Enterprise becoming a training ship?

[GalaxyClass1701]

Was watching TMP then re-read Ex-Machina and was now thinking how the Enterprise went from being back in the hands of Kirk to becoming a training ship in TWOK?

Was there another 5 year mission in between these two films? Has this story ever been told?

 

[Christopher]

Was watching TMP then re-read Ex-Machina and was now thinking how the Enterprise went from being back in the hands of Kirk to becoming a training ship in TWOK?

Was there another 5 year mission in between these two films? Has this story ever been told?

See my next story in that era, Mere Anarchy Book 4: The Darkness Drops Again. Or, an earlier version is shown in Deep Domain by Howard Weinstein.

 

[Vance]

TMP takes place in 2271, and TWOK takes place in 2283. There is an assumption that there were two more tours of duty in those twelve years, with various comics, novels (thank you, Christopher) , and other sources throwing in missions. There is, of course, nothing in 'canon' about that time.

All we know is that sometime around 2280 Kirk is 'retired to the desk', Spock has become a teacher, and the Enterprise, well-tested and a bit long in service, is being used to train up cadets.

 

[DS9forever]

I thought Wrath of Khan was 2285?

 

[Christopher]

I thought Wrath of Khan was 2285?

Unfortunately, yeah. Strictly speaking, 15 years after "Space Seed" would be 2282, and the Romulan ale date was 2283, but for some reason I still don't fully understand, the Star Trek Chronology pushed it forward to 2285 (I think maybe because ST V had to be 20 years after "Balance of Terror" for the Nimbus III thing to work, although I don't see why they didn't just lop a few years off that estimate instead of adding more years to TWOK's estimate), and the books are required to follow the STC's assumptions unless they've been overtly contradicted, so by this point too many books have used the 2285 date for it to be changed.

 

[tomswift2002]

but for some reason I still don't fully understand, the Star Trek Chronology pushed it forward to 2285 (I think maybe because ST V had to be 20 years after "Balance of Terror" for the Nimbus III thing to work, although I don't see why they didn't just lop a few years off that estimate instead of adding more years to TWOK's estimate), and the books are required to follow the STC's assumptions unless they've been overtly contradicted, so by this point too many books have used the 2285 date for it to be changed.

Unless someone mistakenly took Star Trek III's line about the Enterprise being 20 years old quite literally (2265-2285) instead of the usually accepted 40 years.

 

[Christopher]

Unless someone mistakenly took Star Trek III's line about the Enterprise being 20 years old quite literally (2265-2285) instead of the usually accepted 40 years.

Except "The Cage" was in 2254, so obviously it must be much older than 20 years. So that can't be it.

 

[Vance]

Morrow misspoke...
and the writers made a mistake...

 

[WebLurker]

Or maybe the the fifteen year figure in Wrath of Khan was an estimate, too. While Khan was really smart, I could see that survival would outweigh calendar keeping.

 

[Christopher]

Or maybe the the fifteen year figure in Wrath of Khan was an estimate, too.

But that's just what's weird about it. Everywhere else in the Chronology, date estimates are treated as absolutely exact. If a character says something happened 200 years before, it's never 208 years or 189 years, it's always exactly 200 years, even when it makes no damn sense (like putting the Valiant's flight to the edge of the galaxy in 2065, only two years after Cochrane's first flight). And yet here and here alone, the book treats the stated time interval as just an approximation.

 

[WebLurker]

But that's just what's weird about it. Everywhere else in the Chronology, date estimates are treated as absolutely exact. If a character says something happened 200 years before, it's never 208 years or 189 years, it's always exactly 200 years, even when it makes no damn sense (like putting the Valiant's flight to the edge of the galaxy in 2065, only two years after Cochrane's first flight).

I recall in the forward, they did admit that assuming all figures are exacts does introduce a margin of error. (The Valiant never bothered me too much, since I could see a ship getting slapped together due to the high after the first success. I could even see it's loss being another reason why the Vulcans didn't want humans going into space so fast. I will say though, that I thought the depiction of the ship in the Valiant novel seemed way too advanced and Starfleet-like. That, I didn't like so much.)

And yet here and here alone, the book treats the stated time interval as just an approximation.

Huh, that is weird. Is it possible that Kirk's birthday had anything to do with it? Kirk did turn fifty-two in the movie, which is pretty specific.

