Where do you get that? TSFS ended with the crew on Vulcan, and TVH had Kirk explicitly stating in his log that they were "in the third month of our Vulcan exile."
15 year gap between TMP and TWOK
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Where do you get that? TSFS ended with the crew on Vulcan, and TVH had Kirk explicitly stating in his log that they were "in the third month of our Vulcan exile."
If I recall the synopsis in Starlog's "Movie Magazine" for ST III, they have Morrow saying 40 years. It was a bit of a surprise when he says "20" in the film.
...Of course, if we go by the "early TMP" model, then the ship indeed is roughly 20 years old in ST3:TSfS. After all, she was rebuilt for TMP, becoming an "almost completely new Enterprise". From the start of the refit process to the less than triumphant return from combat with Khan, the ship would have clocked some fifteen years, which Morrow would have every incentive to exaggerate into twenty.
Personally, and despite all the above arguments, I'm in favor of a 2273 TMP, if only because of all the starship fanfic that has been written and drawn using that assumption. A 2276 TMP would probably be a more comfortable fit overall, but Starfleet would then have three fewer years to come up with all those ship variants related to the Constitution refit...
Assuming, of course, that the Enterprise was among the first recipients of that technology, which is far from certain. But this might be the reason for Kirk's caution in using the new warp engines insystem - not only have these particular engines skipped the officially required testing, but nobody anywhere has ever fired up their like to warp seven in operational conditions!
Timo Saloniemi
Personally, and despite all the above arguments, I'm in favor of a 2273 TMP, if only because of all the starship fanfic that has been written and drawn using that assumption. A 2276 TMP would probably be a more comfortable fit overall, but Starfleet would then have three fewer years to come up with all those ship variants related to the Constitution refit...
Assuming, of course, that the Enterprise was among the first recipients of that technology, which is far from certain. But this might be the reason for Kirk's caution in using the new warp engines insystem - not only have these particular engines skipped the officially required testing, but nobody anywhere has ever fired up their like to warp seven in operational conditions!
Timo Saloniemi
The whole thing with Chapel is a bit of a clumsy retcon. I'm not sure how it works in the USA but I think that in the UK it takes 7 years to qualify as a doctor, although I think junior doctors start practicing under supervision after 5 years of education. Following qualification the doctors work under a level of supervision for a number of years, gaining supervised experience before becoming consultants.
If Chapel was training to be a doctor on the Enterprise, it's arguable that she would have held a position as a trainee doctor and not the head nurse, although we are viewing this through 1960's eyes when nurses' training was not as extensive as it is now. She certainly would not have been qualified enough to be a CMO by the time of TMP but having said that, neither would Julian Bashir. I'm not sure how things work with real world military medics - perhaps they are not the generalists that hospital (and Starfleet) doctors are required to be so they have greater levels of autonomy at a younger age? On the other hand, the computers do much of the hard work in Starfleet.
I'd have been happier if Chapel had just become a Phd instead of an MD and had been recast as a scientist with extensive medical training instead of a second fiddle MD.
On balance though I'm happy with TMP taking place in 2273.
The TOS ship underwent some crew rotation during the five mission years, but Chapel never showed signs of wanting to leave. Yet it's a bit unlikely that she would have found so much satisfaction in the nursing job that this is what kept her aboard. We could just as well speculate that the exploration mission was the best possible training Chapel could get for her doctorate, with the theoretical studies a triviality and with plenty of opportunities for all levels of practice. That'd be five full years of working towards her original goal, so she could be fully trained and qualified basically from the very moment the mission ended.
The "second fiddle MD" in ST:TMP would probably have been a temporary thing - it was Kirk's last-minute special wish to have McCoy aboard, and Starfleet would probably have sent one or the other off the ship afterwards. Unless the ship again undertook an exploration mission where multiple MDs would be of use, and M'Benga had better things to do.
Timo Saloniemi
The "second fiddle MD" in ST:TMP would probably have been a temporary thing - it was Kirk's last-minute special wish to have McCoy aboard, and Starfleet would probably have sent one or the other off the ship afterwards. Unless the ship again undertook an exploration mission where multiple MDs would be of use, and M'Benga had better things to do.
