Star Trek Books and Comics Timeline-ing Discussion

[Christopher]

However, it's notable that in STII both Khan and Kirk independently referred to the events of "Space Seed" as fifteen years earlier... that corroboration has to count for something.

No, it doesn't have to, because this isn't a historical document, it's just a made-up story. It's all just pretend, and if we're trying to pretend that two things fit together sensibly when they really don't, then we can just gloss over the bits that don't fit. There's no perfect way to reconcile this, but there's no perfect way to reconcile a lot of things in Trek. The perfect is the enemy of the good, as they say. And since none of this is real anyway, and none of it has any actual stakes other than recreation, it doesn't need to be perfect.

Scientifically, that's absolutely right. But in terms of usage in Trek, that ship sailed a long time ago.

Again, it's a matter of having the freedom to interpret things. Yes, generally Trek treats the definition of "year" as fixed, but the whole point of this exercise is to use our imagination to come up with ways to make things fit. And assuming that characters occasionally use non-Earth years is a handy way to do that. None of this is absolute, because it's all just stories. If they can make stuff up, so can we.

After all, the only character who mentions "20 years" in TFF is Caithlin Dar, a Romulan. So why in the world would she use Earth years?

However, I'll give the Okudas credit for this: they laid their assumptions out very clearly in the book, so at least there was no mystery how they arrived at their dates.

Except for the TWOK-TFF dates. Those make no damn sense. Even if you assume the "20 years after 'Balance of Terror'/'Errand of Mercy'" thing as the excuse for TFF, how can there be a year between TSFS and TVH when it was explicitly stated to be three months? And if they were willing to round up 15 years to 18, why not just round 20 years down to 17?

 

[lawman]

Looking at my timeline, which I arrived at back in the "Lit-verse Based TOS Chronology" thread, I ended up being somewhat vague about the specifics of when The Search for Spock takes place, but overall I placed a 12 to 13 month gap between TWoK and TVH. This whole era, though, is one that I have to say that, in my personal continuity, something LIKE those issues occurred, but definitely not the exact details as they are presented in those comics. I'm not even sure I can accept the overall idea that Kirk commanded the Excelsior, for instance, and jettisoning that idea would be a pretty dramatic change to those stories.

Sounds like we have approximately the same span, then, details aside. But what do you imagine filling those months, if not the events of the comics series? AFAIK there's not a single novel set in that period, for instance (which is understandable, since a face-value viewing of the movies doesn't necessarily make it evident that any period of time between them even exists).

No, it doesn't have to, because this isn't a historical document, it's just a made-up story. It's all just pretend...

Of course, I'm sure we all understand that. But if we're going to try to derive non-obvious information about that story (or metanarrative of related stories), we need to have some reasonably consistent rules of evidence. (Much like the efforts put into determining the chronology of the Sherlock Holmes stories, for instance... saying "it's all pretend" is much less satisfying than sussing out clues from the information Watson provided, especially since Watson himself admits he's an unreliable narrator at times.) Otherwise, saying "it's all pretend" means all bets are off, and there's no way to assess the plausibility of any particular chronological arrangement.

So, in that sense, matching testimony from two characters is firmer evidence than a statement from one character alone. Likewise, by the very psychology of round numbers you described, if characters are being imprecise, it's fair to assume that they might round 14 or 16 years to 15, but they'd be more likely to round 18 up to 20.

...and if we're trying to pretend that two things fit together sensibly when they really don't, then we can just gloss over the bits that don't fit.

Which brings us to the supplementary point I made: there really isn't anything about putting STII fifteen years after "Space Seed" that doesn't fit the rest of the canon. The only thing it doesn't fit with, actually, is the Okudachron (and later licensed works that take their dates from the Okudachron).

(There are other bits of canon that don't quite fit the Okudachron. In the 24th century era, for instance, the internal references in TNG's "Data's Day" and DS9's "Emissary" and "Second Sight" and VOY's "11:59" and "Homestead," among others, don't remotely correspond to the way the Okudachron bases dates on stardates. And in all of those cases, as well, I follow the on-screen evidence to the greatest extent possible, and treat the Okudachron as apocryphal.)

Again, it's a matter of having the freedom to interpret things. ... None of this is absolute, because it's all just stories. If they can make stuff up, so can we.

Sure. And sometimes it's necessary. But if it's not necessary, I try to avoid it. Because the more we do so, the harder it is to argue for our conclusions as anything other than personal whim.

After all, the only character who mentions "20 years" in TFF is Caithlin Dar, a Romulan. So why in the world would she use Earth years?

