TSFS-time from Mutara to Spacedock?

[ozzfloyd]

We are never told how long it took the Enterprise to get back to Earth Spacedock after their encounter with Khan/Genesis in the Mutara sector. Kirk says "With most of our battle damage repaired we are almost home." in his opening Captain's Log. So one would believe they conducted repairs while limping home directly from Mutara, or could they have stopped off somewhere for a period for repairs before heading to Earth?

Kirk says "most of the trainee crew have been reassigned". Did other ships rendezvous with Enterprise in their journey home? I'm wondering just how long their trip home could have been. All under impulse?

They had at least enough time to drop off the trainees, Kirk to re-record Dr Marcus's Genesis Project video for whatever reason, and for Genesis to become a "Galactic controversy in your absence" as Morrow states. Days? Weeks? More?

Thoughts?

 

[Christopher]

Vonda McIntyre's novelization of TSFS puts only three days between the two movies (and spends the first several chapters of the novel depicting those three days in detail), but I think that's too short. Conversely, the "Genesis report" written by David Mack that constitutes Chapter 14 of The Genesis Wave Book 1 by John Vornholt sets the time between them as about a month.

DC Comics put eight issues between the movies, constituting four distinct storylines (or five if you count the opening 4-parter as two linked stories), with an unspecified but non-trivial amount of time between TWOK and issue 1. This is hard to reconcile with TSFS in a number of ways, but it helps make more sense of the movie in another, since the battle the Enterprise got into in issue 8 could explain why the ship has substantially more battle damage at the start of TSFS than it had at the end of TWOK (though it doesn't explain why several of the battle scars are in identical places).

I think William Rotsler's YA Short Stories tie-in books also inserted a couple of adventures between the movies, but I don't recall specifics.

The tricky question is, how long did it take for Genesis to regenerate Spock? He matured pretty quickly over the course of the movie, which implies it should only have been days between movies; but on the other hand, the rate of development on Genesis seemed to accelerate exponentially, so Spock's regeneration (and the deterioration of the planet) could've been extremely slow at first and only picked up speed toward the end. Plus it's more plausible that it took at least a few weeks for the new-formed ecosystem to settle down into a livable state, even given the absurdly magical powers of the Genesis effect.

 

[Timo]

Naturally, if Genesis has the power to create life from death, but also to do damage due to the upheavals, Spock might have died and been reborn again and again and again. He did get better at least once after the initial Genesis detonation had died down enough to leave the planet lush with jungles, so why not a dozen times? (Heck, had Kirk waited long enough, David might have sprung back to life, too.)

As for "more battle damage", it seems plausible that stuff hastily repaired by the inexpert crew might not remain repaired, and could blow up on their faces in a quite literal sense. But it's also pretty much inevitable that Starfleet would send other ships to sort out the mess, and those would lend a hand or thirty to Scotty for putting the ship back together. Clearly, none had arrived before the end credits of ST2 rolled, so when they did come, they might have decided to apply more patches than Scotty had originally deemed necessary or viable...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Kor]

It took long enough for Kirk and co. to have all kinds of wacky adventures in the 1980s DC comics continuity, with Klingons, Organians, Excalbians, a human being worshipped as a god by primitive aliens, Ambassador Robert Fox, Saavik in pon farr, and Romulans.

Kor

 

[Tenacity]

So you're saying four days?

 

[Indysolo]

Don't forget they also went to Ceti Alpha V to pick up the crew of the Reliant, per Kirk's log entry at the end of TWOK.

 

[Timo]

Or at least planned on doing so. Might be the rest of Starfleet finally responded in the meantime, and intercepted Kirk, evacuating his crew of children and taking care of the Ceti Alpha V castaways as well. This wouldn't affect the timeline much either way, as it doesn't appear to take a large number of days for Khan to get from CA to Regula...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Indysolo]

Is there any reason to doubt what was said on-screen?

 

[UssGlenn]

Kirk says "most of the trainee crew have been reassigned". Did other ships rendezvous with Enterprise in their journey home?

We know Saavik left the ship and "graduated" since she switched from a red to a white collar. So at least one ship met up with them, unless she left by shuttlecraft. As for the Crew, just because most of the trainees had been reassigned doesn't mean they had left the ship yet. They could have their official transfer orders but wouldn't leave the ship until it got to Spacedock.

 

[Christopher]

As for the Crew, just because most of the trainees had been reassigned doesn't mean they had left the ship yet. They could have their official transfer orders but wouldn't leave the ship until it got to Spacedock.

