Kirok conceived a child with Miramanee, so if Kirk had been on the space pill before, it had likely worn off.
Why The Huge Gap Between TMP & WOK?
- Thread starter DeepSpaceYorks
- Start date
For a long time now I've accepted that the different series and films we have seen are actually parallel/alternate continuities.
If I squint I can accept TMP as being of the same "universe" as TOS. Ditto with TAS. But it also assumes that the level of detail we saw in TMP existed (in some measure) in TOS only we didn't get to see it.
TWOK feels so much like a reboot of TMP and the subsequent historical refrences can be sufficiently jarring that I've come to accept that TWOK-TUC is of a parallel/alternate continuity form TOS-TMP.
Where TNG-DS9-VOY align is anyone's guess. You could argue it either way because TNG has visual callbacks to the TWOK movie era and DS9 has callbacks to TOS (with "Trials And Tribble-ations" and the Mirror Universe episodes.
For me so much of ENT doesn't gel with TOS, but taking FC into account and then what follows ENT could fit better with the TWOK-TUC continuity as well as the TNG-DS9-VOY continuity from which FC sprouts.
The JJverse is a whole other continuity.
I can't recall the episode title, but TNG had an episode where Worf was bouncing from one parallel "universe" to another. Then later we see evidence of a vast mutiplicity of parallel universes. That right there could be the tangible evidence of what we could be seeing on the screen.
Anyway thats my interpretation.
"Parallels."
Literally; I don't thing we ever visited Earth in the "present day" during TOS. Also, it has been a few years, the Enterprise has been upgraded, tech can get updates, so I don't really see the problem. (Actually, I think TAS needs the most squinting to fit in, at least with a few specific episodes, but okay).
Which historical references? And how can TWOK on be an alternate continuity, given that it's a direct sequel to a TOS episode? And TUC is a prequel to TNG, with the explanation of the Klingons becoming Federation allies? (Not to mention that the Khitomer Accords play an important role in DS9).
Many of the TOS movie ship designs also appeared in DS9 as well. There's also that one VOY show with the Da Vinci hologram, where Janeway recalls that Kirk supposedly met the real Da Vinci (referencing a TOS episode), and in another she recalls Carol Marcus (from the TOS movies).
ENT does a lot of set-up for TOS, including prequels, explanations of the Klingon makeup changes. Muc of Vulcan culture that we see in season 4 is taken directly from TOS and TAS. ENT even has the TOS Enterprise at the end of the finale, along side ships from the "movies" and "TNG/DS9/VOY" continuity.
True, but is another branch of the multiverse, and it even ties together elements from the "different" continuities (like how Into Darkness has TOS movie characters, but Adm. Marcus's ship display is taken mostly from ENT, and how Beyond builds off of ENT as its backstory).
But the episode also shows that Worf was jumping around thanks to special circumstances, ones which would be really hard to repeat.
Interesting, but, based on the evidence (and excusing some differences in design and the usual minor continuity errors that creep into any long-running franchise), I think the evidence is that everything takes place in the same continuity.
Whatever.
Yes, that was deliberate. They didn't want to make predictions that could prove too optimistic or pessimistic about progress and risk dating the show. It's related to the reason they didn't establish a clear time frame for the series.
Yeah, it's often been assumed that the tech and uniform upgrades were being made back home during the 5YM, and the Enterprise was slow to get them because they were out on the frontier. For instance, DC's comic story depicting the end of the 5YM had the crew in their old uniforms meeting Will Decker in the new uniform, and though Scotty disdained the "pajamas," Uhura was pleased to give up the miniskirt.
Not that I agree with Warped9's exclusionistic approach to continuity, but this isn't a dealbreaker. Different continuities can involve some of the same stories even if the rest is different. For instance, the Japanese Godzilla movies have been set in eight different continuities to date, but except for the most recent one, they all included the original 1954 film as part of their backstory. That story happened in seven different continuities that differed in every other respect, and some of them even interpreted the events of the original film differently (either giving Godzilla a different origin and different reason for attacking Japan, or changing the details of the ending). And a few of the early-2000s movies also incorporated some other early kaiju films like Mothra and War of the Gargantuas in their continuity. The 2003 Godzilla/Mothra movie even referenced a move Mothra employed in Mothra vs. Godzilla even though its version of Godzilla's history was incompatible with that film.
