the outset of both movies. Neglecting the previous paragraph and assuming some sort of constant year, I do agree that the Enterprise had to be older than 20 years to account for the Talos mission, but that's a perhaps forgivable error; that number was probably chosen because the first time the Enterprise appeared on film was 1964 and the movie was to come out in 1984 (just as 15 years had elapsed between the filming of "Space Seed" and that of TWOK, an interval replicated in the script).

Again, the Enterprise can't be both a long-in-service training ship AND a recently rebuilt super-deluxe flagship of the fleet with newly installed engineering features (such as mentioned in the post-wormhole scene). It makes no sense. Nonetheless, any continuity that includes both TMP and TWOK/TSFS is obliged to try to make it fit.

I don't care if it had a II or not. Until the day Paramount comes out and says "We are officially striking TMP from the list of ST canon because we think it doesn't fit in" then it's a sequel.

It's a sequel that obviously has a much different tone and style to it than TMP, but it's still a sequel. The film was predicated on the notion that you'd seen TMP which is why they didn't bother to go back and explain the backgrounds of the characters and what they were doing before coming back to the Enterprise.

Paramount wasn't so embarrassed by TMP that they decided to kill it and restart it again, they were just tired of the fact Gene Roddenberry couldn't make a ST film without the studio wanting to constantly write him big checks, especially since the return on the film wasn't anything close to the "Star Wars" range.

The execs obviously thought the film itself had enough promise, and it had made a profit, that it could be continued and be successful, but not with Roddenberry at the controls. Enter Bennett and Meyer and co.

It was meant to change the tone of TMP but not to reset the events ST universe. Which it did very successfully. Whether it had a roman numeral 2 in front of it is moot. Many sequels don't stick a number in front of it.

 

[BillJ]

It's a sequel that obviously has a much different tone and style to it than TMP, but it's still a sequel. The film was predicated on the notion that you'd seen TMP which is why they didn't bother to go back and explain the backgrounds of the characters and what they were doing before coming back to the Enterprise.

Kirk was the main character and we were very much reintroduced to him in TWOK. Paramount obviously wasn't happy with TMP which is why there was a whole new creative team brought in. If they'd been happy with TMP, work wouldn't have started with the TV division with a TV producer and an $11 million dollar budget.

 

[Lance]

The simple answer to this question -- and it's so simple, I wouldn't be surprised if someone mentioned it upthread already, but I've not got time to check atm -- is that Kirk retired to his log cabin to live with Antonia after his post-TMP tour of duty, and when he went back to Starfleet he was reactivated as an Admiral and given a desk job again.

Paramount wasn't so embarrassed by TMP that they decided to kill it and restart it again

Actually, there's every evidence that if Paramount didn't intend this, then Nick Meyer certainly did. Certain themes in Kirk's character arc are repeated verbatim from the first movie, and in fact it's incredibly easy to go straight from TOS to TWOK without skipping a beat, an indication that a lot of TMP's character development didn't carry over to the 'sequel'.

Sure, it doesn't go out of its way to contradict TMP. But there are a lot of basic ways in which TWOK ignores that there was ever a movie that came out before it. That it reboots the visual look in such a drastic way (as opposed to carrying the continuity of using the same uniforms, say) is just one of many ways it chooses to do a 'soft reboot' of sorts.

 

[enterprisecvn65]

It's a sequel that obviously has a much different tone and style to it than TMP, but it's still a sequel. The film was predicated on the notion that you'd seen TMP which is why they didn't bother to go back and explain the backgrounds of the characters and what they were doing before coming back to the Enterprise.

Kirk was the main character and we were very much reintroduced to him in TWOK. Paramount obviously wasn't happy with TMP which is why there was a whole new creative team brought in. If they'd been happy with TMP, work wouldn't have started with the TV division with a TV producer and an $11 million dollar budget.

Other than the fact he was having a mid life crisis, how exactly were we "reintroduced" to Kirk? They didn't tell anything about his background or what he had been doing exactly as Admiral. We learned he longed to command a starship again, but we already knew that from the first film. We learn he has a son but not until the latter half of the film.

In TMP we learn about what's he's been doing with his career and how he wants to get back in the captain's chair. We also learn Spock quit starfleet to pursue Kolhinir (?) and McCoy was leading some kind of hippy lifestyle and he had no desire to return to starfleet. In TWOK we just meet them and pick up as if we'd known them all along.

And TMP didn't meet creative expectations on some levels, but it was the FINANCIAL aspect of the film that caused the changes. That's why TV guys were brought in because they were used to doing more with less. If TMP had cost $5 million to make and made the money it did, I doubt you would have seen changes based of creative failures. Instead it cost a ton of money and wasn't a hit of Star Wars proportions.

The changes between TMP and TWOK came down to money pure and simple. Roddenberry couldn't make a film cheaply, Paramount wasn't going to gamble with him again and that's it. The percieved failure of TMP on a creative or entertainment level had very little to do with it

 

[enterprisecvn65]

The simple answer to this question -- and it's so simple, I wouldn't be surprised if someone mentioned it upthread already, but I've not got time to check atm -- is that Kirk retired to his log cabin to live with Antonia after his post-TMP tour of duty, and when he went back to Starfleet he was reactivated as an Admiral and given a desk job again.

Paramount wasn't so embarrassed by TMP that they decided to kill it and restart it again

Actually, there's every evidence that if Paramount didn't intend this, then Nick Meyer certainly did. Certain themes in Kirk's character arc are repeated verbatim from the first movie, and in fact it's incredibly easy to go straight from TOS to TWOK without skipping a beat, an indication that a lot of TMP's character development didn't carry over to the 'sequel'.

Sure, it doesn't go out of its way to contradict TMP. But there are a lot of basic ways in which TWOK ignores that there was ever a movie that came out before it. That it reboots the visual look in such a drastic way (as opposed to carrying the continuity of using the same uniforms, say) is just one of many ways it chooses to do a 'soft reboot' of sorts.

I'll give you that Meyer maybe intended to kill TMP. Paramount I don't think gave a damn one way or the other if he was going to keep they style of the first film going or totally revamp it. All they wanted was someone who could make an entertaining film and do it cheaply. If he kept the space pajamas and tone of TMP and it was a big hit......that would have been fine with the execs also.

 

[J.T.B.]

One TMP change that seemed to stick was the resolution of Spock's inner conflict. After his V'ger epiphany, he was a mellower character. Spock in the WOK "of course, the ship is yours" scene doesn't play quite the same as the TOS character.

Kirk was the main character and we were very much reintroduced to him in TWOK. Paramount obviously wasn't happy with TMP which is why there was a whole new creative team brought in. If they'd been happy with TMP, work wouldn't have started with the TV division with a TV producer and an $11 million dollar budget.

Well, TMP with its production/budget "issues" came around at a time when out-of-control, big budget pictures like Apocalypse Now, Heaven's Gate and 1941 scared the big studios to the core (Heaven's Gate knocked United Artists out of the movie business). Proven producers who could rein in productions and stay within budget were the order of the day.

 

[Ronald Held]

Was there dialogue in TMP that said Kirk took a temporary grade reduction? If so, why not to Commodore? I wonder if he just wanted to be at his old rank?

 

[Captain Clark Terrell]

Was there dialogue in TMP that said Kirk took a temporary grade reduction? If so, why not to Commodore? I wonder if he just wanted to be at his old rank?

No, there was no dialogue pertaining to Kirk's rank change; as far as why he took the rank of captain, perhaps the commodore rank was being phased out by TMP (even though a commodore's name was mentioned as part of a comm transmission).

--Sran