That doesn't fit Kirk's line that the Enterprise "feels like a house with all the children gone." It would be premature to say that if they were still aboard. Also, if most of the crew has already left, that would explain why Scotty was working on automating the ship's systems, rather than just having it be a random bit of plot convenience for later.

 

[UssGlenn]

That doesn't fit Kirk's line that the Enterprise "feels like a house with all the children gone." It would be premature to say that if they were still aboard. Also, if most of the crew has already left, that would explain why Scotty was working on automating the ship's systems, rather than just having it be a random bit of plot convenience for later.

You are right, I forgot about that line. However if you really wanted to you could interpret it to mean that, due to the trauma of the mission, all the cadets lost their innocence and are now jaded servicemen. No more "children" on board even if the people are the same. A simile rather than a metaphor.

While I don't see the logic in Starfleet removing so many crew members off a damaged ship that it would require extra automation to run, I do like the clean tie in to the later plot point.

 

[Christopher]

You are right, I forgot about that line. However if you really wanted to you could interpret it to mean that, due to the trauma of the mission, all the cadets lost their innocence and are now jaded servicemen. No more "children" on board even if the people are the same. A simile rather than a metaphor.

That's not a house with the children gone, it's a house with the college-age kids still living with their folks. It's clearly not what Kirk meant. We should change our hypotheses to fit the data, not force the data to fit a hypothesis.

And it's already a simile because he says "the Enterprise feels like a house" etc. To be a metaphor, he'd have to have said "the Enterprise is a house with all the children gone."

While I don't see the logic in Starfleet removing so many crew members off a damaged ship that it would require extra automation to run, I do like the clean tie in to the later plot point.

They weren't regular crew, they were cadets who were just supposed to be on a brief training cruise and got dragged into a firefight. They wouldn't have stayed aboard anyway. They no doubt had classes scheduled back at the Academy and couldn't afford to be held up too long while the ship was undergoing repairs and the command crew was being debriefed. Not to mention that it was probably most of the cadets' first taste of combat and death, and they needed counseling.

 

[Timo]

Is there any reason to doubt what was said on-screen?

As discussed above, Kirk already had some help with crew rotation. It would be quite weird for Starfleet to even allow, let alone require, him to recover the Reliant crew under those circumstances, in a ship particularly ill equipped to do so, with a crew particularly ill equipped to cope.

What Kirk feels at the end of TWoK is rather rudely contradicted at the start of TSfS. No, he's not young. His ship is to be yanked from beneath him. There's no returning to Genesis, for Spock or for any other reason. So we don't have any dramatic reason to think he would have gotten his wish with the Reliant crew, either.

In-universe logic and rules of drama notwithstanding, where is that crew? Clearly not there aboard the Enterprise at the start of TSfS, or there would have been mention.

Of course, we only have Terrell's word that the crew survived in the first place, and Terrell was serving Khan's interests at the time he made that statement. Perhaps Chekov wasn't properly consulted on whether there was any point in going to Ceti Alpha V, and would at some point wake up and ask "Keptin, what are you doing?"...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Workbee]

While inexperience of the crew and battle damage were definitely issues, I don't think that was the driving factor behind the crew reassignments. Rather, the Enterprise and her crew were considered damaged goods politically.

Genesis had become a foreign policy disaster for the Federation. Any hopes of keeping the Genesis Project secret until the international (interplanetary?) community could be prepared were effectively shot as news quickly began to leak out thanks to an incredibly public uncontrolled detonation that permanently altered the "geography" of the Mutara sector. With the various partners and non-partners of the Federation (and quite possibly several of its members) only learning about this colonization game-changer through the equivalent of the 11-o'clock news, the Federation likely lost a lot of credibility and moral mandate.

We never know the full extent of the fallout from this. Several of the aliens present in the federation council in TVH were missing from the Khitomer Accords in TUC. Perhaps some member worlds chose to part ways with the Federation in the intervening time. The overmining that cause explosion at Praxis may have occurred in direct response by the Klingons to this event.

Faced with the potential (and increasing likelihood) of such significant fallout, Starfleet would move quickly to remove non-essential crew from the Enterprise ASAP in an effort to contain the situation and control the messaging. Kirk was made to hastily record another presentation of the project. As the Federation leaders turned to Starfleet to explain of how such a colossal F-up could occur, the answers did not make Starfleet look particularly good. Having veteran officers confuse one planet for another was embarrassing enough. The revelation that Starfleet had chosen to dispatch a desk-bound maverick has-been on training vessel crewed by cadets -- who then chose to personally assume command and then screw up so bad that it's Captain had to sacrifice his life so that all souls wouldn't be lost - for such a sensitive project probably did not instill much confidence in the current leadership of Starfleet in question.

