Star Trek XI - Canon violation by canon violation
- Thread starter S'kai
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Careful ... you'll use up all your good material.
The Gregorian/Christian dating system has always been used in every iteration of Trek, and even by aliens. Just because stardates didn't originally adhere to that system (largely because stardates were made up), doesn't preclude that they can't be used as stardates. But to be honest, that was just a theory I had...one which I don't even really care for myself. The only reason why stardates were changed to Gregorian dates was for the casual viewing audience. Stardate 64369.8 would be meaningless to the casual viewer; stardate 2387 would not.
Urban legend though it may be, I definitely would have preferred the original idea: that the destroyed ship was the original Enterprise (as it appeared in TOS), with Robert April in command.
Chekov's age.... maybe TOS Chekov experienced some relativistic time dilation which his alternate self didn't? One long journey at near light speed, and both Chekovs can have the dame birthdate but different ages. Ta daa!
Stardates.... meaningless numbers become understandable numbers. It goes back to my Gorn analogy - if a Gorn is a fearsome lizard monster and not a guy in a bad rubber suit, than a stardate is a stardate, whether it means anything to the viewer or not.
Kirk's birth.... In STIV says he says he is "From Iowa", which would be true even if he spent his first few days of his life in a shuttle or ship headed for Earth.
Stardates.... meaningless numbers become understandable numbers. It goes back to my Gorn analogy - if a Gorn is a fearsome lizard monster and not a guy in a bad rubber suit, than a stardate is a stardate, whether it means anything to the viewer or not.
Kirk's birth.... In STIV says he says he is "From Iowa", which would be true even if he spent his first few days of his life in a shuttle or ship headed for Earth.
I think my theory is better.
As I said before, the stardates were changed to regular dates for the benefit of the audience, for exactly the reason that those meaningless numbers would actually have some meaning to the lay person.
So was it ever mentioned in televised Trek that Kirk was born in Iowa, or is this yet another Trek urban legend, like that Spock was the first Vulcan in Starfleet?
Actually, I kind of like KingDaniel's suggestion. There's not enough recognition of time dilation effects in Star Trek. There have been several times when a starship was stranded in the past and needed a way home that would have worked just fine using relativistic time distortions instead of rubber science.
The impression one gets from Trek is that starships can go very fast at sublight velocities ... in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, the Enterprise appears to move at a significant fraction of c just out of spacedock. If a starship can get to 95 - 99% of the speed of light and sustain that for long enough, they could easily leapfrog years.
I just like the idea that the divergence of the Abramsverse with the prime timeline would have occurred via the TOS Enterprise. And I'd like to see how they'd render that ship with modern SFX.
They are called a stardates (not an earthdates) for a reason. Sure, they may have originally existed to blur ST's relative location in time. But they also represent the fact that parochial humans are now part of a multi species Federation that definitely wouldn’t use our dating system, unless perhaps it was called the Terrain Empire. Even then keeping it may have proved impractical.
OK, since modern Trek is just the early 21st century with spaceships, the audience could be forgiven for assuming the familiar looking four digit numbers (ignoring decimal places) might have some relationship to our own dating system. But I don’t think there is actually any other reason to do so. Does anyone in the movie actually say what year stardates start from or how long such a date/year is? If not then they are just as meaningless as "real" (traditional) stardates. Personally I now believe that the Star Trek takes place over 2200 years (of unknown length) in the future!
The silly thing is there was obviously no need to change them and not doing so would have added a certain exotic but subtle quality which is now sorely missing from the "modernised" franchise (green women accepted). Spock Prime only needed to say he was from 129 earth years in the future and the audience would have been up to speed irrespective of where that was relative to 2009. As you can imagine, I am tempted to describe the decision to used boring-dates as just another thoughtless, unnecessary, condescending and regressive part of JTrek, but that might sound a little negative, so I won't.
Good call. Showing the red and blue shift of the stars into halos fore and aft would give the CGI guys something interesting to do as well.
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It's the same reason why no one (other than a few random Klingon phrases) speaks anything other than English. It has nothing to do with "humans being part of a multi-species Federation." It has to do with the ease of the television/movie viewer's experience, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with it. To say that the use of regular dates for stardates is some kind of affront to Trek fans everywhere and yet another example of why JJ Abrams is the Star Trek antichrist is just silly.
If someone wants to take issue with the way stardates were used in this film, fine. But to recognize it as some kind of canon violation is unwarranted IMHO.
Congratulations on not being so negative about JTrek.
But it is a continuity violation. The Jellyfish is from the timeline we've all watched for the past forty-five years. The stardate format from that timeline does not match up with what the Jellyfish uses. Of course, the possibility exists that the Jellyfish and Spock are not from the timeline we've all been watching for the last four and a half decades.
I find it easier to call it a continuity violation. It would all be academic if they had simply done a hard reboot to begin with.
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It was memtioned above that the Spock Prime in the movie could have been from another timeline.
I gree and think that could be possible and sound intersting when you think about it.
What if the Spock prime we see in the 2009 film is infact from another time line.
Then in the Star Trek time we all know exisits for the last fourty something years. The Romulan sun does not explode. Spock does not go and try to fix the problem with Red Matter. Spock prime is still there and is now the ambasador of Vulcon.
We can call it the Star Trek Prime timeline....
Just think about.
I gree and think that could be possible and sound intersting when you think about it.
What if the Spock prime we see in the 2009 film is infact from another time line.
Then in the Star Trek time we all know exisits for the last fourty something years. The Romulan sun does not explode. Spock does not go and try to fix the problem with Red Matter. Spock prime is still there and is now the ambasador of Vulcon.
We can call it the Star Trek Prime timeline....
Just think about.
And totally undermine the whole point of Nimoy's cameo?
[Hudson]Romulus is gone. Game over man, game over![/Hudson]
Again I will point out that the Jellyfish comes from eight years after Nemesis. Eight years that we know absolutely nothing about. For all we know, in 2385, Starfleet decided to change the stardate system. It's not like the system hasn't changed before.
And again I will point out that this is not a theory that I particularly care for. But it is a possibility, as opposed to just flat-out saying that continuity/canon/whatever has been violated.
Thought about it. And it makes absolutely no sense.
"Hey all you Trek fans, this is Leonard Nimoy, and I'll be playing Spock in the new movie. However, my character isn't actually the same Spock from the TV show that you all know and love, but rather some other Spock from some other alternate universe that you've never heard of before and don't really give a shit about. And if you're not already completely confused by that, I end up creating yet another universe for some other Spock who's younger than me to live in. Got all that? There will be a test later."
You know, I never heard this theory before.
Why couldn't someone else have suggested this in the last three years?
But the Jellyfish isn't a Starfleet ship...
It was built by the Vulcan Science Academy. Whether intentional or not, it is a violation.
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