Then there's something like Superman Returns, which references events from the first two Christopher Reeve Superman films while disregarding the later two, but also implicitly retcons the events of those first two films to have taken place 20 years later. So it's a different continuity, but including equivalents of some of the same events.
How did "Space Seed" work with that? The show made a very specific prediction about the 1990s, and even gave a timeframe from that (the infamous "two hundred years ago").
Interesting. Come to think of it, why couldn't some of the more simpler tech designs (like K-7) co-exist with more detailed ones (like Earth Spacedock)? In real life, even the same cultures will use different styles of construction and design for the same types of buildings and hardware.
Okay, I took Warped9 to be referring to completely separate continuities, while you seem to be referring to branching continuities. To use a comic book example, when I read Warped9's ideas, I think of how the Ultimate Spider-Man comic series relates to the 616 comics; there's some parallels and a lot of the same characters, but each is doing it's own version of the stories. There's no other connection.
Your description reminds me of how the recent Spider-Man Secret Wars miniseries (and upcoming ongoing), Renew Your Vows relates to the 616 material. That series was written as a branching off timeline from 616, meaning that the 616 comics that took place before the split (presumably Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson's marriage) were in canon with both, meaning that the RYV comics and current 616 Spider-Man material are alternative sequels, in a sense.
I don't know, am I misreading anything here?
Vasectomy has.
And "The Squire of Gothos" put Napoleon and Alexander Hamilton 900 years in the past, explicitly putting the episode in the 28th century. Yes, some individual episodes did make date references, but the producers themselves didn't have a settled time frame for the series, at least not to begin with. The thing to keep in mind is that TV back then was much less staff-driven and more freelancer-driven. Many of the key ideas came from outside writers rather than emanating from the core creative staff.
No, the Godzilla continuities are not branching in the sense that they diverged from the same original timeline. They're completely separate universes, and Godzilla has a different nature and history in several of them. In the original, the Godzillas were a surviving dinosaur species that had lived in the ocean depths for the "2 million years" since the rest of the dinosaurs had died out, and had been displaced by the Marshall Islands nuclear tests and driven to find new feeding grounds such as Japan, as well as turned radioactive by those blasts. But the '90s movies retconned Godzilla's origins so that he was a T. rex-like "Godzillasaurus" that lived on an island in the Pacific and was mutated to giant size by the '50s nuclear tests. And the 2001 movie said that Godzilla was actually possessed by the spirits of Imperial Japan's victims and was attacking Japan out of vengeance, as well as recasting the monsters Mothra, Baragon, and King Ghidorah as ancient spiritual defenders of Japan, completely different from their nature and roles in the other universes. So they're utterly different realities -- but the events of the 1954 film still happened in all of them, in parallel ways, even though the reason for those events and their ultimate outcome were different. It's really quite interesting how it confounds the usual assumption that two different fictional realities must be either completely the same or completely separate. It's all made up anyway, so it's easy enough for two different made-up realities to claim to include the same past events and interpret them in different ways.
That is basically what I meant.
I created a chronology for myself beginning with TOS, TAS and TMP. It acknowledges that events similar to TWOK era and and TNG era happened, but not exactly as we saw onscreen. To that extent I view TAS as a stylized version of what actually happened in the live-action TOS universe. I admit neither ENT, VOY or the JJverse are acknowledged in it--I completely ignore those.
Conversely what is implicit is that TWOK-TUC and TNG/DS9/VOY continuity seen onscreen has a TOS/TAS/TMP parallel to it, but not exactly as seen onscreen. ENT is possibly a result of FC and JJtrek is also possibly a result of this as well.
I created a chronology for myself beginning with TOS, TAS and TMP. It acknowledges that events similar to TWOK era and and TNG era happened, but not exactly as we saw onscreen. To that extent I view TAS as a stylized version of what actually happened in the live-action TOS universe. I admit neither ENT, VOY or the JJverse are acknowledged in it--I completely ignore those.