True, but she's talking with the Federation and Klingon representatives, not with other Romulans. Presumably, then, universal translators are at work. The usual assumption in Trek is that when we hear something translated into "Federation Standard" (aka modern English), the units and such correspond to ordinary usage in that language. To say that on-screen references to years are not routinely meant to be understood as Earth years would reduce all kinds of chronological references to complete inscrutability and ambiguity... unless the argument is that only this one uses non-standard years, but that's a case of special pleading, and would require some justification for treating it differently from other references.

At any rate, as I mentioned earlier, it doesn't actually make a difference where STV is concerned. Even if it's 19 years or 21 years since Nimbus III was founded (and even if that founding wasn't in 2267), there's still an indeterminate gap between it and the previous movie... a gap that accommodates putting STII-IV where (IMHO) they belong, in 2283-84.

The next specific chronological references we get are in STVI, where we learn that Sulu has been captain of the Excelsior for three years and McCoy has been CMO of the Enterprise for 27 years, which allow us to backdate a terminus ante quem for STV (basically, not later than 2289). Long story short, that movie (if one treats it as canonical at all, but I'm not going to get into that debate!) falls somewhere in the range of '86 to '89. All else equal, then, I find it easiest to take the on-screen reference at face value, assume that Nimbus III was founded within a year or so of the Organian incident, and put the movie in '87.

Except for the TWOK-TFF dates. Those make no damn sense. Even if you assume the "20 years after 'Balance of Terror'/'Errand of Mercy'" thing as the excuse for TFF, how can there be a year between TSFS and TVH when it was explicitly stated to be three months? And if they were willing to round up 15 years to 18, why not just round 20 years down to 17?

Okay, I wholeheartedly agree that the Okudas really didn't make any sense of that. But at least (unless I'm recalling incorrectly; it's been a while since I read it!) they owned up that they were departing from the on-screen evidence in that case, and didn't try to pretend otherwise.

My inference at the time (and it was just that, so I may be wrong, and I'd be curious if anyone has better information!) is that they were treating STV as if there weren't a significant gap between it and the previous film. (It's possible to view it as the Ent-A's first mission, after all, especially as Scotty does use the term "shakedown"; I prefer to interpret that as the ship having just had a minor refit, which also handily explains why its bridge looks different vs. the end of STIV.) Thus they fudged things a bit, taking a set of four movies that should logically bracket a four- or five-year period but didn't seem to, and instead spreading them out just a little over only a couple of years. Why they then chose to anchor that spread with the far less popular film (STV) rather than the far more popular one (STII), I can't imagine. Maybe they flipped a coin, for all I know.

They did make some peculiar judgment calls at times. Even given that they chose to disregard TAS, for instance, if they'd simply treated TOS as the first three years of the FYM rather than the last three, it would have left more than enough time for those who preferred to accommodate TAS. Instead, they made that harder instead of easier (and then got trumped later by the canonical info from VOY's "Q2" anyway).

 

[Christopher]

Of course, I'm sure we all understand that. But if we're going to try to derive non-obvious information about that story (or metanarrative of related stories), we need to have some reasonably consistent rules of evidence.

Ideally, sure, but the thing is, the text itself is not always consistent. The whole question here is how we deal with the things that can't be made consistent by a strict reading of the text, that require us to use our imaginations and gloss or rationalize portions of the text in order to pretend that they fit. You keep stressing the need for general rules, but I am talking specifically about the times when we need to make exceptions to the rules. Those are not opposed principles, but complementary ones. The rules you're talking about are fine in most cases, but I'm talking about what to do when the general rules don't work. In those cases, the question is, do we just straight-up ignore what's written down, or do we find an imaginative and logical in-universe way to reinterpret what it says?

As a certain bald starship captain once said, "There can be no justice so long as laws are absolute." Rules are generalizations, and that means there are going to be exceptional cases that they fail to address, in which case you need to think about the best, least disruptive way to bend or break them.

Otherwise, saying "it's all pretend" means all bets are off, and there's no way to assess the plausibility of any particular chronological arrangement.

Again, I'm not talking about throwing out the rules altogether, I'm just saying we have room to apply them flexibly. You keep saying we "have to" have these rules, but we don't. We choose to follow these rules, because we choose to pretend that this is real in the first place. There's nothing wrong with making that choice, for the most part, but the fact that it is a choice means that we also have the choice to make occasional exceptions. Nothing is preventing us from doing so. We are not powerless observers. We are exercising our own creativity and making our own decisions.

Which brings us to the supplementary point I made: there really isn't anything about putting STII fifteen years after "Space Seed" that doesn't fit the rest of the canon. The only thing it doesn't fit with, actually, is the Okudachron (and later licensed works that take their dates from the Okudachron).

That is a given. Obviously, the writers' intention was that it was 15 years later and the Okudas redated it for still-mysterious reasons. But since I write for the tie-ins and since my personal chronology is based on many of the tie-ins, I've chosen to follow that precedent.

