In The 23rd Century . . .

Yeah. I think the whole thing can be rationalized (however unnecessarily) by saying:

- Trelane's planet is 900 light years from Earth.

- Trelane has seen human culture from as recently as his most recent artifacts and music indicate.

- Our heroes made a simplistic assumption about a "viewing scope" based on their complete failure to accurately estimate the age of Trelane's many cultural artifacts.

 

Hmh? Surely two millennia would be needed for the transition from humdrum everyday interaction to pure myth...

Okay, Christianity did it a bit faster - but mainly by virtue of the myth being born in locations far removed from the actual events. Here the actual Greeks themselves would have to forget the truth about the gods first and then create this myth in its place.

...And as for the middle point, Trelane's planet is mobile, outrunning a starship. He may have viewed Napoleon when the planet was 400 lightyears from Earth, but the castle from a different location.

Timo Saloniemi

 

Good point! So he still has the viewing scope time lag problem, which Kirk chides him for in the dialogue, but his Earth observations are from many points in space.

 

Yes, that is a good point.

 

I know this was expounded upon in the prologue section of the TMP novelization, but did Roddenberry have this type of concept from the beginning of Trek?

Kor

 

According to Herb Solow in Inside Star Trek, when Roddenberry first came to him with the idea, Solow proposed modeling it on Gulliver's Travels -- a story told in the format of a traveler's account of his adventures after the fact. Solow believed that the TV audience, accustomed to Westerns and historical dramas, would have more trouble buying into a story set in the future, and that it would help them accept it if it were presented as "something that had already happened." So he proposed presenting the series as history, as if the whole thing were being narrated in flashback by the captain years after the fact. That evolved into the idea of using the captain's log to frame the show. Though it was actually Solow's idea, it evidently stuck with Roddenberry long enough that he based his presentation of the TMP novelization on a similar premise.

 

^ And other shows followed that lead as well:

Spoiler: show

Babylon 5, which is apparently a 'holodeck' style re-creation of historical events, done by the Rangers, decades after the fact

 

Yes - Squire of Gothos is the one and the evidence goes something like:

A: Gothos is about 900 light years from Earth in a "space desert.
B: Trelane was acting and dressing as if it was the early 19th century.
C: Spock observed that Trelane must be using light-speed limited tech to observe Earth and therefore was 900 years off.

Meaning, Star Trek was taking place around the early 28th century!

 

Except it wasn't Spock but some random bloke whose specialty was meteorology. And it wasn't the early 19th century, but a hodgepodge of eras, with Trelane's costume being more of the 18th or 17th century vein and his lodgings of the 13th century or earlier, while some of his national-historical curios were newer than Napoleon.

But yes, the writer of that episode thought TOS was early-to-mid 28th century. It's just that we can trivially ignore him.

Timo Saloniemi

 

Exactly! It is actually as simple as that. Plus people are forgetting too that there was not only the salt vampire but the bird-like creature from The Cage. So there was a mish mash of different time periods but the predominant time period was the 13th or 14th century (medieval times) and that is what Yeager was focused on. The castle, the torches,the statues, the armor ,the swords, and some of the furnishings.

 

The problem is that different people here are addressing different questions. One is what writer Paul Schneider intended -- which was quite clearly that the show was taking place in the 28th century -- and the other is whether it's possible to rationalize the lines in the context of Trek chronology as we now understand it. I suppose the "Jaeger meant medieval times" justification is a decent one, but I just think it's simpler to recognize it as a continuity error and disregard the whole thing. After all, nobody ever refuted the initial assumption that Trelane was limited by lightspeed observation, even after it became clear that he was aware of 19th-century events.

 

Not really what your primarily focusing on in your comment, but there's an interesting piece on Trelane's dress (see below) which reveals the error of my impression of it dating from the Regency period. I suppose the references to Napoleon, Trelane's pistols (which actually are 1871 vintage), and Yeoman Ross's gown are also part of the mashup of styles and periods.


http://www.startrekpropauthority.com/2014/08/special-photo-study-star-trek-original.html

 

All of which puts me very much in mind of Flint.

Interesting.

 

The writers never thought it would last so many decades thats why it was most likely vague and the eugenic wars took place in the 90s.

 

I always found that odd because, given Khan's age, the Eugenics program should have been in full swing in the 1960s.

 

Eugenics first caught on in the late 19th century, and there were a number of attempts to breed a "superior race" throughout the early 20th century, until the Nazis came along, took the philosophy to its extreme, and pretty much soured everyone on the idea. Keep in mind that the term "genetic engineering" wasn't applied to Khan until TWOK in 1982; in "Space Seed," the supermen were said to be the result of selective breeding. I tend to assume that Carey Wilber was postulating that one of those eugenics programs from the late 19th or early 20th century actually worked as advertised, and kept at it long enough that they were able to breed superhumans after a few generations. Which is almost plausible. The real eugenics programs failed because they were founded in the racist assumption that "superior" meant "white" and that the goal was racial purity, when any first-year biology student knows about hybrid vigor and the dangers of inbreeding. Khan's people were stated to be multiethnic; if a eugenics program had been based in good genetic science rather than racist circular reasoning, maybe it could've actually had some real results, though it probably would've taken a few centuries longer than shown.

 

I gather the Eugenics Wars (McCoy uses a plural) might also encompass the entire late 19th through mid-21st century period simply because eugenics ITRW already cover much of that and Trek adds datapoints for both the 1990s (Khan and fellow Augments) and the 2050s (Green). WWII certainly would befit that catchy name, from a simplified point of view people a couple of centuries in the future are likely to have...

As regards Khan specifically, he may be younger than Montalban looks. His apparent kids in ST2 look older than they "should", after all; accelerated maturity would be useful for superpeople and their creators. This doesn't mean the program to create him would have been significantly more recent, of course - the first generations in the program wouldn't have matured faster than average folks.

Timo Saloniemi

 

I never gave it much thought, but it strikes me that Trelane probably wasn't interested in historical accuracy as much as just having cool stuff to play with. He was just a bratty little kid, you know.