(Actually, having his birthday in the movie does make a few problems elsewhere. The Chronology places The Voyage Home, which was about three months after Wrath of Khan/Search For Spock in the next year, 2284. That would mean that Wrath of Khan would be around October, which doesn't jibe with the semi-canonical idea that Kirk was born on March 22, 2233 -- as claimed in that computer record in "In a Mirror Darkly, Part II" [ENT] -- or the breakdown of the Abramsverse stardates in Star Trek [2009], which would place Abramsverse Kirk being born on January 4, 2233.)

 

[Christopher]

(The Valiant never bothered me too much, since I could see a ship getting slapped together due to the high after the first success.)

Except it's impossible to reconcile with what we know about warp history today. It couldn't have gone much faster than Warp 1, which means it would've taken centuries to reach the nearest edge of the galactic disk. There's no way it could've gotten there 200 years before the Enterprise did. True, the dialogue did indicate that the ship was caught in some kind of space storm that carried it to the edge of the galaxy, but that would've had to be some kind of weird subspace phenomenon to take it that far.

Huh, that is weird. Is it possible that Kirk's birthday had anything to do with it? Kirk did turn fifty-two in the movie, which is pretty specific.

There is absolutely no indication in the movie of Kirk's age. The idea that he turned 52 is based on the Okudas' 2285 dating, not the other way around. In fact, before the Chronology came out, I remember some people arguing that the film had to be in 2283 (one year later than the "15 years" line would indicate) because that would be when Kirk turned 50 and reaching a milestone like that would be consistent with Kirk's state of mind in the film. But the actual film never specifies which birthday Kirk is celebrating.

 

[WebLurker]

Except it's impossible to reconcile with what we know about warp history today. It couldn't have gone much faster than Warp 1, which means it would've taken centuries to reach the nearest edge of the galactic disk. There's no way it could've gotten there 200 years before the Enterprise did. True, the dialogue did indicate that the ship was caught in some kind of space storm that carried it to the edge of the galaxy, but that would've had to be some kind of weird subspace phenomenon to take it that far.

Okay, good point. (I'd buy the freaky subspace thing, though; there's quite the precedent for stuff like that.)

Would there be a better place to put the ship's mission then?

There is absolutely no indication in the movie of Kirk's age. The idea that he turned 52 is based on the Okudas' 2285 dating, not the other way around. In fact, before the Chronology came out, I remember some people arguing that the film had to be in 2283 (one year later than the "15 years" line would indicate) because that would be when Kirk turned 50 and reaching a milestone like that would be consistent with Kirk's state of mind in the film. But the actual film never specifies which birthday Kirk is celebrating.

Oh, mea culpa.

 

[Christopher]

Would there be a better place to put the ship's mission then?

Honestly, there's no good way to reconcile "Where No Man"'s claim about the Valiant with what later Trek has established about chronology and warp speeds, so we pretty much have to assume some kind of subspace storm dragged it hundreds of parsecs. Still, it's just not plausible that an expedition on that scale would've been mounted just a couple of years after the first prototype engine was tested. It'd probably take longer than that even to outfit a mission to Alpha Centauri. At the very least, the "two centuries" reference should be assumed to be rounded up from maybe 180 years or thereabouts.

 

[JonnyQuest037]

Unfortunately, yeah. Strictly speaking, 15 years after "Space Seed" would be 2282, and the Romulan ale date was 2283, but for some reason I still don't fully understand, the Star Trek Chronology pushed it forward to 2285

As I recall, the STC specifically said that they pushed it forward to 2285 because of the date on the Romulan Ale.

Or maybe the the fifteen year figure in Wrath of Khan was an estimate, too. While Khan was really smart, I could see that survival would outweigh calendar keeping.

Yeah, but Kirk also says that it's been 15 years when he's talking to Carol ("There's a man who hasn't seen me in 15 years who wants me dead"), so it's pretty definitely a 15-year gap.

Huh, that is weird. Is it possible that Kirk's birthday had anything to do with it? Kirk did turn fifty-two in the movie, which is pretty specific.