Also, I do feel that the Antonia relationship in GEN makes more sense if it precedes Kirk's reunion with Carol Marcus than if it straddles it. At least, it's less complicated that way.

Sure. And sometimes it's necessary. But if it's not necessary, I try to avoid it. Because the more we do so, the harder it is to argue for our conclusions as anything other than personal whim.

Of course it's personal whim. We're not historians or archaeologists, we're just playing around with imaginary ideas. There's nothing wrong with that. This is play. Grown-up fans tend to forget that we're here to have fun. Of course, for me, it's what I do for a living, but then, I'm blessed to have a job that's the same thing I'd do for fun. For folks like you, it's pure recreation. Don't lose sight of that, and don't devalue it.

True, but she's talking with the Federation and Klingon representatives, not with other Romulans. Presumably, then, universal translators are at work. The usual assumption in Trek is that when we hear something translated into "Federation Standard" (aka modern English), the units and such correspond to ordinary usage in that language.

In general, yes. But the very word "usual" implies that there are occasional exceptions. This whole conversation is about what to do when the usual rules fail to solve the problem.

unless the argument is that only this one uses non-standard years, but that's a case of special pleading, and would require some justification for treating it differently from other references.

The justification is that the writers of the movie made an obvious continuity mistake and we're trying to patch it.

At any rate, as I mentioned earlier, it doesn't actually make a difference where STV is concerned. Even if it's 19 years or 21 years since Nimbus III was founded (and even if that founding wasn't in 2267), there's still an indeterminate gap between it and the previous movie... a gap that accommodates putting STII-IV where (IMHO) they belong, in 2283-84.

I just can't believe there's a 2- or 3-year gap between the launch of the E-A in TVH and the crew's frustration over their broken, nonfunctional ship in TFF. If the ship's systems had been that screwed up from launch, they never would've tolerated using them for years. The film implied that it had been mere weeks between movies, though Harve Bennett said his intention was that there was a 6-month shakedown between them.

 

[Garth Rockett]

The Okudachron does rely on some quixotic assumptions and rules of thumb. (Things like "TOS was exactly 300 years forward from broadcast" and "TNG's stardates correlate exactly with calendar years" don't make much sense either, for instance.) However, I'll give the Okudas credit for this: they laid their assumptions out very clearly in the book, so at least there was no mystery how they arrived at their dates.

It's because they are very clear in their assumptions that I give them a lot of slack; and in fact, many of their assumptions I agree with. I think it's a little unfair to take them to task for (generally) using exact numbers for length of time when characters were most likely rounding. Not to do so introduces an element of arbitrariness to the assumptions, and they were clearly trying to minimize arbitrariness. I think the problem lies less with the dates the Okudas used and more with the apparent requirement that tie-in works stick so closely to those dates. The Okudas clearly didn't mean it to be used as such by the production team, and I don't know why the license holders should be held to a much higher standard.

Having said that, there were a few things that I have always disagreed with in the Chronology. I never liked the idea that TOS was the last three years of the 5YM. However, given how few episodes they placed in 2269, I always theorized that you could squeeze in all 22 TAS episodes into 2269 and still have the 5YM end that year. As a result, I had TMP in 2272 instead of 2271. Fortunately "Q2" fixed that for us.

Another thing I had a problem with was the placement of TWOK-TFF. I felt like TWOK-TVH should have all taken place within the same calendar year, with TFF possibly slipping into the next year. Prior to reading the Okuda Chronology, I always figured TSFS was about a month after TWOK, and of course TVH was 3 months later. TFF was a little harder to pin down, but I had it as a few months later (certainly not a year). I was able to make the Okuda dates work in my head by assuming that TWOK occurred in the fall of 2285. I couldn't see any reason why Kirk's birthday had to be the same day as Shatner's, and it made the gaps fit better in my head. Of course, that ship has sailed now.

The current placement of March 2285 for TWOK does make it easier for me to fit in that first DC run, but all those adventures with Kirk commanding Excelsior have always felt apocryphal to me.

 

[Christopher]

It's because they are very clear in their assumptions that I give them a lot of slack; and in fact, many of their assumptions I agree with. I think it's a little unfair to take them to task for (generally) using exact numbers for length of time when characters were most likely rounding. Not to do so introduces an element of arbitrariness to the assumptions, and they were clearly trying to minimize arbitrariness.

Again, the problem isn't the overall practice; the problem is the unwillingness to make exceptions even when it clearly made no sense to apply the rule rigidly. If nothing else, they should've made an exception for the Valiant's launch, because putting it in 2065 made nothing remotely resembling sense. And they should've made an exception for Nimbus III, because 20 years is too long for it to have existed. Even if they had no reason to diverge from the exact-figures rule in most cases, I would argue that those two specific cases, at least, warranted making exceptions. If they'd clearly explained their reasons for making exceptions in those cases, then it wouldn't have been arbitrary, by definition.

