Spoilers Star Trek: Khan 1x01 - "Paradise"

[CaptChris42]

I'm wondering if maybe the kids were hidden in a separate part of the Botany Bay with shielding that the Enterprise was unable to scan through, but I doubt that 20th-century (or 21st-century in the rewritten timeline) shielding methods would have been able to fool 23rd-century sensors. And of course Kirk would've had to find out when they reached Ceti Alpha V.

But it is pretty much necessary to explain all Khan's twentysomething followers in TWOK, 15 years after being stranded (or 18 years per the Chronology's inexplicable retcon that even Michael Okuda didn't remember the reason for when I asked him about it). At least, it's more straightforward than Greg Cox's handwave that they were born on Ceti Alpha V and matured at an accelerated rate (and it avoids the ramification that the crew that got blown up on the Reliant would've been mostly underage).

The jump from 15 to 18 years was likely to keep the events of TWOK closer to The Final Frontier, which has to be set 20 years after Day of the Dove, approximately?

That's my assumption about things, anyway. To shorten the gap between films.

Also, Generations made it very difficult to fit TWOK before 2284.

 

[Christopher]

The jump from 15 to 18 years was likely to keep the events of TWOK closer to The Final Frontier, which has to be set 20 years after Day of the Dove, approximately?

Well, 20 years after "Balance of Terror," since there was no contact with the Romulans before then. But then, why not fudge ST V's 20 years instead of TWOK's 15 years? After all, it was Caithlin Dar who mentioned that figure, so she could've been speaking in Romulan or Nimbian years.

And even so, the Chronology's dating doesn't work, because it puts TWOK & TSFS in 2285, TVH in '86, and TFF in '87. TSFS can be no more than a couple of weeks after TWOK, given the rate of the regenerated Spock's aging. TVH is explicitly only 3 months later, although I suppose there could be a time jump from the climax to the trial scene and the intro of the E-A, but probably not more than a couple of months. And TFF seems to pick up fairly soon after TVH, although Harve Bennett asserted it was 6 months later. So I can't believe the four films could possibly span more than a year.

 

[Yistaan]

The jump from 15 to 18 years was likely to keep the events of TWOK closer to The Final Frontier, which has to be set 20 years after Day of the Dove, approximately?

That's my assumption about things, anyway. To shorten the gap between films.

Also, Generations made it very difficult to fit TWOK before 2284.

Michael Okuda said in his Star Trek Encyclopedia that he formed the timeline on the basis of TOS being set 300 years after production. So Space Seed automatically became 2267.

If he doesn't remember why he set WoK 18 years after Space Seed instead of 15 years, we can still figure out why from the evidence. The first is that WoK itself derails Okuda's 300 year "rule". The wine that Kirk drinks for his birthday is said to be from "2283". So WoK HAS to be later than that.

Furthermore, ST4 promotional material, even though it's not mentioned in the film itself, said that the crew went back exactly 300 years to 1986, setting it in 2286.

Given how little time passes in-universe between WoK to ST4 AND taking the wine year in WoK into account, 2285 is as best a placement as you can make for WoK (and even THAT's wonky as it's set in March 2285 around Kirk's birthday, 3 months pass between ST3 and ST4, which means there has to be an at least 6 month gap between ST2 and ST3).

This isn't the last time that a wine bottle mucked up timeline placements, the same happened in Picard locking season 2 to mere months before season 3

 

[Christopher]

The wine that Kirk drinks for his birthday is said to be from "2283". So WoK HAS to be later than that.

Only if you assume it's a Gregorian calendar date. Before TNG: "The Neutral Zone" locked down its calendar year as 2364, requiring TOS to be around a century earlier, many fans and a few professional novelists followed the Spaceflight Chronology dating scheme which put TOS in the first decade of the 23rd century (to reconcile with the "200 years" references in "Tomorrow is Yesterday" and "Space Seed"), so that TWOK would've been maybe 2222 or thereabouts. When TWOK came along with the 2283 date, many fans speculated that it was a Romulan calendar date or a stardate.

6 months pass between ST3 and ST4

No, Kirk's log entry says "We are in the third month of our Vulcan exile," which means there are only 2-3 months between movies.

