Klingons in STID--why do they look like [SPOILERS]?
- Thread starter DavidLeeRoth
- Start date
Yeah, I'm still trying to decipher this post, too. How does Gary Seven's covert mission to Earth in 1968 to avert an accidental nuclear war mean that Armstrong and Apollo 11 didn't make it to the Moon a year later or vice versa?
Here's what happened: until the moment Nero's red matter black hole appears near the location of the Kelvin on stardate 2233.04, both the Abrams and Prime timelines share the same history. There's no divergence until the moment the singularity appears. Any time travelers who visited Earth prior to that moment in the year 2233 will still have visited and been present on Earth if, say, the Chris Pine Kirk and Quinto Spock time traveled back to San Francisco in 1986 or Montana in 2063.
It's not rocket science. It's Star Trek time travel, and Abrams and his people have basically said that both timelines share the same history up until Nero appears in the past and alters things.
No. No, it isn't.
TOS simply didn't have the time nor enough episodes to delve enough into Earth's history nor even the history of the more recent Federation to give us a fleshed-out and comprehensive backstory that would conflict with, say, First Contact or Enterprise.
TOS only sporadically touched on Earth history and even when they met significant historical figures like Zefram Cochrane himself the circumstances surrounding his first warp flight and 21st century Earth history weren't mentioned, only his age, the timeframe of his mysterious disappearance and that he was the human discoverer of space warp technology. There's nothing in First Contact that contradicts the Eugenics Wars, Khan and the genetic Augments, Colonel Green nor any other bit of history established during the original network run of TOS in the late sixties.
TOS doesn't conflict with First Contact or vice versa except on the most nitpicky levels such as why Cochrane looks different and older in the film than he does in the original series and the fact that Roddenberry and the original writers hadn't yet settled on a determination that a nuclear conflict had happened in the 21st century, only that there had been a Third World War of some sort in the years preceding mankind becoming an interstellar species.
I can't believe I actually have to explain this.
Because Gary Seven's mission was to sabotage the deployment of an orbiting nuclear missile silo on a Saturn-V rocket, in essence rigging the rocket so that the silo would explode in orbit and scare the world into scaling back from a nuclear arms race.
The problem is, they directly suggests the U.S. missile platform was a COUNTER to other platforms already deployed by the Soviet Union; that, plus the addition of more launch facilities and a larger number of Saturn Vs suggests the Soviet Union of the TOS timeline was ALOT more competitive in the space race than they were in the ENT timeline, in which case NASA's moon program would be similarly accelerated. In which case, the first man on the moon probably would have been either Jim Lovell or William Anders (assuming the Americans actually beat the Russians to the moon, which is by no means a sure thing).
Neil Armstrong being first is, in fact, the result of a dizzying number of historical coincidences and ultimately the difference between "Neil" or "Buzz" as the first to leave the ship came down to a coin toss. In Gary Seven's timeline, it's questionable whether or not Neil Armstrong even works for NASA (with that degree of militarism, they'd been looking for pilots with more combat experience).
They don't even share the same stardate system. What makes you think they share the same history?
There wasn't a single stardate mentioned in all of Trek until "Where No Man Has Gone Before," set in 2265. "The Cage" didn't mention when the Talos IV encounter happened and we didn't even know when to fit Pike Prime's command of the Enterprise and the events of the original pilot into the timeline and chronology until "The Menagerie" was filmed during the first season of the regular series.
Put simply, we didn't know how stardates in Starfleet and the Federation before "WNMHGB" were expressed until Trek '09 when Captain Robau tells Nero what the current stardate is. Now we know how stardates of that era were expressed. It's that simple, really. No need to introduce some convoluted, way overthought theory into it. The creators didn't.
Stardates sounding and looking different in 2233 in and of itself means nothing. It's just how they calculated time and kept onboard calendars then, just as the pre-Federation Starfleet of Captain Archer used Earth calendar dates to keep time and make log entries. The timekeeping methods and rules changed as the generations passed. Besides, the earliest stardates seen on TOS were so low that it can't have been that long before Kirk Prime took command of his Enterprise that the stardate style used in the original show began.
