Spoilers Star Trek: Discovery 1x08 - "Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum"
- Thread starter Commander Richard
- Start date
Pike, unless there was another one in there we don't know about. Spock is there with him ("The Cage"; "The Menagerie" [TOS]). Lieutenant Kirk is likely serving aboard the Farragut under Garrovick on his first deep space assignment ("Obesession" [TOS]), somewhere in between commanding his first planetary survey on Neural ("A Private Little War" [TOS]) and getting attacked by the dikironium cloud creature ("Obsession" again).
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McCoy's quote in Obsession about Kirk being stationed on the Farragut "11 years ago" would seem to place him right there during this particular time, if you take it as face value that DSC is 10 years before TOS and that Obsession took place sometime in year 2 of a 5-year mission.
11 years ago, from "Obsession" would be sometime within the next year from the current year of Discovery. "Obsession" is supposedly 2268, and we are nearing the end of 2256 in Discovery. So sometime during 2257 for Kirk. This also means that Kirk might be the same year as Cadet Tilly.
Tilly stole his Cherry.
Kirk is already a Lieutenant, no longer a cadet. My interpretation based on reviewing the evidence is that in his deep guilt and remorse after failing to save Garrovick and nearly half the Farragut crew from the cloud creature, he goes back to Earth and becomes an instructor at the Academy, retreating into his books and bonding with Gary Mitchell, who has just then enrolled and is Kirk's student as per "Where No Man Has Gone Before" (TOS). (He had previously met the younger Mitchell when Kirk himself was a fresh 17-year-old cadet, or just about to be, hence having "known" Mitchell "for fifteen years" but them only having "been friends" since Mitchell joined SF. This relationship nicely parallels the one Kirk earlier had with his own instructor-cum-shipmate, Ben Finney, per "Court Martial" [TOS].)
Later he leaves that position and assumes command of a destroyer or equivalent vessel (per the backstory in The Making of Star Trek), with Mitchell serving under him at his request (WNMHGB again). Then when Pike is promoted to fleet captain and Kirk assumes command of the Enterprise ("The Menagerie" [TOS]), Mitchell follows him, just as Kirk had followed Garrovick from the Republic to the Farragut. (Garrovick had been his "commanding officer from the day [Kirk] left the Academy" and the Farragut was his "first deep space assignment" per "Obsession," but as an ensign Kirk had served on the Republic alongside Ben Finney "some years" after he had first known Finney as his Academy instructor.)
Kirk (and Mitchell) transfer to the Enterprise at least a couple years before the start of the five-year mission, per Dehner's reference to Spock (who was there already under Pike) having worked with Mitchell "for years" in WNMHGB and Kirk's reference to "all the years" he's known Spock in "Amok Time" (TOS). (It's also specified in the backstory in TMoST that Kirk has commanded the ship for "more than four years" from the standpoint of the second season of TOS, which nicely fits.)
Full quotes and rough dates with additional points to follow after collating and plotting out all references...
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Intendant Tilly has a nice ring to it
It wasily could be. The more this series progresses, the more I think that CBS turned the screws on "Star Trek: Axanar" because they realized it was going to try and tell the exact same story they were aiming for with a completely different interpretation of events.
So could Voq.But Lorca could turn out to be Garth...
It was more like "We thought we were beaming down right where we should, but oops, XYZ threw us thirty klicks to the left and here we are". The mothership probably didn't want to linger, lest she call attention to Starfleet's Big Secret Plan, and warped or mushroomed away right after deploying the landing party, either aware that they were in the wrong place but not thinking this relevant, or then unaware.
Not true - either part of it, that is.
Spock was never indicated to be the first in Starfleet in any sense: not the first Vulcan, not the first alien, not the first halfbreed, not the first Ambassador's Runaway Son. At the very most, we learned in "Amok Time" that he was "legend" on Vulcan, but not the reason why this would be.