 

[Jbarney]

Whoa. Been busy with other projects, work; and a great conversation is happening that I don't have time to contribute to. Arg.

 

[ryan123450]

Whoa. Been busy with other projects, work; and a great conversation is happening that I don't have time to contribute to. Arg.

Maybe you’ll get a chance to go back and do a mega quote, multi response, super post at some point Jay.

Also I will say that I agree with everything @Garth Rockett and @Christopher said in their last posts.

 

[Garth Rockett]

If they'd clearly explained their reasons for making exceptions in those cases, then it wouldn't have been arbitrary, by definition.

I can't really disagree with that, but as I indicated, for me the bigger problem is with the requirement to follow the Okuda Chronology, not with the Chronology itself. As far as I know, that was never envisioned when they did their Chronology.

 

[lawman]

Ideally, sure, but the thing is, the text itself is not always consistent. The whole question here is how we deal with the things that can't be made consistent by a strict reading of the text, that require us to use our imaginations and gloss or rationalize portions of the text in order to pretend that they fit.

Naturally. I think we're actually on the same page here; we just seem to have crossed wires for some reason... because the above is pretty much what I mean when I use the phrase "rules of evidence."

...I'm talking about what to do when the general rules don't work. In those cases, the question is, do we just straight-up ignore what's written down, or do we find an imaginative and logical in-universe way to reinterpret what it says?

The latter, by all means. I'd have thought that was clear when I offered the analogy to constructing a chronology from the Holmes canon!...

Rules are generalizations, and that means there are going to be exceptional cases that they fail to address, in which case you need to think about the best, least disruptive way to bend or break them.

Again: of course. I am a lawyer, after all. The whole concept of "rules of evidence" is not meant to suggest hidebound rigidity or inflexibility... it simply means that when you're attempting to determine the truth of an ambiguous situation, and you have some information in front of you that counts as "evidence," you do your best to interpret it in a consistent fashion from one situation to the next. It's how you're able to interpret precedent from a past case (and distinguish, narrow, or broaden its application as necessary) in order to resolve a new one. It's how you have principles of statutory construction that help you interpret what legislation means, even when the legislators have used language that may appear contradictory.

Situations that can be resolved just by reading "the plain meaning of the text" aren't usually the interesting cases, after all. Having broad, general principles isn't an obstacle to responding flexibly to the specifics of a given problem, it's a precondition for it. It makes sure that you're not just being arbitrary.

You keep saying we "have to" have these rules, but we don't. We choose to follow these rules, because we choose to pretend that this is real in the first place. There's nothing wrong with making that choice, for the most part, but the fact that it is a choice means that we also have the choice to make occasional exceptions.

Again, no disagreement. I really only mentioned the word "rules" once IIRC, and I feel like you took it rather more sternly than I intended. Of course it's all a matter of choice; plenty of fans are content to ignore this sort of thing entirely. But given that we choose to pretend that this is real (the "Watsonian stance"), and that we attempt to construct timelines for events, having clear principles makes the whole effort easier, and also makes it easier to defend our choices when we do make exceptions.

Obviously, the writers' intention was that it was 15 years later and the Okudas redated it for still-mysterious reasons. But since I write for the tie-ins and since my personal chronology is based on many of the tie-ins, I've chosen to follow that precedent.

Perfectly reasonable. Your situation, your choice. If one of your guiding principles is to be able to take chronological information from the tie-ins (at least in the current "litverse") at face value as much as possible, and that lit makes a practice of following the Okudachron, it would be quixotic for you to do otherwise.

As I stipulated earlier, though, I'm just talking about my headcanon here. One of my guiding principles is to put canonical evidence first, and deprecate evidence from tie-ins if necessary.

Fortunately, where the dating of the original-crew films is concerned, there's a lot of flexibility in that span of years, so as I already noted, they can be nudged a couple of years one way or the other with negligible ripple effects on the rest of Trek continuity. (If I were arguing for, say, a different dating for the FYM, I'd have a much harder row to hoe.)

Also, I do feel that the Antonia relationship in GEN makes more sense if it precedes Kirk's reunion with Carol Marcus than if it straddles it. At least, it's less complicated that way.

I think it makes more sense the opposite way, actually. I see the interaction with Carol and David as likely to leave Kirk ruminating on the life he might have had if he'd settled down, and thus to make him more disposed in the aftermath to consider doing so. After all, we don't have any reason to assume that the relationship with Antonia was ongoing for two entire years; all we know is that he met her two years before a point at which he was in a relationship with her and considered retiring.

I just can't believe there's a 2- or 3-year gap between the launch of the E-A in TVH and the crew's frustration over their broken, nonfunctional ship in TFF. If the ship's systems had been that screwed up from launch, they never would've tolerated using them for years. The film implied that it had been mere weeks between movies, though Harve Bennett said his intention was that there was a 6-month shakedown between them.

