Any connection between Battle of Axanar and Battle of Donatu V?

[blssdwlf]

According "The Undiscovered Country", "70 years of unremitting hostility with the Klingons" were about to come to an end. So that would put a potential Klingon conflict 20 years prior to Donatu-5 if TUC occurred in the mid-2290s.

Just so we're clear, the hostilities started 20 years prior to Donatu V and continued up until TUC, correct? So Donatu V would have been part of that hostile period, since "unremitting" means "never slackening or stopping; unceasing; constant". Which doesn't take into account the enforced peace of the Organian Peace Treaty in 2267, of course ;-/

I find it hard to beleive that the Federation was in a constant state of war for 70 years, since the Enterprise, the pride of Starfleet, saw relatively little action against the Klingons. so I guess the idea of the Cold War with various flareups makes the most sense.

Well even during the Organian Peace Treaty the Klingons were still...

• Poisoning grain supplies ("Trouble with Tribbles")
• Sabotaging the Enterprise's warp engines to make it look like an accident and then decided to just outright attack the ship. ("Elaan of Troyius")
• Sneaking across the neutral zone to destroy the Grissom and attack the Enterprise ("The Search for Spock"). (When did the Organian treaty end anyway? )

And that's the incidents that we're aware of...

From the Federation's POV, it probably was "unremitting" and "hostile"...

 

[ghoyle1]

KIRK: How does he manage to change form at will?
CORY: The people of Antos taught him the techniques of cellular metamorphosis to restore the destroyed parts of his body. By himself, he later learned to use the technique to recreate himself into any form he wished.

Garth was being ravaged by some type of disease that was cured through what the Antos taught him. He was able to restore destroyed body parts and with some thought alter is physical appearance. That can put him in potential immortal territory.

Or let's backtrack a bit. How old should Garth be?

Joins academy at age 17 or 18.
Graduates at 23-24.
Has an awesome career that is required reading at the Academy. That could be a few years to a few decades.
Kirk joins Academy ~17 years prior to episode

So Garth at the minimum would be 24+ 5? + 17 = 46 years old or much older given his career and exploits.

But he looks pretty good for his age, whatever it might be

http://tos.trekcore.com/hd/albums/3x14hd/whomgodsdestroyhd0085.jpg

Certainly he could be immortal after he learned cellular metamorphosis, but probably not before. At a guess, I'd say he's probably a contemporary of Matt Decker or Commodore Wesley (from "The Ultimate Computer"), or a little older. Probably not as old as Robert April (TAS, "The Counter-Clock Incident"), but that's just a hunch, and far from canonical.

This is all just idle speculation on my part, BTW; I don't have a story in mind or an axe to grind.

Guy

 

[Hartzilla2007]

According "The Undiscovered Country", "70 years of unremitting hostility with the Klingons" were about to come to an end. So that would put a potential Klingon conflict 20 years prior to Donatu-5 if TUC occurred in the mid-2290s.

Just so we're clear, the hostilities started 20 years prior to Donatu V and continued up until TUC, correct? So Donatu V would have been part of that hostile period, since "unremitting" means "never slackening or stopping; unceasing; constant". Which doesn't take into account the enforced peace of the Organian Peace Treaty in 2267, of course ;-/

I find it hard to beleive that the Federation was in a constant state of war for 70 years, since the Enterprise, the pride of Starfleet, saw relatively little action against the Klingons. so I guess the idea of the Cold War with various flareups makes the most sense.

Well even during the Organian Peace Treaty the Klingons were still...

• Poisoning grain supplies ("Trouble with Tribbles")
• Sabotaging the Enterprise's warp engines to make it look like an accident and then decided to just outright attack the ship. ("Elaan of Troyius")
• Sneaking across the neutral zone to destroy the Grissom and attack the Enterprise ("The Search for Spock"). (When did the Organian treaty end anyway? )

And that's the incidents that we're aware of...

From the Federation's POV, it probably was "unremitting" and "hostile"...

Don't forget that little proxy war they started up in "A Private Little War".

 

[ghoyle1]

Yeah, I think the Treaty of Organia was honored more in the breach than anything else.

 

[blssdwlf]

LOL Yeah. No axe to grind from me either. Just wanted to throw out other data points. I think as others have said, those TOS dates and descriptions are specific enough to be interesting but vague enough to be anything

 

[Potemkin_Prod]

Garth might not be Human. He's Garth of Izar.

 

[T'Girl]

^^^ Garth to Kirk: You Earth people are a stiff necked lot, aren't you?

 

[Captain Robert April]

Just means he's not from Earth, doesn't mean he's not human.

Getting back to the age matter, he was a starship captain before Kirk was even a cadet, so we're talking at least fifteen years difference, probably closer to twenty. The regeneration thing does point to Garth making himself more youthful than he would be normally, but I think we're talking somewhere in his fifties.