Every wonder what happened to Admiral Morrow in TVH? With egg all over his face, Admiral Morrow's job was probably already on the ropes. Trying to salvage the situation, he quietly put the Enterprise pasture and moved her senior officers to lower profile positions to keep them out of the way. As the most responsible survivor of the whole Khan incident, Kirks career was probably over at this point. Still needing to know what the heck they had with Genesis, Morrow would have to send another ship out there. Since Captain Terrell had trouble following the basic parameters of his mission, Morrow made sure that that ship was commanded by a yes-man that wouldn't so much as sneeze without checking in. After Kirk stole the enterprise, engaged in combat at Genesis with Klingons and blew up his ship (along with the loss of Grissom), Morrow was history.

 

[Christopher]

While inexperience of the crew and battle damage were definitely issues, I don't think that was the driving factor behind the crew reassignments. Rather, the Enterprise and her crew were considered damaged goods politically.

I still say that has nothing to do with it, because they were not "the crew." They were Academy cadets assigned to the ship for a single training flight. Basically it was a field trip. Their experience or the political situation had nothing to do with it; they were just never meant to be aboard the ship for longer than that one training mission. And the training cruise was a birthday outing for Admiral Kirk, which suggests that it was intended to be just a day long. So getting diverted to Regula I and getting their butts kicked by Khan made them all very, very late for their next classes.

We never know the full extent of the fallout from this. Several of the aliens present in the federation council in TVH were missing from the Khitomer Accords in TUC. Perhaps some member worlds chose to part ways with the Federation in the intervening time. The overmining that cause explosion at Praxis may have occurred in direct response by the Klingons to this event.

Is there any reason that every member world would need to be represented? Maybe it was just the worlds with a stake in the question of detente with the Klingons, e.g. those near the border or those that would need to provide resources for rescuing Qo'noS's ecosystem.

The revelation that Starfleet had chosen to dispatch a desk-bound maverick has-been on training vessel crewed by cadets -- who then chose to personally assume command and then screw up so bad that it's Captain had to sacrifice his life so that all souls wouldn't be lost - for such a sensitive project probably did not instill much confidence in the current leadership of Starfleet in question.

The idea of Kirk as a "maverick" is a myth that arises almost entirely from his behavior in The Search for Spock, which hadn't happened yet. Watch TOS and you'll see he's anything but a maverick. He's a serious, disciplined officer who takes his duties and obligations seriously, who usually obeys direct orders even when he dislikes them. What's often misinterpreted as defying authority is actually exercising his own authority as the commander on the scene to determine how the laws should be interpreted, something that frontier captains are supposed to do by virtue of their position. And what's often misinterpreted as Kirk "violating" the Prime Directive is actually upholding it by its 23rd-century definition -- he intervenes to cancel out other sources of intervention like Klingon spies, crazy Federation captains and historians, and evil computers, thereby freeing cultures to pursue self-determination thereafter.

The only times in Kirk's onscreen career that he blatantly disobeyed direct orders were in "Amok Time" and The Search for Spock -- in both cases, placing Spock's life above his duty. The rest of the time, he took his oaths quite seriously.

 

[Therin of Andor]

Don't forget they also went to Ceti Alpha V to pick up the crew of the Reliant, per Kirk's log entry at the end of TWOK.

And the McIntyre novelizations mention the USS Firenze, which rendezvoused with Enterprise to take severely injured crew (and cadets) to Earth while the Enterprise returned to Ceti Alpha V to rescue Kyle, Beach et al.

Which also conveniently explains how Janice Rand was able to be at Spacedock (in ST III) to see the wounded Enterprise arrive. She (and Dr Chapel) had been aboard the Enterprise for the ST II novelization, even though not in the movie.

 

[Workbee]

The idea of Kirk as a "maverick" is a myth that arises almost entirely from his behavior in The Search for Spock, which hadn't happened yet. Watch TOS and you'll see he's anything but a maverick. He's a serious, disciplined officer who takes his duties and obligations seriously, who usually obeys direct orders even when he dislikes them.

You are absolutely right - I've fallen in the trap of analyzing Kirk's reputation through a post-TOS lens. That being said, I think we often grossly underestimate the repercussions of the Genesis fiasco on geopolitical landscape (or, astropolitical starscape?) The best "present-day" analogy I can think of is imagine if the US Government had secretly developed technology that would let them create and develop a land mass anywhere in any ocean (sort of Superman Returns style). The United States can simply create and occupy more land at will. Now imagine the ripples through the international community if existence of one of these "secret islands" (forgetting about satellite surveillance capabilities for the moment). How that affects our relationship with China, Russia, with NATO. What about within the US? These new land masses could conceivably become states. Would their population be more left leaning or right leaning politically? How would it affect the political balance?