But a Vulcan Admiral might join Starfleet at Admiral rank, long after Spock had gone through his Academy years. Military organizations today accept foreigners with suitable credentials, and do not expect them to start as Sweeper's Mate 3rd Rate if they used to hold the rank of Grand Poobah in their native military. Indeed, T'Pol joined UESF at high rank in ENT S3, and Kira joined UFP SF at her own rank for the Cardassian Coup Coaching job in DS9 S7.
More like in regards to nondescript statesmen and visionaries, possibly associated with Axanar, perhaps not.
For all we know, "made me and Spock brothers" is literally true: given visionary statesman Sarek's quirks, perhaps he adopted Kirk, too?
Timo Saloniemi
Those are the trappings of a feudal state, I agree. That doesn't necessarily imply anything about the actual state underneath the trappings. The British Empire had all those trappings in the 19th century (noble houses, aristocratic ranks, royalty, primogeniture, etc.), but it hadn't been an actual feudal society for centuries... and were it one, it couldn't have been effective as an empire. (Indeed, the concept of a feudal society managing to survive and thrive as a modern technological state — never mind an interstellar one! — is fairly preposterous. We certainly have no examples on Earth.)
IMHO part of the problem here is that Ronald D. Moore, who was responsible for the bulk of development (and retconning) of Klingon culture during the TNG/DS9 years, didn't do a particularly coherent job of it. He gave it the trappings we're talking about, and a culture of petty assassinations, duels, and the like to go with them (plus an obsession with a frankly incoherent concept of "honor")... but RDM also said (as quoted on Memory Alpha) that "The worlds that now make up the Empire were either subjugated in a not-so-distant past or were annexed at the point of a sword. The Empire is efficiently managed and extremely well run. No star system has ever broken away from Klingon rule in over two centuries of steady conquest. This is not to say that the member worlds of the Klingon Empire are straining at the bit to break away from despotic rule. Quite the contrary, the member worlds of the Empire have learned the many advantages and benefits of their association with the Klingons and few would choose to leave, even if given the option."
That's nowhere remotely close to anarchy, and it is quite simply not possible without a stable government, which is hardly compatible with a feudal system caught up in endless dynastic squabbles and lacking a meaningful legal infrastructure. Some of what you describe is inescapable from what was depicted on screen (although it's worth noting that Gowron was never a monarch, only a chancellor — i.e., a head of government, not a head of state), but I think you overstate its implications.
In fact, I'd go so far as to speculate that by the TNG era, the Klingon Empire actually has a very well-developed and stable bureaucratic state, and the squabbles between the Houses on the Council are mostly symbolic and fairly irrelevant to most of the real process of governing... they may not actually have much in the way of consequences beyond transient control over the military itself, akin to (say) contemporary squabbles between the four branches of the US military, or between the DOD, the State Department, and the NSC. And the Klingon military is, traditionally, pointed very much outward — concerned with expanding the Empire, not managing day-to-day business within it — which is probably a relief to the Klingons in charge of the latter.
This is a really interesting speculation. (Of course, a society with social classes based on functional roles is something fairly distinct from a feudal society, and it's not clear how the Klingons square that circle.) It's an alternative to what I just posited — you're saying that the military is, in fact, pointed inward to a large extent — but it's possible, perhaps even plausible.
The trouble is, we honestly just don't know. Given the focus of this whole season, I had hoped that Discovery would move significantly away from the RDM template (notwithstanding its acknowledgment of 24 houses), and clarify some of the political intricacies of Klingon culture in a more coherent way, but at least so far that's clearly not happening. (It's certainly moved away visually, but that's not an improvement.)
Oooh, that sounds interesting! Where and when are you planning to post it? I've got my own opinions about a lot of that, but I would never deny that there are lots of ambiguities and lacunae, leaving plenty of room for interpretation.
Well, that depends on how you date "Obsession." I've never been partial to the Okudachron approach of dating TOS episodes exactly 300 years after their broadcast seasons... but even if we stick with that approach I'm not sure why "Obsession" should land in 2268, since the episode was both produced and broadcast in 1967. In fact, there were two later episodes in '67. In my personal chronology, it's definitely in '67... which would place the cloud-creature incident with the Farragut sometime in 2256, almost certainly already in the past relative to Discovery.