Timo Saloniemi
Well the ship requires one doctor to be on duty for each shift - the CMO is just the senior doctor among them. No doubt each doctor has an area of speciality in addition to being a general MD and can be called onto duty when needed. McCoy's seems to be surgery; Helen Noel was an MD and a psychiatrist (so presumably she does the night shift after M'Benga). From her role in TMP, Chapel was being set up to be the more technical doctor vs McCoy's 'old country doctor'. It's a pretty narrow niche though - she'd have been better as the head of life sciences.
I did too.As a matter of fact, on Friday December 7,1979, I still remember that the majority of the audience, including myself, thought it was a funny Kirk comment.
Yes, I had the same experience that night in a packed theater. It seemed the most of the crowd laughed at that point.
No, I don't think so. I just disagree with your arguement.
There was a definate attempt by Nick Meyer & Harve Bennett and the studio to correct some of the things that it was felt didnt work in the first movie - serious tone, running out of story, slow pacing etc and return to the "spirit" of the original show. Don't get me wrong, I love TMP - but it does feel very different to the TV series. It does what it does well (creating an atmosphere - making you really feel like you are in space etc), but it misses the fun and adventure. Feels a bit cold too.
But the characters are the same. Yeah, they are acting a bit serious, but they are still the same people from TOS. The interplay between Kirk Spock & Bones is still there, albeit reduced.
"They do not, its like working in a damn computer centre"
...........
"Well, so help me I'm actually pleased to see you"
...........
"Will you please...sit down..."
In TWOK they warmed things up a bit (literally with the uniforms and the lighting on the bridge) and let us explore the characters a bit more. But everything is fundamentally the same - the didn't redesign the enterprise or fudge the backstory or change the characters or their relationships (they added in some instances - Kirk's son). It is cosmetically and tonally different from TMP - specifically all the naval stuff which Meyer admitted to "laying on with a trowel"...
But it isn't a reboot.
I don't think TMP misses the adventure. There's a stronger flavor of discovery and sense of wonder in it than in any other Trek movie, and to me that's a far more satisfying adventure than the blood-soaked violence of TWOK. Star Trek is supposed to be about exploring the unknown, not blowing stuff up. There's very little exploration in any of the other Trek movies. Maybe wandering across the surface of Genesis in TSFS counts, barely. The voyage to Sha Ka Ree in TFF is going someplace new and unknown, but it's not a very good example. There's some exploration of the Ba'ku culture in INS, but they're basically just humans so it's not very interesting.
I loved the sense of wonder and sense of sterile efficiency from TMP. It had enough spirit of adventure to avoid being too sterile, but it clearly evolved into TNG not TWoK. I think with a few tweaks - perhaps sending a landing party with more than just the main characters inside Vger to add a bit of personal peril, it could have upped the action quotient in the latter part of the movie. It was long enough as it was though. They would have needed to clip quite a bit from earlier to do such a plot thread justice. The musical score of TWoK does a fabulous job of keeping us excited too.
I gotta admit, when I think TOS I think "bright and colorful," not "sterile efficiency"--which is why the latter doesn't seem quite right for STAR TREK.
Star trek is a lot of things. You'll never get two Star Trek fans to agree on exactly what. If you take the Original series - sometimes you have a sense of wonder (Where no man has gone before), sometimes you get revenge (The Doomsday Machine), sometimes people fistfighting in a bar (The Trouble with Tribbles), sometimes you get Space Hippy Jamming with a guy with Cauliflower ears
(The Way to Eden)...TMP is an adventure in the literal sense but is let down but by stodgy pacing. It is, however, perhaps the only movie that you get the sense of a big, bad alien threat and the technology seems both real & dangerous (both Warp Drive & the Transporter). I know Nick Meyer made some fairly big dramatic choices in TWOK that not everyone agreed with but I dont think it takes anything away from what happened before. I enjoy both films in different ways.
In fact I enjoy all 10 of them (well, maybe not Nemesis
).