It'd be tempting, from a fanfic perspective, to have Garth, in his younger days, serve as April's helmsman, but then we're getting into small-universe syndrome...

 

[ghoyle1]

Garth might not be Human. He's Garth of Izar.

Garth is an Earth name. It's of Scandinavian origin, and means "Keeper of the Garden". If he looks human and has a human name, there's a good chance he's human. ("Spock" is, of course, of Earth origin as well, but this just means that there's a Vulcan name that coincides with an earth name; of course, it could be a family name that Amanda chose, as well.)

Just because he's Garth "of Izar", doesn't mean that he's not human. Zephram Cochrane was called "Zephram Cochrane of Alpha Centauri", but he's human. (I know that there was speculation for a long time that he was a native of Apha Centauri, but, c'mon... Zephram and Cochrane are BOTH Earth names!)

At any rate, we don't know what Izar is, except for a place name associated with Captain Garth.

 

[ghoyle1]

^^^ Garth to Kirk: You Earth people are a stiff necked lot, aren't you?

That DOES mean that he's not from Earth, but it doesn't prove that he's not human. There are plenty of Earth colonies in the Federation and beyond.

 

[Timo]

Note that not just Garth but Kirk, too, was considered a notable military hero. When Garth makes the accusation, Kirk admits to being mostly an explorer "now"; his halfhearted failure to deny his military past would suggest the line was written to convey false modesty, to paint Kirk as a really significant former war hero truly on par with Garth.

It's just that we don't know of a war that Kirk could have fought. It would have to have been very recent, because Kirk is young and decidedly human. Garth might have fought in the same war, considering how Axanar ties to it (first a bloody battlefield, then a location of reconciliation - or perhaps an enemy the Feds couldn't defeat with arms, so they tried with peace missions instead), and that might necessitate a long conflict, one that had started before Kirk's cadet days but extended to Kirk's commanding days, and only thereafter transmuted to a series of peace missions.

The idea of a Four-Year War is okay with me - as long as it doesn't become a lone instance of Klingon/UFP fighting amidst general peace. Indeed, when Donatu V is mentioned, it's not suggested to be an isolated incident, either; the spirit in "Trouble with Tribbles" is one of an ongoing conflict, setting the stage for the ensuing villainy. Probably there were battles of Donatu level every three years or so at the very least.

As for the whole "serving as brothers" thing, one idea suggested for it has been that Vulcans stayed out of Garth's big fight initially, but agreed to aggression at a long last thanks to Axanar, thereby (re-)uniting the respective species of Kirk and Spock in Starfleet. Another is the FASA/"Final Reflection" thing where the Klingon threat was making half the UFP secede initially, but the war related to Axanar made everybody realize that the only hope for security from Klingons lay in military unity within the UFP. Both of these explanations allow for a pre-existing "brotherhood" that was only temporarily lost, possibly because of the war part of Axanar, and then regained, apparently because of the peace part of Axanar.

As for the war/peace dichotomy of the place, one might assume the writer was once again speaking about the US foreign policy of the time. Should commie nations in Southeast Asia be invaded, or converted to western thinking with Peace Corps missions? The FASA thing would carry the analogy further, with the Klingons essentially fighting a proxy war by having the primitive Axanari join their cause out of ignorance, with the Feds winning the proxy war and then proceeding with a Peace Corps invasion that brought the Axanari primitives to the UFP fold. All ENT changes here is that the Axanari are slightly less primitive technologically than FASA made them be... They could still be opposed to the Federation ways, and their hearts and minds would only be won with peace missions.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Wingsley]

Well, we don't know what species Garth is, but we can assume he's at least humanoid if not human. Any TREK character becoming a metamorph does present interesting possibilities as far as what the character's abilities are, but assuming a metamorph is automatically immortal does seem a bit of a leap. The Founders of the Dominion were certainly mortal; Odo did manage to kill one in the Defiant's engine room, after all.

FWIW, count me in as assuming that Fleet Captain Garth was at least a humanoid. Izar could either be an alien world populated by humanoids who are friendly to the Federation, or it could be a frontier colony populated by Terrans in the 22nd or 23rd century. Either works for me.

The idealism thing is an ongoing phenomenon in Federation history, probably born out of the desire by Captain Archer and other Terrans to "reach any star". I wouldn't be surprised in Zephrem Cochrane himself may have unwittingly started the movement Kirk spoke of with the founding of the Warp 5 Project. So it probably started in the 22nd century, and then flourished in the 23rd. Axanar was likely one of those key moments in Federation history when it resonated.

 

[blssdwlf]

^^ It's a small leap to think of Garth as "potentially immortal" in the terms of being able to regenerate damaged body parts on his own. He would be immune to aging and to some extent capable of repairing himself from some (but not all) damage.