 

[Yistaan]

I think by the time the chronology was laid out the early 23rd century for TOS would soon be clashing with reality with the SS Valiant reaching the galactic barrier supposedly 200 years before TOS, which anyone could tell wasn't going to be happening anytime soon. It's bad enough Trek started using real world dates. Once they decided that 2283 in WoK wouldn't be a stardate, that was the best way to move forward with the late 23rd century to buy time until Trek clashed with real world.

 

[Christopher]

I think by the time the chronology was laid out the early 23rd century for TOS would soon be clashing with reality with the SS Valiant reaching the galactic barrier supposedly 200 years before TOS, which anyone could tell wasn't going to be happening anytime soon. It's bad enough Trek started using real world dates. Once they decided that 2283 in WoK wouldn't be a stardate, that was the best way to move forward with the late 23rd century to buy time until Trek clashed with real world.

Roddenberry always preferred to keep the exact date vague so there'd be wiggle room. I'm convinced that the only reason we got the 2364 date in "The Neutral Zone" was because it was shot from a first-draft script due to the 1988 writers' strike. If it had gotten rewritten, the date reference might have been deleted.

The Valiant is the one case where I'm most annoyed by the Chronology's insistence on treating every onscreen date reference (except TWOK's 15 years) as exact rather than rounded up or down, so that it said the Valiant was launched only four years after Cochrane's first experimental warp flight -- or only two years after the final date settled on in FC. It's utterly ridiculous to suggest it would've been so soon, and it's ridiculously unlikely that the Enterprise would've run across its marker buoy exactly 200 years after its launch rather than 183 years or something, which they rounded up to 200.

 

[James Cole]

TrekMovie has an interview up with co-writer Kirsten Beyer on the development of the series

Interview: Kirsten Beyer On Writing An Iconic Villain As A Tragic Hero In ‘Star Trek: Khan’

The co-writer for the new scripted podcast talks canon, characters, and more.

trekmovie.com

some quotes...

on if KHAN is canon:

I don’t know the answer to that, yet. There are conversations I need to have with people because I could see arguments for both. But I don’t know where that’s going to fall. And I hope, ultimately, it doesn’t matter. Come to the story. Enjoy the story or don’t. It’s not going to contradict anything that we already know, that was previously established. But it is going to make it deeper and richer in ways I don’t think you can quite imagine yet.

on revisions to Meyer's version:

So there were nine scripts and kind of the full shape of the thing. And Nick had a very clear story he wanted to tell, which was essentially Khan as a tragic hero, which I thought was an interesting take. The challenge that was in front of us was that when Nick had made Wrath of Khan, there were 80 hours of Star Trek in existence or so. And now there are like over 900. And he wasn’t familiar with most of that. He really had no idea how much Khan and the Augments and that whole thing had begun to impact other areas of canon and knock up against other stories. So it was first very important to make sure that the story we were telling lined up with the much bigger picture.

it looks like Mack did a revision of Meyer, and then Beyer then did a revision of Mack's draft, adding the Excelsior framing story:

So Nick had a ton of story, and David and I set about sorting through it and figuring out how much we were actually going to be able to do, and how best to do that. And then David wrote the writer’s drafts, and then I took it from there.

the kids element was added by Mack and Beyer (the Augment infertility angle was already part of Meyer's backstory, going off the original script leaks)

So it was a combination. Obviously we had Joachim and Joaquin, from “Space Seed” and Wrath. I also remember early on pointing out to Nick that he had a lot of young people on the planet, in the people who survived to Wrath of Khan. Joaquin looks like he’s 17, everybody else looks like they’re 30 or 25, and just do the math. That’s not possible unless they were having babies, which, even then, they wouldn’t have been old enough. Or some of the people who came were younger. So that dynamic was something that David and I came up with that I think really also broke the story open in interesting ways, this intergenerational sort of issue.

EDITED TO ADD: not sure if this thread is the best place for this, but as it contains spoilers, it felt better to put it here than the "News" thread or to try starting a "[SPOILERS] General Discussion Thread: Khan".

 

[David Mack]

it looks like Mack did a revision of Meyer, and then Beyer then did a revision of Mack's draft, adding the Excelsior framing story:

Not exactly. The Excelsior framing story was part of my and Kirsten’s story plan from the beginning, as we began discussing the overall structure of the series, and of each individual episode within it. Many other cool and intriguing elements were added by Kirsten during the revisions process, and I offered some final notes on late drafts of all the scripts.

 

[Tuskin38]

I completely forgot Wrenn Schmidt was voicing Marla, I didn't even realize it was her.