From what I can infer, as I described, the Okudas seem to have felt the same. Personally I have no problem with it; I've been comfortable with it for years. In fact, apropos of this thread, one of the reasons I'm comfortable with it is precisely because it accommodates the end of the first DC Comics run (issues 37-55), which otherwise really wouldn't fit anywhere.

Anyhow, I don't assume that the ship's systems were that screwed up from launch (in fact I don't really like that aspect of the film at all, as it's mostly played for cheap laughs, but never mind that)... I assume that they were screwed up after a minor refit (including a bridge overhaul), probably at a starbase somewhere, done by engineers who were less talented than Scotty or the experts back at the shipyards.

But if I did want to place it closer to the previous films, I'd just nudge it back into '86, or even '85, and assume (as you suggested earlier) that Caithlin Dar's statement about Nimbus III was subject to more rounding than Kirk's and Khan's remarks back in STII.

(And the rest of Trek continuity would still continue on its merry way, with STVI and events thereafter situated in the same place regardless.)

I think it's a little unfair to take [the Okudas] to task for (generally) using exact numbers for length of time when characters were most likely rounding. Not to do so introduces an element of arbitrariness to the assumptions, and they were clearly trying to minimize arbitrariness.

On the one hand, I can see where you're coming from, and even agree with it. OTOH, some of the decisions to avoid arbitrariness are themselves fairly arbitrary. For instance, one of the foundations for the dating used in the Goldsteins' Spaceflight Chronology way back in the day seems to have been an interpolation of the various references to events of the FYM being roughly "200 years" in the future, which didn't match up precisely, but made it possible to zero in on 2207-12 as kinda sorta compatible with all of them... whereas the Okudas simply dispensed with all of them for the "exactly 300 years" rule, and that's about as arbitrary as you get.

(Of course, something in the 2260s was pretty much inevitable after TNG set its timeframe in "Neutral Zone." I've often wondered what happened behind the scenes during TNG S1, to shift the thinking from early 24th century — per Data's reference to being "class of '78" in the pilot — to late 24th century, per his reference to "2364" at the end of the season.)

I think the problem lies less with the dates the Okudas used and more with the apparent requirement that tie-in works stick so closely to those dates. The Okudas clearly didn't mean it to be used as such by the production team, and I don't know why the license holders should be held to a much higher standard.

I agree with you there. It seems to have acquired that status simply by default.

...I was able to make the Okuda dates work in my head by assuming that TWOK occurred in the fall of 2285. I couldn't see any reason why Kirk's birthday had to be the same day as Shatner's, and it made the gaps fit better in my head. Of course, that ship has sailed now.

Same here. I'd always assumed his birthday was in autumn (for reasons that escape me at this late date), until canon nailed it down otherwise.

 

[Christopher]

The whole concept of "rules of evidence" is not meant to suggest hidebound rigidity or inflexibility... it simply means that when you're attempting to determine the truth of an ambiguous situation, and you have some information in front of you that counts as "evidence," you do your best to interpret it in a consistent fashion from one situation to the next.

Which is fine for dealing with reality, which presumably is self-consistent. The same is not true for series fiction. No matter how hard you try to pretend it's consistent, sometimes it just isn't, and the only way to create the semblance of consistency is to ignore bits of it.

But given that we choose to pretend that this is real (the "Watsonian stance"), and that we attempt to construct timelines for events, having clear principles makes the whole effort easier, and also makes it easier to defend our choices when we do make exceptions.

I'm becoming increasingly Doylist in my interpretation of Star Trek, seeing the different productions as individual artistic interpretations of a putative reality, especially since realizing that that was Roddenberry's own way of looking at it. Discovery's wholesale reinvention of the look of 23rd-century Starfleet technology and alien species has made it harder to stick with a Watsonian view.

After all, we don't have any reason to assume that the relationship with Antonia was ongoing for two entire years; all we know is that he met her two years before a point at which he was in a relationship with her and considered retiring.

I've only recently realized that's the case. I always assumed he spent two years in retirement, and I wrote The Darkness Drops Again with that assumption.

Anyhow, I don't assume that the ship's systems were that screwed up from launch (in fact I don't really like that aspect of the film at all, as it's mostly played for cheap laughs, but never mind that)... I assume that they were screwed up after a minor refit (including a bridge overhaul), probably at a starbase somewhere, done by engineers who were less talented than Scotty or the experts back at the shipyards.

That's not the impression I get from Scotty's opening line. "'Let's see what she's got,' said the captain. And then we found out, didn't we?" If this had been 2-3 years later and the breakdowns were the result of a refit in a previously functional ship, then why would Scotty be thinking of what Kirk said at the ship's original launch? Unless Kirk has gotten into the habit of repeating himself.

