Soooo.... Where's the third 5YM?
How many continuities are there in Trek Literature?
- Thread starter Extrocomp
- Start date
I honestly can't figure out how anybody might think there was a second 5YM before TMP, at least with Kirk in command of the Enterprise. He specifically says in TMP, "My five years out there, dealing with unknowns like this."
Not ten years, not "five years and a bunch of other missions." It's pretty emphatic. I know not everybody had access to the film/etc. the way we do today, but this line of dialogue is also in the novelization. So, it seems like a pretty odd goof to make, particularly more than once.
On the other hand, things were looser and more free-wheeling in those days, without the sort of oversight to which we're more accustomed.
Not ten years, not "five years and a bunch of other missions." It's pretty emphatic. I know not everybody had access to the film/etc. the way we do today, but this line of dialogue is also in the novelization. So, it seems like a pretty odd goof to make, particularly more than once.
On the other hand, things were looser and more free-wheeling in those days, without the sort of oversight to which we're more accustomed.
How frustrating this misconception is.
Honestly, I wish Kirk hadn't said "five years out there" in TMP, because isn't that forgetting that he spent about a decade as a junior officer rising through the ranks? Were the Republic and the Farragut not "out there" enough to count? Was he not "out there" on Tyree's planet or on the Axanar peace mission? It's not like he just sprung into existence as a full-fledged starship captain. Heck, according to The Making of Star Trek (and implicitly per "Where No Man Has Gone Before"), the Enterprise wasn't even his first command. So he was a captain for more than five years. So that line doesn't make any more chronological sense than Morrow's "The Enterprise is 20 years old" screwup from two movies later.
Well, I suppose you could interprete in a way that leaves space for more missions, just with no unknowns. That would of course be very boring, however it would leave space for a lot of escort ship A to planet B or deliver some supplies to random colony number 314156... Which would still be very boring.. Nevertheless his 5YM was probably way more exciting with 458 adventures as opposed to his time as a Lieutenant on the Farragut. As a Captain he was involved in every single one of them while he might not have been as a Junior Officer (or a First Officer under a CO who has the same attitude towards landing parties as Kirk would later have)
^Even so, I think that an officer who was specifically making a case about how his experience made him the most qualified person for the job would do so by citing all his experience. After all, you have to have a good deal of experience in order to earn a captaincy in the first place, so it makes no sense that he wouldn't include that. The line was just lazily written, compromising in-story credibility for the sake of an Easter egg for the fans.
Yeah, it would have been better if he had at least included some of the other ships he was on, something like "All these years on the Farragut, the Excalibur, the Oxford, my five years on the Enterprise and all these other ships!"
Yeah, it's tricky, but given the larger discussion - his ability to command the Enterprise to go after V'ger rather than leaving it to Decker - I go with the idea that he was referring specifically to his experience as a starship captain.
I know there comics and books that postulate he commanded another ship prior to the Enterprise, but you know none of those pesky things are canon.
I know there comics and books that postulate he commanded another ship prior to the Enterprise, but you know none of those pesky things are canon.
I know there comics and books that postulate he commanded another ship prior to the Enterprise, but you know none of those pesky things are canon.
It's from The Making of Star Trek. I don't want any more cracks about The Book!
And it's implied in the second pilot. "Gary told me that you've been friends since he joined the service, that you asked for him aboard your first command." That would be an oddly distant way of phrasing it if the Enterprise had been his first command. Implicitly, Dehner is referring to a different ship.
It's too bad the film and later history didnt just go with the real world time. It makes the aging of the crew seem odd, and we end up with a much more awkward long gap between TMP and TWOK.
Also, good to see you here, Bruce. You should pop in more often!
I don't see how that's awkward. Given how much changes between the end of TMP and the start of TWOK, it would be more awkward if only three years passed between them in-story. I mean, it's not just Kirk going back to the admiralty, Spock becoming a captain, the junior officers getting promoted again, and Chekov getting promoted twice and transferred to Reliant. It's all the changes in the setting itself. The ship that was brand-new in the last movie is now a training vessel. The uniforms have changed yet again. The crew is a lot less diverse. The feel of Starfleet as a whole is a lot more militaristic. Bringing TSFS into it, we have Morrow running Starfleet instead of Nogura. All that makes much more sense (relatively) if there's 10-12 years between movies.
Well, the same episode explicitly referred to Kirk's middle initial as "R," so whatevs.
Well, I like the idea that Kirk had a command before the Enterprise. I'm disappointed, in fact, that hardly anybody's ever made an attempt to explore that part of his career. Howard Weinstein's "Star-Crossed" comics story, in its second part, did show first officer Kirk of the Eagle getting promoted to captain of the Oxford, and both "All Those Years Ago..." and Enterprise: The First Adventure showed Kirk at the end of his tenure as captain of a smaller ship before getting the Enterprise, but I can't recall ever seeing a story about Kirk's time aboard his first command, and that's a surprising oversight. (I actually tried to think of such a story to pitch for the anniversary, but I'm afraid I drew a blank.)
I'd always just assumed she was referring to the Enterprise, but I honestly never really gave it much thought.
That puzzles me, really. Why would people assume that the Enterprise was Kirk's first and only command just because it's the only one we knew of? The Enterprise was a capital ship, one of the most powerful and important ships in the fleet. They wouldn't give a command like that to a novice captain, as a rule. It's just logical that he would've gained command experience on a smaller ship before being judged worthy of commanding a heavy cruiser. (Never mind the Kelvinverse.)
^Yet Sulu somehow ended up with the Excelsior.
Also never mind John Harriman.
Didn't his dad have something to do with that?
^ He'd have had to. 
In his 50s, after decades of experience. (And, tie-ins aside, we don't really know for a fact that he went directly from the Enterprise to the Excelsior. Canon leaves room for him to have had a smaller command before then.) Kirk was at most 33 when TOS began. He had much less experience, so it would've most likely been more significant experience, a faster rise through the ranks as opposed to a slow-and-steady accumulation of seniority.