It was "class of '78," actually, but yeah. Roddenberry never wanted to pin down an exact time frame for the series, which was why they invented stardates as a completely meaningless placeholder. I've always suspected that the only reason the 2364 date got onscreen at all was because "The Neutral Zone" was filmed during the '88 writers' strike and thus had to be shot from a first-draft script (which is why it's such an incoherent mess). Of course, by that point, Roddenberry was already too ill to function as the showrunner, but if he had been able to do a rewrite on the script, I doubt he would've let the calendar date get through.
Really interesting possibility. I actually do like that the franchise started hammering down dates and stuff, since it makes the series seem a lot more real to me (but I can see the advantages to having a floating timeline where we only have estimates).
Maybe, but that's the whole point -- at the time, there was no way of ruling out any possibility, because it was just a throwaway line in a movie in a franchise that had never, up to that point, established any kind of clear or consistent chronology.
I was admittedly speculating after the fact. It would be interesting to know what the original intent was for the ale's date was (Romulan year, Gregorian year, stardate, random gibberish we were supposed to not assign any value to, whatever).
Yes, but most of fandom consistently ignored that and treated the dates as exact, and we Pocket tie-in authors were in fact required to treat the Okudachron dates as exact except in cases where later canon had contradicted them. So the "circa" was a bit too implicit, if you ask me.
Well, yeah, I suppose. On the other hand, the
Chronology has been subsequently used by the TV shows as a guide to the extent that most of it's assumptions need to be in place for the franchise's internal history to work.
I would also say that, as a reader and viewer of the franchise, having some "official" dating and order of events is appreciated, esp. since the
Chronology generally hangs together (excusing troublesome spots, like the date of
Star Trek - The Motion Picture not quite working with the end of TOS and/or TAS being moved from 2269 to 2270 thanks to "Q2" [VGR]).
The "Class of '78" bit reminds me of a pet peeve of mine with the Okuda chronology - McCoy's age. When you put the reference to McCoy being 137 years old in "Encounter at Farpoint" together with the specific year 2364 from "The Neutral Zone," you end up with a McCoy who was in his late 30s during TOS -- which was substantially younger than the show typically implied and not consistent with DeForest Kelley's actual age. It bugs me that people have no problem totally discounting Data being in the Stafleet Class of '78 yet they treat the 137 age from the same episode as incontrovertible gospel. It's my opinion that McCoy doesn't work as well as a character if he's not 10-15 years Kirk's senior.
I suspect that the reason for that is that Data's original graduation date makes no sense in any timeline, whereas McCoy's age could with with the final
Chronology assumptions, since a character doesn't need to be the same age as their actor. Also, had Data's line not been contradicted by "The Neutral Zone" (TNG), his original graduation would've been kept, so they weren't playing favorites.
And apparently that's changed slightly -- David A. Goodman commented in his afterword to The Autobiography of Jame T. Kirk that he was allowed to depart from the Chronology in certain instances (He has the incident with Ben Finney and the Republic happening after Kirk's graduation from Starfleet Academy, for instance, which fits with Kirk's statement in "Court Martial" that it was "some years later" after Finney instructed Kirk). So maybe they allow you to adjust things slightly if you can make a good argument for it?
I think the
Chronology admitted that Kirk's backstory had quite a few inconsistencies and they worked to try and create a "best guess" that made sense and didn't ignore everything. Since that part of the timeline was already guesswork and not hard canon, I could see that Goodman might've been allowed leeway for his own interpretation. (Given that the book claimed that
Star Trek V was an "in-universe" movie, fidelity to canon wasn't exactly Goodman's priority in the first place.)
