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Poll Do you consider Discovery to truly be in the Prime Timeline at this point?

Is it?

  • Yes, that's the official word and it still fits

    Votes: 194 44.7%
  • Yes, but it's borderline at this point

    Votes: 44 10.1%
  • No, there's just too many inconsistencies

    Votes: 147 33.9%
  • I don't care about continuity, just the show's quality

    Votes: 49 11.3%

  • Total voters
    434
Even Chekov seems to have forgotten he'd been there. I know it was 18 years later but you'd think the trauma of Khan attempting to commandeer the Enterprise and detaining or imprisoning the ship's crew would have been enough to remember in which solar system Kirk had dumped him into exile.
That's just a lie Chekov told to impress the ladies. He wasn't there.
 
When did anyone say that? If Darvin was the result of an extensive surgical alteration like Voq Tyler, how was McCoy able to detect him so quickly with a tricorder? It took two full scans from the shipboard medical computer to detect even a hint at Tyler's, and a third was required to determine exactly what that hint meant. And even then, they still needed L'Rell to explain things. So what, just because they know what to look for, suddenly the process is simplified so that a quick scan with a tricorder reveals all?

I'll stick to the belief that Darvin was only cosmetically altered to appear human but was all Klingon on the inside.


After trek it was confirmed. After Ash starfleet had full scans, ten years after. Is it a shock medical scanners 10 years later have that stuff in them?

Darvin was just like Ash, except they skipped the flawed mind imprinting.
 
When I see the Galaticia show up I'll know we're in the wrong timeline.

Although, with a little imagination, they could fit. Not very well, but they could. LOL
 
Where are the nuclear wessels? Anyone seen some TIE fighters out there??? Could have sworn that I saw a Deathstar somewhere!!
 
The fact of how hard it was to make Ash... It makes zero sense they have ones that look man.
The way Ash Tyler was "made" pretty much makes zero sense even on its own terms within DSC, and seems to have been devised on the fly mostly to provide an excuse for those gratuitously gruesome surgery flashbacks. Be that as it may, it really has no bearing on the existence or lack thereof of human-style Klingons, since obviously Voq wasn't one. If he was going to pass for human, it was necessarily going to be more complicated.

...and the fact we have been told this is how human looking spys of TOS are made... They have no need to do this if they look human.
Excuse me? How is that a "fact"? We have not one single scene telling us anything of the sort.

After trek [sic] it was confirmed. ... Darvin was just like Ash, except they skipped the flawed mind imprinting.
Oh, something from "After Trek." :rolleyes: Got a quote? Exactly who said what? Not that it really matters, because as we all know, ad hoc statements from show creators are neither canonical nor particularly reliable (especially about how to interpret stuff they themselves didn't write). You'll pardon me if I don't invest full credulity into that particular take on things.

(Not to mention that it wouldn't begin to explain all the other Klingons walking around in "Trouble With Tribbles" who weren't undercover, who we know from DS9 did in fact look human-like.)

Even Chekov seems to have forgotten he'd been there. I know it was 18 years later but you'd think the trauma of Khan attempting to commandeer the Enterprise and detaining or imprisoning the ship's crew would have been enough to remember in which solar system Kirk had dumped him into exile.
I don't want to dwell on it but it's just kind of a pet peeve... it was fifteen years between "Space Seed" and TWOK. The movie says so several times. I am always perplexed by how many fans are willing to write that off just because of (as far as I can tell) a pretty arbitrary decision by the writers of the first ST Chronology.
 
I think it can still work, personally.

Fair enough.

The Federation as numerous member species. Why not Klingons?

That is an interesting point (we never see conquered races that they've been hinted to have very much in public). I guess my counter is that the DSC Klingons were not presented as a new racial variant or another humanoid species who had Imperial membership, but as the same species we'd seen in the past with a redesign for some reason.

If they ignore it, the retcon is itself, retconned. As it should be. Not only was it not needed, it messed with a vast history of trek over a damned joke.