 

[T'Girl]

Governor. Cory told Kirk that "The people of Antos taught him the techniques of cellular metamorphosis to restore the destroyed parts of his body." It would seem obvious that the Antos people also possessed this ability, in order for them to teach it to someone else. But could they teach it to just any species? Or would Garth, and by extension Garth's species, have to have a previous natural ability in this area. Which might go toward suggesting that Garth isn't a Human.

" later [Garth] learned to use the techniques of cellular metamorphosis to recreate himself into any form he wished." which might mean that he went beyond the abilities of even the Antos people. Implying that Garth's species were latent shape-shifters, perhaps not even realizing it.

-----------

It also occurs to me that Garth basically would have had to have been naked and barefoot through the majority of the episode, remember whenever Garth changed his appearance, his clothing and footwear also changed. I figure those were not his clothes, that was Garth's skin. When you saw Garth in his flowing robes, yep that was him adopting baggy skin.

 

[kkozoriz1]

I'm glad he wasn't wearing a tie!

 

[Wingsley]

^ This adds new meaning to the old quip, "Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me???"

 

[blssdwlf]

@T'Girl - Eeeeewwww.

 

[ghoyle1]

Governor. Cory told Kirk that "The people of Antos taught him the techniques of cellular metamorphosis to restore the destroyed parts of his body." It would seem obvious that the Antos people also possessed this ability, in order for them to teach it to someone else. But could they teach it to just any species? Or would Garth, and by extension Garth's species, have to have a previous natural ability in this area. Which might go toward suggesting that Garth isn't a Human.

Or, it might not; without knowing more about the Antosian cellular metamorphosis techniques, we really can't say who they can teach 'em to and who they can't. Maybe the Antosians are humanoid themselves, who discovered a technique for CM? Maybe it's a latent power in all humanoids, or even all species, that can be trained. (I've read more than one story where scientists learn the regenerative abilities of lizards, starfish, etc., with generally ghastly processes). I think if their intent had been to make Garth an alien, they would have definitely made him an obvious alien (like Dr. Severin or Tongo Rad, from Way to Eden), given Starfleet's bias towards human starship captains and crews over the course of the series. It's all speculation without further facts. If it's important for a story you're writing, then go with it. For me, Garth as a human works sufficiently well.

I have far fewer qualms about shapechangers being long-lived, though I could also argue that the stress of changing shape might also shorten life, as well.

 

[Santa Kang]

Garth might not be Human. He's Garth of Izar.

Garth is an Earth name. It's of Scandinavian origin, and means "Keeper of the Garden". If he looks human and has a human name, there's a good chance he's human. ("Spock" is, of course, of Earth origin as well, but this just means that there's a Vulcan name that coincides with an earth name; of course, it could be a family name that Amanda chose, as well.)

Just because he's Garth "of Izar", doesn't mean that he's not human. Zephram Cochrane was called "Zephram Cochrane of Alpha Centauri", but he's human. (I know that there was speculation for a long time that he was a native of Apha Centauri, but, c'mon... Zephram and Cochrane are BOTH Earth names!)

At any rate, we don't know what Izar is, except for a place name associated with Captain Garth.

There's no shortage of Aliens with human sounding names in Star Trek:

Sargon
Nerys
Balok
Landru
Sylvia
Hengist

To name but a few.

 

[ghoyle1]

Garth might not be Human. He's Garth of Izar.

Garth is an Earth name. It's of Scandinavian origin, and means "Keeper of the Garden". If he looks human and has a human name, there's a good chance he's human. ("Spock" is, of course, of Earth origin as well, but this just means that there's a Vulcan name that coincides with an earth name; of course, it could be a family name that Amanda chose, as well.)

Just because he's Garth "of Izar", doesn't mean that he's not human. Zephram Cochrane was called "Zephram Cochrane of Alpha Centauri", but he's human. (I know that there was speculation for a long time that he was a native of Apha Centauri, but, c'mon... Zephram and Cochrane are BOTH Earth names!)

At any rate, we don't know what Izar is, except for a place name associated with Captain Garth.

There's no shortage of Aliens with human sounding names in Star Trek:

Sargon
Nerys
Balok
Landru
Sylvia
Hengist

To name but a few.

Having an Earth name alone doesn't make Garth human, but he looks human, has an Earth name (as do many people from Earth), was a Starship Captain at a time when human male starship captains were prominent, he was apparently familiar with Earth culture, and was never revealed to be an alien. I'm simply saying that the evidence, while inconclusive doesn't rule out that he's a human of earth descent; calling him "Garth of Izar" is ambiguous enough to support conflicting interpretations, so it isn't definitive proof of extraterrestrial origin.

And I think it's very annoying that there are so many aliens out there in Star Trek eisodes and novels with human names (especially McKenzie Calhoun).