Those trainees weren't returned to classes - they were reassigned to somewhere else (for their sake hopefully not Grissom). (One can also argue they were never due back in classes and were meant to be trained into the new crew for the Enterprise). If they were going back to their next class, they could have remained on Enterprise.

We have another hint when Morrow tells the remaining crew that they have "extended shore leave". If this was simply a reward for the crews performance, why didn't the other training crew get to enjoy it instead of being reassigned (arguably the ones most in need of rest and possibly counseling). Basically they are told to go home and don't talk to anyone about their last mission. What is problematic is there are faces aboard the Enterprise in TSFS that clearly weren't there in TWOK. However one such officer who asks about the reception makes me believe that they were "meant" to have always been on the ship.

 

[Christopher]

Those trainees weren't returned to classes - they were reassigned to somewhere else (for their sake hopefully not Grissom). (One can also argue they were never due back in classes and were meant to be trained into the new crew for the Enterprise).

One could, but why would one want to? It seems like fighting against the simplest explanation for no other reason than pure contrariness. The most obvious and likely explanation for a cadet crew on a training mission to be removed from the ship is that they were never intended to stay aboard it after the mission ended. It's arbitrary and circular to invent the ad hoc conjecture that they were supposed to be permanently assigned merely to justify the further ad hoc conjecture that they were removed from the ship for political reasons.

Besides, we have evidence that the cadets did go back to the Academy after TWOK, because Saavik changes from a cadet-red turtleneck in TWOK to a command-white one in TSFS. Which suggests, as I think someone already mentioned, that she graduated between movies.

If they were going back to their next class, they could have remained on Enterprise.

Not if the Enterprise wasn't able to go directly back to Earth. After all, they needed to rescue the Reliant crew from Ceti Alpha V, for one thing. And there could've been extensive repairs and debriefing needed on a starbase. Remember, the position I'm taking here is that there's reason to believe the interval between movies was fairly substantial -- a month per The Genesis Wave, considerably longer per DC Comics. Even if it's just a couple of weeks, the cadets were probably already late getting back to Earth just as a result of the ship being diverted to Regula. So it makes sense that they'd be taken back at the earliest opportunity while the Enterprise pursued its other responsibilities.

 

[gottacook]

All under impulse?

Spock repaired the warp drive, at the cost of his life. Would it have conked out as soon as they were out of reach of the Genesis explosion?

What is problematic is there are faces aboard the Enterprise in TSFS that clearly weren't there in TWOK.

This is much less of a problem than all of Khan's people being (apparently) 15 years younger, rather than older, than the Botany Bay crew we saw him reviving in 1967.

And the McIntyre novelizations mention...

To invoke the McIntyre novelization of TWoK is to acknowledge that in her version of the story, Spock's coffin is seen to burn up upon entering the atmosphere of the Genesis planet.

 

[Mres_was_framed!]

the ship has substantially more battle damage at the start of TSFS than it had at the end of TWOK (though it doesn't explain why several of the battle scars are in identical places).

Perhaps they were patched and then other places were patched later, as others have said.

Naturally, if Genesis has the power to create life from death, but also to do damage due to the upheavals, Spock might have died and been reborn again and again and again. He did get better at least once after the initial Genesis detonation had died down enough to leave the planet lush with jungles, so why not a dozen times? (Heck, had Kirk waited long enough, David might have sprung back to life, too.)

If what you are saying is so, are you suggesting the the Genesis Planet is not gone at the end of ST:III? What do you think the implications of that should be? (Arguably, the implications of the planet's existence would be good to know even otherwise.)

They wouldn't have stayed aboard anyway.

(One can also argue they were never due back in classes and were meant to be trained into the new crew for the Enterprise).

I was going to address that similarly.

The real issue with this timing lies in another question, in my opinion. The drama of Star Trek, III, IV, and VI, all seem to imply that the Enterprise is an older design that will be retired. Yet, we have seem data sheets and even a couple scenes in TNG that could imply they stayed in service in some degree. Some suggest the Khitomer Accords involve retiring ships of that class and letting Excelsior replace them (I'm not suggesting this). So here's the question that really affects this timing:

Is the Enterprise an "older" class at this point, and the way we see the ship treated a result of it being older, or would it have gone back out into service in regular duty had it not bee attacked by Khan?