For instance, one of the foundations for the dating used in the Goldsteins' Spaceflight Chronology way back in the day seems to have been an interpolation of the various references to events of the FYM being roughly "200 years" in the future, which didn't match up precisely, but made it possible to zero in on 2207-12 as kinda sorta compatible with all of them... whereas the Okudas simply dispensed with all of them for the "exactly 300 years" rule, and that's about as arbitrary as you get.

The problem with the SFC dating scheme is that, while it's a good way to reconcile the "200 years" references in season 1 with the "23rd century" reference in TWOK, it doesn't fit with "Metamorphosis." If Cochrane was lost 150 years earlier at the age of 85, and if the episode took place in 2208, then Cochrane would've been born in 1973. That's too early for the inventor of warp drive to have lived. Even the SFC puts the launch of the first warp vessel in 2058, which would have to be the same year Cochrane disappeared as an old man, and that just doesn't add up.

It also doesn't fit with ST:TMP, which said that Voyager 6 was lost in a black hole "over 300 years ago." Of course, that doesn't fit with the modern dating scheme either; a sixth Voyager probe would probably have been launched in the 1980s sometime and traveled for an indeterminate number of years after that before encountering a black hole, so that could put TMP in at least the 2290s and probably later. But it's much, much harder to reconcile with the SFC scheme. We can assume Decker misspoke and overstated the time interval by a few decades, but by the SFC timeline he'd be overstating it by a century.

 

[Leto_II]

That's not the impression I get from Scotty's opening line. "'Let's see what she's got,' said the captain. And then we found out, didn't we?" If this had been 2-3 years later and the breakdowns were the result of a refit in a previously functional ship, then why would Scotty be thinking of what Kirk said at the ship's original launch? Unless Kirk has gotten into the habit of repeating himself.

Yeah, ever since I saw the film in the summer of '89, my takeaway from that bit of dialogue has always been that perhaps only a span of months had elapsed at most between the starship's launch at the end of The Voyage Home and the opening of The Final Frontier, and that the ship's systems were basically a ticking timebomb in terms of functionality, with the new Enterprise's first shakedown-period exposing those flaws by the time the Yosemite shore-leave rolls around.

If we take into account the events of DC TOS Vol. 1 (from issue #37 onward), novels like Timetrap and the 2286 section of Prey: Hell's Heart, then there were certainly quite a few physically-strenuous events and situations that the new ship got placed into during those months, which could account for the need to return to Spacedock and undergo a systems-refit in early 2287. (Greg also addresses this in To Reign in Hell, where he says that Scotty is preparing the Enterprise-A for "final testing and service" up in Spacedock when Kirk and crew head to Ceti Alpha V in a courier ship -- the last kinks from the shakedown months getting hammered out when the Nimbus III hostage-crisis prematurely interrupts.)

 

[lawman]

The problem with the SFC dating scheme is that, while it's a good way to reconcile the "200 years" references in season 1 with the "23rd century" reference in TWOK, it doesn't fit with "Metamorphosis." If Cochrane was lost 150 years earlier at the age of 85, and if the episode took place in 2208, then Cochrane would've been born in 1973. That's too early for the inventor of warp drive to have lived. Even the SFC puts the launch of the first warp vessel in 2058, which would have to be the same year Cochrane disappeared as an old man, and that just doesn't add up.

Did it peg warp drive to 2058? I haven't looked at the book in ages, and don't have it handy. I do remember inferring from the reference in "Space Seed" about how sleeper ships became obsolete because of "the time involved in space travel until about the year 2018" (heh!) that at least the earliest of Cochrane's experiments took place around then, when he would have been quite plausibly in his '40s.

(And, of course, at the time 2018 was more than fifty years in the future. Who would've thought anybody would care about details of old Star Trek episodes that far down the line?... )

If we take into account the events of DC TOS Vol. 1 (from issue #37 onward), novels like Timetrap and the 2286 section of Prey: Hell's Heart, then there were certainly quite a few physically-strenuous events and situations that the new ship got placed into during those months, which could account for the need to return to Spacedock and undergo a systems-refit in early 2287.

Sounds plausible to me. (Granted Timetrap is more than a little ambiguous in terms of its placement, but I'm content to go along with the "Pocket Timeline's" placement of it shortly after STIV.) And hey, yet more reason for me to look forward to reading the Prey trilogy!...

 

[Christopher]

Did it peg warp drive to 2058?

Memory Beta says so. I've never actually managed to acquire a copy of the book myself, except from the library once.

 

[lawman]

Ah, thanks. Somehow I hadn't noticed that MB had such detailed entries on the SFC timeline!...

 

[Leto_II]

Sounds plausible to me. (Granted Timetrap is more than a little ambiguous in terms of its placement, but I'm content to go along with the "Pocket Timeline's" placement of it shortly after STIV.) And hey, yet more reason for me to look forward to reading the Prey trilogy!...

