Kirk's retirement
- Thread starter JoeZhang
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Don't know that novel, but wasn't this mentioned in Star Trek Generations (= Kirk's Nexus fantasy)?
^^Yes, that's consistent with Generations. According to that film, Kirk was retired between 11 and 9 years before the GEN prologue, which works out to 2282-4, with TWOK being in 2285. We don't know how long before that he actually retired.
Kirk's retirement is also touched on in Mere Anarchy Book 4: The Darkness Drops Again by yours truly, which is still available in eBook form and will be available in the Mere Anarchy trade paperback in March '09. However, my version is in a different continuity from the Crucible novels and interprets the period between TMP & TWOK somewhat differently. (Although, ironically, DRGIII and I independently chose the same last name for Antonia, giving her the surname of the stuntwoman who briefly "played" her in the film.)
And in answer to your original question, yes, Kirk's retirement and relationship with Antonia are explored in the Crucible: Kirk volume.
Kirk's retirement is also touched on in Mere Anarchy Book 4: The Darkness Drops Again by yours truly, which is still available in eBook form and will be available in the Mere Anarchy trade paperback in March '09. However, my version is in a different continuity from the Crucible novels and interprets the period between TMP & TWOK somewhat differently. (Although, ironically, DRGIII and I independently chose the same last name for Antonia, giving her the surname of the stuntwoman who briefly "played" her in the film.)
And in answer to your original question, yes, Kirk's retirement and relationship with Antonia are explored in the Crucible: Kirk volume.
More than one line. When Kirk and Picard were in the cabin, Kirk realized what day it was and told Picard, "This was nine years ago," the day he told Antonia he was going back to Starfleet. Then when the location shifted to the stable, Kirk said it was eleven years ago, the day he first met Antonia. So we know his relationship with Antonia lasted from 2282-4.
Damn.. I'm a bad fan as well, I never picked up on that.....
The TOS movies fit into the timeline in really different places from where you'd expect given the ages of the actors, at least in a few cases, so that kind of threw me too. Since the TNG films are placed into continuity at about the same rate as it took for them to be made, it seemed like that was pretty much the rule of thumb to me.
The 12-year gap between TMP and TWOK is particularly odd.
The 12-year gap between TMP and TWOK is particularly odd.
Indeed, it's downright bizarre. Given that TWOK was stated explicitly onscreen to be 15 years after "Space Seed," it should only be a 9-year gap. But for reasons surpassing comprehension, the Okuda Chronology placed TWOK in 2285, a good 18 years after "Space Seed." And GEN pretty much canonized that, because TWOK couldn't have taken place in 2282 if Kirk was retired and living with Antonia from 2282-4.
Even though the cast had aged ten years between TOS and TMP, the script infers that only a few years have passed since the 5YM ended. (That's why several early Pocket novelists added a second set of adventures between TOS and TMP.)
Though the real-time gap between TMP and ST II was quite short, the "ST Chronology" allowed the actors' ages to catch up, and they shifted the hypothetical second mission to after TMP. I recall considerable debate in the early days of ST II as to which birthday Kirk might have been celebrating, and what would make it significant for him.
Well, tWoK has to take place post-2283 because of the year on the bottle of Romulan ale, so the problem more lies in the Okudas' arbitrary dating of the original series. Obviously "Space Seed" should have happened in 2270!
L
Lord Garth
Guest
People sometimes have a tendency to round numbers into 0's and 5's, even though 18 would round off to 20 in this case.
Not necessarily. For years, before the Okudachron came out, fans were explaining the discrepancy (since setting TOS in 2266-69 was a longstanding convention, hardly invented by the Okudas) by suggesting one of three possibilities:
1) "2283" was a Romulan calendar date.
2) "2283" was a stardate.
3) The movie actually took place in 2283 (16 years after the generally accepted date for "Space Seed," easy to round to 15) and McCoy's "a while to ferment" line was an ironic joke.
Actually it's a bit more complicated than that, since pre-TNG, there were two schools of thought in fandom, one that TOS was in 2266-69, the other that it was in 2206-09. So options 1 and 2 were cited by supporters of the second theory as well as the first. The latter theory was an attempt to reconcile TWOK's explicit "23rd century" reference with the references in "Space Seed" and "Tomorrow is Yesterday" to TOS being about 200 years in our future. I used to favor that theory myself, failing to realize that it was difficult to reconcile with Zefram Cochrane's dates from "Metamorphosis" (he would've had to have been born in 1972) and blatantly contradicted TMP's reference to Voyager 6 being lost three centuries before. Anyway, when "The Neutral Zone" explicitly established TNG's calendar date as 2364, that blew the earlier dating scheme out of the water.
As far as possibilities go, it's perfectly valid to say that Kirk never retired. His talk about "going back to Starfleet" could refer to returning from a weekend on the countryside rather than making a triumphant comeback after half a decade.
That would be as big a decision as any - Kirk wouldn't reverse his years-old decision to stay away from Starfleet, he would reverse his two-day-old promise to Antonia to retire next Monday and start a new life with her.
Timo Saloniemi
That would be as big a decision as any - Kirk wouldn't reverse his years-old decision to stay away from Starfleet, he would reverse his two-day-old promise to Antonia to retire next Monday and start a new life with her.
Timo Saloniemi
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