No, they would have to actively contradict it onscreen to retcon it. What did it mess up with anyways? It contradicted nothing (indeed, the Klingons' refusal to discuss it now makes sense) and provided the best possible on-screen answer. Personally, I liked the explanation from the "I am Klingon" short story in the Strange New Worlds II book a bit better, but it did the job and was an entertaining story enough. If you don't like it, it's

When did anyone say that? If Darvin was the result of an extensive surgical alteration like Voq Tyler, how was McCoy able to detect him so quickly with a tricorder? It took two full scans from the shipboard medical computer to detect even a hint at Tyler's, and a third was required to determine exactly what that hint meant. And even then, they still needed L'Rell to explain things. So what, just because they know what to look for, suddenly the process is simplified so that a quick scan with a tricorder reveals all?

I'll stick to the belief that Darvin was only cosmetically altered to appear human but was all Klingon on the inside.

I could buy that advances in tricorder tech and the knowledge of Klingon spy alterations could

(Not to mention that it wouldn't begin to explain all the other Klingons walking around in "Trouble With Tribbles" who weren't undercover, who we know from DS9 did in fact look human-like.)

Augment virus.

I don't want to dwell on it but it's just kind of a pet peeve... it was fifteen years between "Space Seed" and TWOK. The movie says so several times. I am always perplexed by how many fans are willing to write that off just because of (as far as I can tell) a pretty arbitrary decision by the writers of the first ST Chronology.

Memory Alpha has a whole section on the movie's article about how to date the movie here and there are reasons to use the 2285 date.
 
Guys, the producers have said its the same method. You can whine and cliam its not all you want, but we have not seen the silly 60s make up, and we will not see it.
 
(Not to mention that it wouldn't begin to explain all the other Klingons walking around in "Trouble With Tribbles" who weren't undercover, who we know from DS9 did in fact look human-like.)
Augment virus.
Well, yeah, that was my point. The Augment virus would explain them nice-and-easy. Retcon that away, though, as MM clearly wants to do, and they remain unexplained.

Memory Alpha has a whole section on the movie's article about how to date the movie here and there are reasons to use the 2285 date.
Yeah, I'm unconvinced. To quote it...

The film alone does not clearly identify the year it is set on, other than that it is somewhere in the early to mid 2280s. Based on some of the film's dialogue, the film was set fifteen years after "Space Seed". Khan: "...marooned here fifteen years ago by Captain James T. Kirk." According to a line in the script, it was more accurately fourteen years after the episode. Kirk: "He wants to kill me for passing sentence on him fourteen years ago." [9] "Space Seed" in turn aired in 1967 and is considered to be set in 2267. This suggests The Wrath of Khan would be set in 2281 or 2282. Nick Meyer's commentary on the special edition DVD, explains that the intention was that the film depicted Kirk's 49th birthday. Kirk was born in 2233, so this would support the year 2282.

Other accounts within and after the film suggest the events of the film took place later in the 2280s. The label on the bottle of Romulan ale that McCoy gives to Kirk as a birthday gift reads 2283. In Star Trek Generations, in the Nexus, Kirk imagines himself eleven and nine years into the past, to the years 2282, when he met Antonia, and 2284, to the day he told her he was returning to Starfleet. All those accounts suggest the events of this film occurred afterward, as Kirk was at the beginning of the film supervising command-track cadets at Starfleet Academy as an active Starfleet admiral. According to StarTrek.com, Star Trek Chronology, and Star Trek Encyclopedia, (3rd ed., p. 691) the events of The Wrath of Khan in fact occurred one year later in 2285. Memory Alpha uses this year as well.​

From the top: first of all, the film doesn't actually identify its date even as precisely as the decade; it merely says "In the 23rd century." Placing it in the 2280s is an after-the-fact inference that was only possible once the TNG episode "Neutral Zone" (six years later) used the Gregorian date "2364," and pretty much everything else in Trek got backdated from that.

