Did Kirk command the Enterprise for a while after TMP?
- Thread starter The Rock
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And hopefully different communicators than the giant clunky things they ended up using.
I'm pretty sure it is 1966 to 1981 more than any time frame for the characters.
I've never really liked those either. But there's an interesting story behind those props, with them re-purposing army walkie talkies from the Vietnam War era.
Kor
In the Menagerie, Kirk says he took over Enterprise from Pike, so probably no interim commander.
Of course, this is correct, it's also why Morrow thinks Enterprise is twenty years old in TSFS. I think the movie writers maybe weren't as familiar with the fine details so just used real life dating.
I don't know, the TWOK uniforms are a pretty strong indicator he wasn't particularly attached to the Trek esthetic.
Well, of course the assumption is if he had a bigger budget then he would be free to spend it.
We know he probably wasn't a fan of the forced perspective Engineering set, and dropped the blast door as soon as possible to free up additional camera angles. It's fun to speculate how he would have changed other things. I can see a bridge where the captain's chair and helm console are moved to a raised platform in the back of the room to better mirror the quarterdeck of a sailing ship, which actually would have been kind of cool. I also wonder if he would have had a torpedo room similar to the one in Into Darkness for firing broadsides at another ship.
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Five Year Missions, the USS Olympia in DS9 had a 8! year mission, and in Voy Kim has a 4 year one in some alt timeline.
More fanon stuff has stuff like three year missions, one year missions, six months, etc.
There's also those weird Deep Space Explorers in the Beta? Quadrant that VOY is told about; dunno who are on those and their missions would be what, 25 years ongoing?
Dunno why TOS has five year missions, I guess Starfleet is just bored at the time and the alternative is just being on border duty or showing the flag off for something like the Connie.
Re the communicators, according to Memory Alpha: "These were essentially recycled Vietnam War walkie-talkie units, stripped of paint and coated with chrome. "It was what Paramount wanted," stated The Making of Trek Films, 3rd ed., p. 29). I guess they wanted them as cheap as possible, without having to create them from scratch.
Well, at a guess, in Tos time, a 5 year mission was a typical outing for a ship between refits, so while the Tos Enterprise went far and back, it still had crew replacements/transfers, dock time, etc.
in Tng time, Riker and the Titan's mission is a "real" mission in deep deep space, hundreds of light years away.
in Tng time, Riker and the Titan's mission is a "real" mission in deep deep space, hundreds of light years away.
That's more or less the point of my original post. We don't know that 5 year missions were the norm, or even common. Kirk says "these are the voyages of the starship Enterprise...its five year mission...", so it might just have been Kirk and crew assigned a 5 year stint on Enterprise. It could also have been all the Connies, or all the deep space explorer ships in general which were assigned 5 year missions. Try as I might, though, I can't think of a compelling reason that a 5 year mission would be a standard assignment. So when we talk about additional missions for Kirk, or for that matter any of the other commanders, it's a lot more complex than fitting in round multiples of 5.
I actually don't really like the idea of having 5YMs over and over again. It seemed the writers got it in their head that because the original series took place over a 5 year mission that was standard practice for decades in the latter half of the 23rd century. Now it seems to have been retroactively been added to Pike's time as Captain, and even April's time before that, and in non-canon source to after TMP.
Personally, I'd rather think the 5YM was a program Starfleet tried in the 2260s, that they designed their ships and complemented their crews accordingly. Before that I figure they could maybe have missions of varying duration. 2, 3 years depending on where they were going. In fact, I always used to figure "Where No Man Has Gone Before" was actually pre-5YM. One of the novels, "My Brothers Keeper" has the Enterprise returning to spacedock after WNMHGB to have upgrades and crew replacements in preparation for its 5YM (which also served to explain the production design changes and crew shifts). In story, it makes sense, there was a noticeable change in design between that and "The Corbomite Maneuver" so I actually always figured there was a refit in between.
And after TMP why not have a 6 or 7 YM. Or maybe the ship went on missions with differing timelines depending on where they were going.
In fact, I would think having a static time frame for a mission doesn't make a lot of sense. If you are going to explore a part of the galaxy, depending on where you are going, maybe you'd need less time, or more time. I can see it as a program to determine how long a starship can stay on a mission before returning for a refit. But over and over again never made a lot of sense to me.
Yeah, studios don't like to just waste money. And I have to imagine if Meyer had more money he'd spend it on things he wanted but didn't already have. I just always took his attitude to be 'if I created the ship it would like this.....but I didn't so this is what I have to work with'. I didn't necessarily take it to mean if he had money he would design all new sets. And of all the complaints I've read about TMP, usually this ship design is not one of them. In fact I've seen a number of fans that have said it was their favorite ship. But I can honestly say I never heard anyone say "damn, that bridge design totally ruined TMP for me" (of course someone will probably say it did now
)Yeah, I think we can take 15 Earth years at face value. I mean, maybe give or take a year, sometimes people round it out. And I don't think the writers would have written 15 years if that's not what they intended.