True, and I could have coped with more colourful uniforms, but for me personally the Enterprise has never looked better than in TMP. Also, I've always disliked the shambolic way a lot of US sci fi hierarchies operate e.g. the way some of the TOS crew fall to pieces in a crisis. It works great in a show like Firefly but the Brit in me likes my nice neat command structure so it was nice to see something more efficient and professional. The spirit of adventure need not be born from incompetence.
Would TMP Kirk have left the shields down for as long as Kirk in TWoK? He could always say that he was using the opportunity to teach the trainees emergency protocols if it might be viewed as an insult by his colleague.
I think the goal with TMP was to bring a more modern and realistic flavor to ST rather than the flamboyant, stagey bombast of '60s TV. Roddenberry wanted TOS to be a naturalistic show, and you can see that particularly in the early first season -- but what constituted naturalism in 1966 was more melodramatic than what constituted naturalism by the standards of 1979 audiences, and TOS got more melodramatic as it went on. If you look at Robert Wise's The Andromeda Strain, it feels very grounded and documentary-like. If it feels emotionally sterile, it's because it was a story about professionals doing their work, and that tends to be a relatively undramatic thing to watch in real life. TMP was going for the same thing, that sense of matter-of-fact naturalism and orderly professionalism. That's what Roddenberry wanted the Enterprise crew to be: not larger-than-life cosmic heroes, but professionals doing a job that happened to be in space.
I'm not sure I agree it was a good idea for TWOK to try to "recapture" the flavor of a '60s television show instead of maturing it with the times. Meyer deserves credit for getting naturalistic performances out of the actors in a lot of the film, but I feel TWOK is often ludicrously melodramatic, to the point of cartoonishness. It feels like trying too hard to capture the surface feel of TOS rather than respecting the underlying goal of creating naturalism, and I think that may be missing the point. It makes it feel retro instead of cutting-edge. And I think that laid the groundwork for things like Rick Berman keeping his ST shows strictly conventional in their style of cinematography and acting even while the medium grew and evolved around them. It led to Star Trek being seen as something grounded in the past instead of the future. And I'm not sure that did the franchise a favor.
I'm not sure I agree it was a good idea for TWOK to try to "recapture" the flavor of a '60s television show instead of maturing it with the times. Meyer deserves credit for getting naturalistic performances out of the actors in a lot of the film, but I feel TWOK is often ludicrously melodramatic, to the point of cartoonishness. It feels like trying too hard to capture the surface feel of TOS rather than respecting the underlying goal of creating naturalism, and I think that may be missing the point. It makes it feel retro instead of cutting-edge. And I think that laid the groundwork for things like Rick Berman keeping his ST shows strictly conventional in their style of cinematography and acting even while the medium grew and evolved around them. It led to Star Trek being seen as something grounded in the past instead of the future. And I'm not sure that did the franchise a favor.
Christopher, this is a most interesting analysis but perhaps should be spun off into its own thread.
Imagine if TMP didn't have to meet the 12/7/79 deadline, if the Robert Abel effects had been good, the editing process hadn't been rushed, etc. How would Star Trek have developed if TMP had been an unqualified success? Would there have been further movies in the "Andromeda Strain template"? Perhaps a more conventional antagonist would have to be introduced at some point in any such movie series...
Keep in mind also that TMP was a G-rated picture intended to please all audiences - hence no phaser fire, etc. - whereas TWoK evidently intended to please the fans first and foremost (being a sequel to a specific episode) and arguably ended up pleasing a wider audience than TMP did.
I really enjoyed the naturalism in very early TOS episodes - such as the sleeping-pills exchange in "The Man Trap" and Kirk's "Green leaves!?" scene in "The Corbomite Maneuver" - and wish it had continued.
Imagine if TMP didn't have to meet the 12/7/79 deadline, if the Robert Abel effects had been good, the editing process hadn't been rushed, etc. How would Star Trek have developed if TMP had been an unqualified success? Would there have been further movies in the "Andromeda Strain template"? Perhaps a more conventional antagonist would have to be introduced at some point in any such movie series...