Actually, there are several pretty-solid pieces of evidence in the book that more or less place it in a post-Star Trek IV setting (I'm copying/pasting this from a different thread a few years back that I posted this in, to save some typing):

1. The post-TWOK glasses references -- in the movie, Kirk and McCoy have clearly never had that particular conversation before, and in this novel, he needles Kirk about it, with the implication that this has now become something of a semi-regular topic. Also, Kirk mentions that he now has a second backup pair on the ship in his quarters, which would place this story after the events of The Voyage Home (when he pawned the first pair back in the 20th century).

2. Peter Kirk is mentioned at one point as being significantly older than he was on the TV show, and now a very renowned and accomplished Federation research scientist in his own right. This actually ties into the Wildstorm Enterprise-A era comic story "Bloodline," set in 2292, when Peter is serving aboard the USS Feynman as that starship's chief scientist.

3. Close to the end of the book, McCoy drops the old English proverb, "A man at sixteen will prove a child at sixty," on Kirk, in direct reference to his age, and Kirk groans. Now, this is probably a slight rounding-up of sorts on McCoy's part, but if Kirk's sixtieth birthday falls in 2293 and he's now getting very close (as the novel implies), this would still fall squarely into his Enterprise-A command period (2286-2293).

And yep, the Prey trilogy is pretty damn great. You're gonna enjoy it.

 

[lawman]

Good points, particularly about the glasses and the needling. That's where I already have it anyway, but it's nice to be reassured of the reasons why.

Peter Kirk I'm less sure about... I haven't read the Wildstorm comic, but I do recall he had a role in the novel Sarek (set just after STVI) in which he was an Academy cadet. (One might imagine he'd be a bit older than typical at that point, but we don't really know the age limits at the Academy...)

 

[JonnyQuest037]

Rather, that specific story was based on the premise that there was a separate universe like the Gold Key comics. That doesn't mean the conceit has any applicability outside the story, or that Byrne meant it as anything more than a joke and a wink to the audience

I think you're misremembering the story, Christopher. The end of Byrne's story "Eye of the Beholder" explicitly states that

Spoiler: "Eye of the Beholder" ending

Kirk was hit by a brain ray on an alien planet and was beamed back to the ship in a delusional state. In other words, he imagined the Gold Key-like ST Universe seen in the story. The tag at the end where he sees a TAS-style crew as he enters the bridge was another hallucination.

And yeah, it was only a six page story, so it was definitely just a joke and wink to the audience. Just Byrne having a little fun.

Here's a question for whoever wants to address it: assuming for the sake of argument that you include the DC Comics series in your headcanon, how much time do you allow for its storylines, in particular between STII and STIII, and again between STIII and STIV?

In my mind, there is a gap of a few months between TWOK and TSFS - I have TWOK taking place in March of 2283 (March 22nd is as good a date as any for Kirk's birthday to occur, in the absence of other evidence, and it makes sense that something like the Kobayashi Maru test would be taken later in the Starfleet Academy school year, rather than earlier.)

I figure a gap of anywhere from 3 to 7 months between the movies works. That leaves plenty of time for the Mike W. Barr adventures in issues #1-8 of the DC Comics series. That way the Enterprise crew has a bit of time to mourn and miss Spock before he comes back, and the trip to the Great Barrier during the Saavik "Pon Farr" storyline nicely explains the extra damage to the Enterprise at the beginning of TSFS. So TSFS takes place in late 2283 (say, October) and the three-month Vulcan exile takes us into January 2284.

Yeah, call me stubborn, but I don't accept that 2285 date for STII. I've just never been willing to set aside the multiple on-screen references to "fifteen years" between "Space Seed" and the movie. I place the events of the film in 2283, concurrent with Kirk's 50th birthday (which also fits nicely thematically, given his uncharacteristic brooding over the birthday).

Hey, it's my headcanon.

I'm of the same school of thought on TWOK taking place in 2283, although I have it as Kirk's 49th birthday instead of his 50th. (this jibes with Nicholas Meyer's original draft, which said that Kirk was turning 49.) You don't always have your midlife crisis on the milestone birthdays. Whenever I read "2285" as a date for TWOK in a novel or a reference book, I just rewrite it in my head to "2283."

(Which is how Greg Cox reconciled the TWOK dating issue in To Reign in Hell -- by establishing that 15 Ceti Alpha V years equalled 18 Earth years.)

That would be a great explanation if Kirk didn't also say that it had been 15 years.

^ And there is that one line of Admiral Kirk's in the film that kinda seems to fly in the face of Greg's retcon ("There's a man out there I haven't seen in fifteen years who's trying to kill me. You show me a son that'd be happy to help him"), but I simply squint sideways at it and disregard it as an impromptu, in-the-moment ballpark-rounding by Kirk, in service of harmony of continuity (even though we'd all likely realistically round it upwards, not downwards, to "twenty years").