Second, yes, the film's dialogue (from both Khan and Kirk, both of whom were from Earth and familiar with Earth years) did say fifteen years; anything contrary in the script was evidently cut out.

Third, "Space Seed" is only "considered to be set in 2267" by the arbitrary convention (first used in the ST Chronology) that TOS episodes are set exactly 300 years after broadcast. However, given that TOS episodes almost never refer to one another (and especially given the absence of Chekov during the first season, when "SS" was broadcast!), it would be ridiculously easy to move "SS" as necessary to just about any point within the FYM to keep it 15 years before TWOK.

Fourth (just as a side note), it's interesting to read that Nick Meyer intended Kirk's birthday to be his 49th. (Presumably he was adding 15 to the "34 years old" line from "The Deadly Years"?) For my part, given the way the TWOK story came across on screen, I always assumed it was his 50th, much more of a milestone of the kind that would get him reflecting on his age.

Fifth, yes, the bottle of Romulan Ale does have the date "2283," but it was never clear that this was a Gregorian date (presumably Romulans bottled the stuff, after all), nor what exactly the implications of the joke were meant to be. It's ambiguous.

Sixth, Kirk's flashbacks in ST:GEN were indeed set eleven and nine years into his past, but they didn't actually provide Gregorian dates as implied here. Those are inferences based on setting the movie in 2371, which is itself an inference based on its stardate (48632), which would be during the nonexistent "eighth season" of TNG and is typically interpreted as 2371, based on the ST Chronology's (again arbitrary) convention of assuming that 1000 stardate units in TNG correspond exactly with one calendar year — an assumption never verified on screen and often implicitly contradicted. (E.g., "Data's Day.")

Seventh, even if we do accept 2371 (and hence 2293 for the Kirk opening sequence 78 years earlier, and hence 2282 and 2284 for his Antonia flashbacks), the film doesn't actually give us enough information to place those flashbacks relative to the rest of his career or events from other movies. It's just the day he met her and the day he left her, that's all. It would be an equally reasonable inference to imagine that he considered retiring after the events of STIII and STIV (including the destruction of the Enterprise), and only decided to return in order to take command of the newly christened Enterprise-A, which after all was basically a gift to him from Starfleet.

Long story short (too late? ;)), the only hard-and-fast chronological relationships between TOS episodes and original-crew movies are (A) TWOK happens fifteen years after "Space Seed," and (B) STV:TFF happens at least 20 years after the end of season one (since the Nimbus III colony could not logically have been established until after the Romulans were back on the scene in "Balance of Terror," and the Klingons had been reigned in by the Organian peace treaty in "Errand of Mercy"). It has always struck me as quixotic to disregard one of those relationships for the sake of otherwise completely arbitrary dating conventions and far more ambiguous evidence. FWIW, in my own timeline (headcanon of course, but very detailed) I place these two films in 2283 and 2287 respectively, with a significant time gap between movies 4 and 5.
 
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Oh, something from "After Trek." :rolleyes: Got a quote? Exactly who said what? Not that it really matters, because as we all know, ad hoc statements from show creators are neither canonical nor particularly reliable (especially about how to interpret stuff they themselves didn't write). You'll pardon me if I don't invest full credulity into that particular take on things.

(Not to mention that it wouldn't begin to explain all the other Klingons walking around in "Trouble With Tribbles" who weren't undercover, who we know from DS9 did in fact look human-like.)
I'll lean towards the creators than random fan speculation on the Internet. You'll pardon my cautious nature on such opinions.
That is an interesting point (we never see conquered races that they've been hinted to have very much in public). I guess my counter is that the DSC Klingons were not presented as a new racial variant or another humanoid species who had Imperial membership, but as the same species we'd seen in the past with a redesign for some reason.
Neither were the TMP Klingons, yet they were accepted. As much as Klingons are accepted and established in TNG going forward, they are not as well known in TOS. GR attempted to avoid them due to feeling they were too "one note."

Honestly, it would be nice if "new design=alternative universe" wouldn't be the knee-jerk reaction to change.
 
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