Yeah, that was a bit of a miss. But understandable, esp. since there was no Memory Alpha to check on things back then. In the collected books "Mere Anarchy" Morrow makes an appearance and the book noted he was horrible at keeping track of years, hence, in story his confusion. It's a stretch, granted, but what can you do. He said 20 years when it really was about 40 years old. But it was amusing.
As an aside there was a nice scene in that story where the retired Morrow and Spock are just starting to negotiate with the Klingons (in preparation for the events of TUC) and Morrow apologizes to Spock for his actions in TSFS. He noted had he known what was at stake, he would have given Kirk the Enterprise with his blessings. Spock of course tells him there is no need for apologies. He had no way of knowing how things would turn out and he made a perfectly logical, even reasonable decision based on the information and circumstances. But it was a nice little redemptive moment for Morrow. (it came up because Spock had just saved Morrows life in the story and Morrow was thinking about how ironic that was).
I tend to view the "5-year mission" as being the standard length of deployment for the Enterprise during TOS, but not necessarily some kind of special assignment as basically stated in the Kelvin Timeline. The current-day analogy I would use is the 20 years a nuclear aircraft carrier could go between refueling. Maybe five years is how long a Constitution-class ship could go between matter/antimatter pit stops back in Kirk's time. Otherwise, the Enterprise didn't really seem to be out in the wilderness on a regular basis like the Voyager would later be in the Delta Quadrant. The Enterprise seemed to routinely alternate between being in uncharted/explored space and Federation territory, even being so close to home at times to be mere days away from Vulcan in presumably the core Federation sectors.
Maybe it was just during Kirk's deployment, a lot of notable things happened.
Maybe it was just during Kirk's deployment, a lot of notable things happened.
Khan left Earth 200 years is accurate based on "Space Seed" where TOS was set in the 22nd Century. I don't think it's necessary to force things to fit and it won't, just accept the imperfections. As for Kirk proceeding on the Enterprise Shakedowns, why can't he oversee the shakedowns as an Admiral?
The main problem is the beginning of TWOK states "...in the 23rd century".
I'll admit, I can be a bit of a continuity junkie. One thing I like about some of the novels is sometimes they 'fix' a continuity glitch, usually in a way that makes sense even (though it's still got to be a good book for me to enjoy it, continuity 'fixes' are what I consider a bonus, not the goal). I don't recall any novels ever tackling this particular one.
But another book I always plug when talking about TWOK is Greg Cox's 3rd Khan book, "To Reign In Hell" which covers Khan's exile on Ceti Alpha V. It does have 'bonus' continuity material that fixes any continuity glitches with "Space Seed", but it really is an excellent story. And one thing I really liked about the book is you really can grasp how Khan became obsessed with vengeance, to the exclusion of all else. I know in the past I sometimes find myself agreeing with Joaquin, they have a ship and can go anywhere, why obsess over Kirk. But after reading the novel you realize how that could happen. It didn't happen overnight, but as the years passed the rage built and built, and the death of McGivers was the final straw. So highly recommended for any fan of TWOK.
But that being said, I don't sweat every last detail. Whether it's 200 years, or close to 300 years doesn't really affect the story at all. Continuity errors bother me more when it actually a major plot point, not a throwaway line.
I think as far as TWOK is concerned, TMP never happened.
Not a popular opinion, but I'm frankly OK if this was the case. TMP is the clear outlier in the 6 film series (7 if you include GEN and the whole Antonia business).
FWIW, Robert Wise said that when they were making TMP, the understanding was that it took place ten years after the series. Of course, he was just a hired gun in the context of a larger franchise.
Kor
I'm sure someone probably said this, but the real-time that has elapsed between TOS and the films lines up with the stated passage of time in-universe. For TWOK, 15 years from 1982 is 1967, about time time of Space Seed. In TMP, 18 months is hardly enough time to complete strip and rebuild a ship. But give it a decade, and things make sense. It also gives Kirk more than enough time to get cabin (desk) fever.
Well, he basically hated the look of that uniforms and they came out with something that looked miles better, IMHO.
Meyer also hated filming on the bridge set, considered a very difficult one for getting good angles, but I don’t think the studios would have ever justified building the set for scratch again. He did redress it in a way I like a lot, btw.
Speaking of the bridge being difficult to film, I’ve heard the same remarks about the -A bridge (the old set had been destroyed in a fire, so they had to build a new one for Final Fronteer) and by Beyond’s Director Justi Lin regardinthe Abrams’ one (probably too many stray lights on his one, but Abrams liked that!).