I figure that there's no way that both Kirk and Khan would be wrong about this. Khan was obsessed with Kirk stranding him on Ceti Alpha V. He would have the length of his exile timed down to the second. And Kirk is a smart guy. I suspect that he looked up his log entries on his previous encounter with Khan to refresh his memory. He would've had plenty of time to do so between the Reliant attacking the Enterprise and the Enterprise arriving at Regula I. So yeah, Kirk knew that it had been 15 years, or pretty damn close to it, by the time they beamed down to the Genesis Cave.

However, it's notable that in STII both Khan and Kirk independently referred to the events of "Space Seed" as fifteen years earlier... that corroboration has to count for something.

Agreed. The fact that both Khan and Kirk say that it's been 15 years since "Space Seed" makes that gap pretty ironclad in my mind.

What the hell is with Okuda's ongoing refusal to even consider the notion that there probably exists a few years' worth of leeway on either side of any centuries' old onscreen date, and that even most folks in the real world will most likely just say, "200 years ago" instead of "193 years ago" or "203 years ago" or "207 years ago" (for instance) in the patter of casual conversation?

I would guess that if Okuda didn't do treat those figures as exact, he would be bombarded with questions on why he chose 203 years instead of 193 or 207, and he would be making his work that much more complicated. I believe he said in his introduction that a lot of the dates could be adjusted up or down if need be. And indeed, the date of Zefram Cochrane's first warp flight shifted from 2061 to 2063 in between the first and second editions of the Chronology when First Contact went with 2063.

Truth. For my own purposes, I tend to treat such things as exact if they're uttered by Spock (or Data), but malleable when uttered by others, within a range of ±5% or so.

Same here.

Which brings us to the supplementary point I made: there really isn't anything about putting STII fifteen years after "Space Seed" that doesn't fit the rest of the canon. The only thing it doesn't fit with, actually, is the Okudachron (and later licensed works that take their dates from the Okudachron).

Yeah. It had been 15 years in the real world, so I'm totally cool with it having been 15 years for the characters, too.

Why they then chose to anchor that spread with the far less popular film (STV) rather than the far more popular one (STII), I can't imagine. Maybe they flipped a coin, for all I know.

I think that was likely because the founding of Nimbus III was a much more major event than the 2283 dating of the bottle of Romulan Ale. And logically, that meant that TFF had to be at least 20 years after contact was re-established with the Romulans in "Balance of Terror."

Having said that, there were a few things that I have always disagreed with in the Chronology. I never liked the idea that TOS was the last three years of the 5YM.

Me, neither. Kirk and Spock are pretty obviously getting to know each other in the first few episodes of TOS, which makes me think that we were seeing something close to the beginning of the 5YM, rather than the middle or the end.

I also think that the 79 episodes we saw of TOS were spread out over 5 years, not 3. The stardates range from the low 1000s to the high 5000s, after all. It just makes sense that way. (FYI, I only include certain parts of TAS in my headcanon.)

You can browse through my TOS timeline here. The text version of my chronology has a lot more references to novels and comics, but I'm trying to keep it mostly screen canon for the online version. There's also a few things I'd still like to include that I haven't found decent pictures for yet.

 

[ryan123450]

Great website @JonnyQuest037. Surprised I’ve never seen it before.

 

[Garth Rockett]

Did it peg warp drive to 2058?

It does. Inspired by this thread, I hunted down a copy on eBay a couple of weeks ago. I haven't had time to do much more than thumb through it yet, but I did think it neat that it had the date so close to the first edition of the OkudaChron (2061) and the canonical FC date (2063). I suppose there's really only so much leeway you have with that date, if you want to be consistent with Metamorphosis and still have it set reasonably far enough into the future.

Me, neither. Kirk and Spock are pretty obviously getting to know each other in the first few episodes of TOS, which makes me think that we were seeing something close to the beginning of the 5YM, rather than the middle or the end.

Speaking of which, one of the things that caught my eye while thumbing through the SFC was a reference to the Enterprise undergoing a refit after completing three years of a five year mission. I'm not sure if this was supposed to be a reference to the tweaks the ship underwent between TOS and TAS or if they thought the 5YM was curtailed so they could get refitted for TMP. Either way, it suggests that TOS is the first three years of the mission. I'm looking forward to diving into the SFC in depth after April 17 (I'm a CPA, and it's that time of year...).

 

[JonnyQuest037]

Great website @JonnyQuest037. Surprised I’ve never seen it before.

Yeah, I love Sutori! It's great for creating your own timelines. It's very intuitive and user-friendly. They used to be called something else & they changed their name a year or two back.