Put simply, we didn't know how stardates in Starfleet and the Federation before "WNMHGB" were expressed until Trek '09 when Captain Robau tells Nero what the current stardate is. Now we know how stardates of that era were expressed. It's that simple, really. No need to introduce some convoluted, way overthought theory into it. The creators didn't.
Stardates sounding and looking different in 2233 in and of itself means nothing. It's just how they calculated time and kept onboard calendars then, just as the pre-Federation Starfleet of Captain Archer used Earth calendar dates to keep time and make log entries. The timekeeping methods and rules changed as the generations passed. Besides, the earliest stardates seen on TOS were so low that it can't have been that long before Kirk Prime took command of his Enterprise that the stardate style used in the original show began.
Yes, yes it is.
TOS establishes World War III -- aka the Eugenics Wars -- as taking place during the mid 1990s and resulting in 30 to 40 million casualties.
First Contact establishes World War III taking place almost half a century later and, in spite of (or possibly because of) having nothing whatsoever to do with augments, has a death toll five times higher.
We also have "The Omega Glory" where Spock laments that the Yangs and the Kohms actually experienced the nuclear holocaust that Earth supposedly managed to avoid. Thus we have an explanation for the disconnect: TOS timeline considers the Eugenics Wars to be the Third World War, mainly because it's about the worst thing that ever happened on Earth in their timeline. In the TNG/FC timeline, Earth went out of the Eugenics Wars and straight into a period of rapid decay and then a full blown nuclear holocaust. Moreover, the TOS timeline establishes the first warp-powered starship to be the USS Bonaventure; in the FC timeline, it's the NX-01 Enterprise.
"Kohms? Communists? The parallel is almost too close, Captain. It would mean they fought the war your Earth avoided, and in this case, the Asiatics won and took over this planet."
Should we break the news to Spock that Earth didn't actually avoid that war?
The superpower ancestors of the Yangs and Kohms fought a global bacteriological war on their planet. The war on Earth was largely nuclear and fought long after the Cold War superpower rivalry here ceased to exist (WWIII on Earth was waged by 21st century powers such as the Eastern Coalition, not the United States and Soviet Union of the late 20th century).
Apples and oranges. Spock was right. Earth did avoid a global superpower war along the lines of the American-Soviet rivalry. We avoided a bacteriological war.
We'll just have to agree to disagree on this.
Apples and oranges. Spock was right. Earth did avoid a global superpower war along the lines of the American-Soviet rivalry. We avoided a bacteriological war.
We'll just have to agree to disagree on this.
Forgive me for saying so, but I think you're being touch naive if you think by the time we hit a series year we'll suddenly see the random-number stardate reappear in these new movies. They changed the stardate system to something simpler and more sensible. That's all. There's no need for any further complication of it, IMO.
I never said nor even implied that I think they would reappear. 
I know they were simplified, I was just giving a rational in-universe explanation for the differences over the course of time.
Nothing ”naive” involved.
I know they were simplified, I was just giving a rational in-universe explanation for the differences over the course of time.Nothing ”naive” involved.
Hell, these Klingons had gold rings glued to their foreheads.
Ridge piercings. Such a fad.
I blame the H'ip-H'op.
No, they are not. The "Caucasian race" covers a territory that includes Southern Asia, Western Asia, North Africa and Europe. (If one was inclined to use the outdated system from the 19th Century)
Try again.
[YT]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBtj4WoC6XA[/YT]
Then it's an issue of semantics and you should replace "race" with "subrace" or "geographical subset of race".
You're talking about overall "Caucasoids", but as I indicated in my post that's not what I referred to when I used the term "Caucasian"; rather, I used its colloquial meaning - the subset of the Caucasoids which the NLM calls simply "Europeans".
Europeans? Like Ricardo Montalban? Or are the Spanish and the English different races too?
We don't know for sure what Khan's background was. We have only McGivers' speculation.