Conversely what is implicit is that TWOK-TUC and TNG/DS9/VOY continuity seen onscreen has a TOS/TAS/TMP parallel to it, but not exactly as seen onscreen. ENT is possibly a result of FC and JJtrek is also possibly a result of this as well.
Roddenberry's own TMP novelization posited that TOS had been an "inaccurately larger-than-life" dramatization of the "real" adventures of the Enterprise, and that TMP represented a more accurate dramatization. When fans asked him why the Klingons suddenly had forehead ridges, Roddenberry asked them to pretend that Klingons had always looked like that and TOS just couldn't afford to depict them correctly. So Roddenberry's view would've been that each new incarnation (at least the ones Roddenberry was personally responsible for) was a more accurate representation of the "ideal" Star Trek reality than the previous one had been.
After all, that's how creators think. We're always striving to do better, to improve on our past work and correct the bits that didn't turn out right. Any published/released work is the end result of a long process of change and refinement, and so many creators are willing to keep changing and refining things after release, taking the opportunity to rewrite novels in later editions or re-edit movies for home video or the like. Fans tend to see the earliest version of a thing they fell in love with as its purest form and anything that diverges from it as being less valid, but creators tend to come at it the other way around -- that "art is never finished, only abandoned," that our works got released because our time to fix their flaws ran out rather than because they were flawless, and that there's always more room for improvement. Especially in something like film or TV, where a creator has to compromise one's vision due to studio or network interference or logistical and budgetary limitations or censorship or whatever. Roddenberry saw TOS as just an imperfect approximation of what he'd wanted to create, and he tried to do better when he got another chance with more experience and more money and higher technology and less censorship.
That's actually really smart.
The TMP novelisation even acknowledges Kirk/Spock slash fiction! It's a terrific read, one of my favourite bits of Trek fiction.
Maybe the Enterprise had a major refit in 2265, when it was done Kirk took command. It does look different in the Cage after all. We also know almost nothing about when Kirk first took command. We do know Pike was injured some years before that. For all we know the Enterprise could have been trashed right before 2265 and then had a major re-fit/re-build. Then in 2273 it had a another refit because there were new technologies available that Starfleet wanted to incorporate into there ships to bring them to a certain standard.
Got it.
So specific stories take place in more than one continuity. Okay, that sounds like the spirit of what I was trying to suggest. (The "branching timeline" is one way I sometimes think of that sort of thing, and in this case, it wasn't the best analogy.)
Can't say I agree with you, Warped9, but I think I understand what you're saying now, so thanks.
As consumers, it's hard to remember that. So, fair points. (I will say, that, as a reader, I tend to refer changes that don't completely invalidate the older version. Like how when Tolkien revised The Hobbit, he incorporated the earlier edition into the backstory of Middle-earth. I thinks it's more fun if the older stuff is still "in continuity," rather than just an earlier version that's mostly there for comparison.)
Contemporary science fiction was always making guesses like that. They all seemed to think we'd have flying automobiles in 25 years or fewer. A good reason to avoid such predictions if you don't want your show dated!
Yeah. We'd be sending spaceships to other stars by the 1980s, but once we'd conquered the entire galaxy thousands of years later, our empire would be governed by a single gigantic computer using vacuum tubes and punch cards, and women would still be housewives, secretaries, and stewardesses.
A few years back I heard a "nostalgic" broadcast of a 1950s science fiction radio drama. Something by Frederik Pohl, no less. This spaceship was in trouble because the computer was sick: It was a human mathematician that handled these tasks. You see, no spaceship could afford a computer room and tons of hardware, so taking along a 160-pound genius made sense, payload-wise.
I may have heard that one. And it's a reminder of the fact that "computer" was originally a human job title. Computers were employees -- usually women -- who did the grudge work of doing calculations for scientific or engineering work. When machines were invented that could do that same job, they were called electronic computers, and once they took over the job completely from human beings, we dropped the "electronic" part.