There is absolutely no indication in the movie of Kirk's age. The idea that he turned 52 is based on the Okudas' 2285 dating, not the other way around. In fact, before the Chronology came out, I remember some people arguing that the film had to be in 2283 (one year later than the "15 years" line would indicate) because that would be when Kirk turned 50 and reaching a milestone like that would be consistent with Kirk's state of mind in the film. But the actual film never specifies which birthday Kirk is celebrating.

In the original script, it was stated that Kirk was turning 49 (I believe that Nicholas Meyer confirms this in his commentary). William Shatner asked them to not specify an exact age for Kirk.

When I was working on my own ST chronology (mostly because I disagreed with a few of the Okuda's TOS era dates), I placed Kirk's birth year in 2234 and TWOK in 2283 to jibe with both the Romulan Ale date and the original intention of Kirk turning 49. This also worked well with Kirk stating that he was 34 years old in "The Deadly Years."

 

[Vance]

Or maybe the the fifteen year figure in Wrath of Khan was an estimate, too. While Khan was really smart, I could see that survival would outweigh calendar keeping.

Actually the date - well, the time gap - was deliberate. Since TMP tried to ignore the fact that the actors had aged a decade since TOS and tried to be only a two-year delay since, TWOK had to pad some years in between to explain why Kirk and company had AGED.

 

[WebLurker]

Actually the date - well, the time gap - was deliberate. Since TMP tried to ignore the fact that the actors had aged a decade since TOS and tried to be only a two-year delay since, TWOK had to pad some years in between to explain why Kirk and company had AGED.

Well, yeah, but the question is, why was the movie given an official date that was more then fifteen years after "Space Seed," when using the fifteen year mark described in the movie itself wouldn't've caused any continuity errors (the way using Khan's "200" years since 1996 date would've.)

 

[Vance]

I'm pretty well on record at being slightly annoyed at how literally Mike and Denise took every line of dialog in Star Trek. It's not the only timeline issue that's caused by their doing that... Admittedly, they had a bit of a Herculean task before them, but a less literal approach to dialog would have made a lot of things much easier.

 

[JonnyQuest037]

Actually the date - well, the time gap - was deliberate. Since TMP tried to ignore the fact that the actors had aged a decade since TOS and tried to be only a two-year delay since, TWOK had to pad some years in between to explain why Kirk and company had AGED.

They said that it had been 15 years since they'd first encountered Khan because it had been 15 years in real life since that episode was filmed. Simple.

One of Harve Bennett's big things when he took over Star Trek was that the actors should start acting their ages and stop trying to look like they hadn't aged since the series.

I'm pretty well on record at being slightly annoyed at how literally Mike and Denise took every line of dialog in Star Trek. It's not the only timeline issue that's caused by their doing that... Admittedly, they had a bit of a Herculean task before them, but a less literal approach to dialog would have made a lot of things much easier.

Well, I think that they didn't have too much choice, because:

A) In most instances it doesn't matter much if a particular incident was 49, 50, or 51 years ago (Which is why the conjectural date of Zefram Cochrane's first warp flight was adjusted from 2061 to 2063 between the first and second editions of the Chronology - First Contact had moved the date two years forward in time).

B) Once you start interpreting every date less than literally, where does it end? What's to stop you from saying, "Oh, well they said 20 years, but let's make 30 because it fits better with our conjectural timeline?" If you're assembling a timeline out of something that's been written by dozens of writers over the course of 30+ years, you're going to have some discrepancies here and there. That's unavoidable. All you can do is try to do what makes the most sense with the majority of information. It's just that the "TWOK was 18 years after Space Seed" thing is one of the Okudas' more egregious misjudgments.

Hell, the Sherlock Holmes canon probably has as many timeline discrepancies in it as the Star Trek canon does, and that's 60 stories written by one guy over the course of several decades. Really, when you consider how that many people were making it up as they went along, it's a wonder that the ST timeline hangs together as well as it does.

 

[C.E. Evans]

I'm pretty well on record at being slightly annoyed at how literally Mike and Denise took every line of dialog in Star Trek. It's not the only timeline issue that's caused by their doing that... Admittedly, they had a bit of a Herculean task before them, but a less literal approach to dialog would have made a lot of things much easier.

Didn't they list quite a few things as being totally conjectural on their part, though? And it wasn't like their chronology was set in stone--VOY later gave us our first official placement of Kirk's 5-year mission, which began and ended a year later than what the Okudas proposed.