Speaking of difficult things to film, everyone hated the enterprise model, but it was beautiful and very expensive, so they stuck with it. In fact it’s one of the reasons it never got reused in TNG, eventually they even found cheaper to build a new ship (the Stargazer) than repurpose the enterprise as originally planned.
And yet all these things were sort of apocryphal, there only ever being references to an "x year mission" well after the fact, or in the out-of-universe credits sequence, or so forth. Nobody ever suggested that a ship would sail out for X years; all we ever got was that a ship would sail back home after Y years out there, without knowledge whether that had been scheduled or not.
ST:ID really was our first insight into Starfleet thinking, suggesting that before the 2260s in that timeline (and before 2233 in both timelines), Starfleet had not launched missions that would have the two parameters of "five years" and "out there". Or at least was not in the habit of launching those, and the last one was already more or less forgotten by that point.
DSC then gave us the second datapoint, in which Chris Pike had commanded five-year missions in the past. But that one didn't teach us whether those had been intended to be five-year ones in advance, or merely had happened to take that long. And it didn't tell us what a five-year mission was, that is, what its starting and termination points might be. ST:ID was much clearer on this, heavily suggesting that the ship would leave Earth (or perhaps UFP ports of call in general), stay away for five years, and return to Earth (or UFP ports of call) - while Kirk in TOS and TAS was happily frequenting UFP joints and running errands in the UFP core regions.
With TOS, we could always argue that the five years were Kirk's mission, his tour of duty, unrelated to the fates of the ship, and that the ship smoothly continued under Captain Dunsel as soon as Kirk moved onto his next assignment as scheduled. But this option is out in the Pike case, where Pike does not cease to command the ship, and AFAWK doesn't cease anything else, either, at the mysterious "end" of the first five-year mission.
So we still don't know much. Perhaps we are observing two distinct but indistinguishable sets of missions: those that happen to take X years, and those that are scheduled to take X years. Perhaps no mission we ever saw in the regular timeline was scheduled to take X years, and the ST:ID one is an interesting outlier. And perhaps scheduled missions start and end with an extensive refit and perhaps also old-style temporary decommissioning of the vessel, and we just missed most of those when entering the adventures in medias res. Or perhaps something else is at play here.
And I guess that's the problem here: Kirk's TOS ship was never doing one specifc thing for any length of time, but she did do most things, including dull border duty, showing the flag, and running menial errands. And returning to Earth every now and then!
Which is hardly a problem for the audience, which can sit back and enjoy and decide that "Five-Year Mission" is what Kirk calls this in his memoirs (which is the thing we are watching here). It's only when people in-universe start speaking of FYMs that the structure of the fictional universe begins to unravel at one teeny weeny corner...
Timo Saloniemi
I think this is an important data point, that the Enterprise is NOT doing one specific thing over the course of the mission. I interpret the "five year mission" as "James T. Kirk, your are ordered to assume command of the USS Enterprise and report to Starbase 11, from there to assume patrol and exploration duties and other duties as assigned." In other words, Star Fleet has to have known that they were not sending a ship out for five years with no contact; there are just too many things that could (and did) come up.
When you come down to it, Star Trek is episodic and rarely are any previous adventures mentioned. We have some sequel stories, but other than that they don't refer to older stories. Movies 2-4 are connected so they really form a single long story. But you don't get much reference to that in 5 or 6. TMP didn't reference anything that McCoy might have been doing. The stories are not concerned with previous events, only the current story. That holds true in TNG as well, though they have a lot more story arcs and sequel stories, most stories are still episodic and don't refer to anything previous. So a lack of reference to TMP in TWOK is meaningless.
Exactly. It is a deployment time frame. The 5 year mission is 5 years out exploring unknown territories. It involves mapping (there are lots of references to areas previously mapped). They only encounter other starships in rare occasions. So you can imagine an area they are assigned and other starships have other areas and they boarder. So the Enterprise can respond to Constellation, Intrepid, Exeter, and Defiant and still be exploring an unexplored area. They would build new starbases as they found unoccupied spaces or negotiated treaties. The Enterprise would have a home starbase to go back to for repairs. In the series we see a different starbase each time, but I'm sure we could find a logical explanation for that.
I have yet to see anything that doesn't allow for TMP to be in its own universe. It has little to no connection to any other Trek series or movie. For that matter the launch of Voyager 6 doesn't really groove with developments in the Trek universe in the late 20th century. They were launching DY100 series nuclear ships by the 90s, and Friendship One not long later.
To me TMP is canon but where it takes place is questionable.
To me TMP is canon but where it takes place is questionable.
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