Keep in mind also that TMP was a G-rated picture intended to please all audiences - hence no phaser fire, etc. - whereas TWoK evidently intended to please the fans first and foremost (being a sequel to a specific episode) and arguably ended up pleasing a wider audience than TMP did.
I really enjoyed the naturalism in very early TOS episodes - such as the sleeping-pills exchange in "The Man Trap" and Kirk's "Green leaves!?" scene in "The Corbomite Maneuver" - and wish it had continued.
I think the two onscreen references you are looking for are in The Wrath of Khan.
Khan says to Captain Terrell:
"You are in a position to demand nothing, sir. I, on the other hand, am in a position to grant...nothing. What you see is all that remains of the ship's company and the crew of the Botany Bay, marooned here fifteen years ago by Captain James T. Kirk."
Also, later, Kirk tells Dr. Carol Marcus:
"There's a man I haven't seen in fifteen years who thinks he's killed me. You show me a son who'd almost be happy to help him. My son. My life that could have been--and wasn't. What am I feeling? I'm feeling old--worn out."
So both Khan and Kirk seem to characterize the events of "Space Seed" as taking place about fifteen years before The Wrath of Khan. (I don't know how precise they were being during these emotional events.)
As was pointed out, fifteen years is about how much time had elapsed between filming "Space Seed" in 1966 and The Wrath of Khan in 1981.
I don't claim that ST films would've been more successful had they been more sophisticated and erudite. That's not the way these things generally work. I actually commented on this in an article in Star Trek Magazine #23 (#150 UK) last year:
Call me elitist, but I would've rather seen cinematic ST remain smart and classy and in the vein of 2001 or Silent Running than be turned into an action franchise dominated by space battles.
I don't agree that TWOK was targeted primarily at Trek fans. No movie can ever succeed that way, since the dedicated fanbase for any franchise is going to be much smaller than the audience size a movie needs to be profitable -- and the Trek fanbase was probably even smaller at the time than it became as a result of TWOK and TNG. After all, TWOK was produced and directed by people who weren't particularly familiar with Star Trek. They wanted to appeal to the fanbase, yes, but not exclusively to that fanbase. As with every other SF film that came out following 1977, the makers of TWOK were trying to ride the coattails of Star Wars, to capture some fraction of its audience. TMP tried to be like Star Wars by being a big-budget, FX-laden tentpole, but TWOK tried to be like Star Wars by telling a more visceral, character-driven story with ILM-produced space battles.
Bennett and Meyer didn't just choose to do a sequel to any old Trek episode, they picked an episode that they thought could be the basis for a film with a lot of appeal for movie audiences in general because it featured a strong villain. I mean, heck, I'm not sure if "Space Seed" would've ranked quite so high among Trek fans before TWOK came along. If it had been all about catering to the preferences of the Trek fanbase, they would've made a sequel to "City on the Edge" or "The Trouble with Tribbles."
The thing that gets me about "The Man Trap" is how much eating and talk about food is going on throughout the episode. I'm not sure if that was meant to be thematic/ironic or if it was just meant to reflect everyday life.
I think TMP captures some of that degree of workplace detail that early TOS had. Throughout the film, especially in the Director's Edition, there are people in the background doing stuff and chattering and giving reports and slipping through closing doors and such, and it just gives the world of the film a wonderfully rich texture.
I'm not a Brit (save in allegiance of the heart and spirit) but I couldn't agree more with the use of "shambolic." My touchstone of professional efficiency has always been the R.N.
Not even my beloved U.S.N. has managed to attain that particular pitch of professionalism. (Success, Yes. So please don't hate on me!) Starfleet falls far, far short of that particular ideal.
We know as of Season 3, there were at a minimum of three doctors on board the the Enterprise; McCoy, M'Benga, and Dr. Sanchez, who was performing the autopsy on Ensign Wyatt (That Which Survives). I would think that Helen Noel would primarily serve the mental health needs of the crew. She may not have been aboard all that long, maybe serving on a 6 or 8 month assignment as part of McCoy's staff. All we know for sure is that she was at last year's X-mas party and had some sort of holiday cheer with Kirk
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