Looks like we've got at least the outline of it already! Most of it sounds plausible, although I'm curious how you'd define Kirk's service on the Republic as something other than a "deep space assignment." And I'd be cautious about taking material from TMOST at face value, since there are plenty of things in it that contradict later on-screen canon, and (in particular) it's hard to imagine Spock having time to serve 11+ years with Pike if Kirk took command of the 1701 a full three years before S1.
Dating TOS is simple: the five-year mission ended in 2270 and thus began in 2266.
Dating TOS episodes is difficult: do the three seasons cover all the five years, or just three, or perhaps five months, or what?
Basically the only thing we can do apart from deciding that S1 is 2266 and S2 is 2267 while S3 is 2268 (or going entirely arbitrary) is to play with stardates. Those cover 5000 units, which in the 24th century would mean five years; this would make "Obsession" a third-year adventure with its 3600 range stardate. We can then start worrying about where in the Earth year the stardate year rolls over, and whether the latter half of the third year is 2267 or 2268.
Or then we can take a look at DSC stardates and note that the jump from "Magic" to "Para Bellum" is the only time in Trek history where the passing of time moves stardates back, by nearly a thousand units.
Timo Saloniemi
Dating TOS episodes is difficult: do the three seasons cover all the five years, or just three, or perhaps five months, or what?
Basically the only thing we can do apart from deciding that S1 is 2266 and S2 is 2267 while S3 is 2268 (or going entirely arbitrary) is to play with stardates. Those cover 5000 units, which in the 24th century would mean five years; this would make "Obsession" a third-year adventure with its 3600 range stardate. We can then start worrying about where in the Earth year the stardate year rolls over, and whether the latter half of the third year is 2267 or 2268.
Or then we can take a look at DSC stardates and note that the jump from "Magic" to "Para Bellum" is the only time in Trek history where the passing of time moves stardates back, by nearly a thousand units.
Timo Saloniemi
Well one thing is that the loss of Captain Garrovick could be an incident covered in Discovery (Season Two), as either a way to introduce us to a young James T. Kirk, or to have Tilly lose some friends from the Academy that might have been on that ship (or even have Tilly have been assigned there and either not go because of the incident, or return after the loss (USS Farragut wouldn't be damaged I don't think by the cloud, just a lot of the crew was killed. Be it almost half the crew, if the ship carries around 430, or all but a few survivors, if the crew is 203 or so.)
As it is, they will probably stick to the Okudachron timeline for TOS events if they need them for something. Simply because it is less work.
That is assuming they will even make a mention of it in Discovery. Space is vast, but something that tragic, happening to one of their vaulted Constitution-class starships (assuming that USS Farragut remains a Constitution-class starship), that might warrant a line of astonishment on USS Discovery. Especially if Captain Garrovick was a well liked Captain in the fleet.
As it is, they will probably stick to the Okudachron timeline for TOS events if they need them for something. Simply because it is less work.
That is assuming they will even make a mention of it in Discovery. Space is vast, but something that tragic, happening to one of their vaulted Constitution-class starships (assuming that USS Farragut remains a Constitution-class starship), that might warrant a line of astonishment on USS Discovery. Especially if Captain Garrovick was a well liked Captain in the fleet.
Every time I see that Vulcan admiral, I'm reminded how the Vulcans see Starfleet as an inferior second fiddle to the Vulcan Expiditionary fleet.
So the guy bossing Lorca around wasn't good enough for his own people's space force. Just saying.
So the guy bossing Lorca around wasn't good enough for his own people's space force. Just saying.
Vulcan attitudes towards Starfleet must have changed since Archer's time, else there wouldn't be enough Vulcans in Starfleet at the time Discovery is set to later man the Intrepid.
I'm talking about what we saw only a couple of episodes ago with Sarek and Burnham's backstory.
Those Vulcans who do join Starfleet would obviously disagree with what this cranky old Vulcanian said.