• Welcome! The TrekBBS is the number one place to chat about Star Trek with like-minded fans.
    If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

McCoy's back story

Blackmm

Ensign
Red Shirt
I read one of the Trek novels a few years back that said that McCoy wasn't originally a starfleet doctor, but an earthbound doctor who enlisted after watching his family get killed in a sky car accident. I wonder if they are going to include this?
 
I thought it was due to a divorce. Pretty sure his ex and daughter were alive when he enlisted.
 
IIRC McCoy's Original series backstory was that he was not in Starfleet but ended up joining Starfleet Medical Academy after his divorce, he used Starfleet to escape the pain of the divorce. I'm curious to see if we'll get any hints of the cast back stories...
 
i think some of it was with character guidelines developed for the characters back when the series was on the air.
bones' daughter was originally supposed to have been in the space hippies episode.
 
He enlisted cause of divorce? I didn't know that. What book was this?

I forgot which book it was. I'm pretty sure it wasn't canon and yes, divorce was involved, but the accident happened as they left.

It was a backstory Dorothy Fontana had developed for an episode that would have aired in the third season. That episode was retooled and we got The Way to Eden instead.
 
Several of the novels ran with it, though. The story is at its most explicit in Dreams of the Raven, perhaps...

Of course, in "reality" it could go either way: McCoy could have gotten his medical training in Starfleet rather than in civilian life. The divorce could still be thrown in the mix without much trouble.

Timo Saloniemi
 
We should keep in mind, however, that parts of Leonard McCoy's biography might have been influenced by Nero's 'Destroy the U.S.S. Kelvin' temporal incursion... perhaps not as heavily as Jim Kirk's, but nevertheless. He is older than Jim Kirk, so his early childhood would have been the same, but after that all bets are off. He might never have met the woman Prime McCoy had married before TOS, he might have had a completely different medical/Starfleet career et al.
 
Wasn't McCoys Daughter mentioned or seen in an Animated Episode? I could've sworn she was, but I don't remember the episode.
 
McCoy's wife left him for a guy named Hatfield. History is a bitch.

I have to agree: :guffaw::guffaw::guffaw: -- too good.

But, I do hope that McCoy's back story and personality don't quite change. He's too good a man for total revision.
 
The bio they have for him on the movie site mentions him attending the University of Mississippi (reference to "Trials and Tribble-ations") before going to Starfleet. Not sure if that's going to make it into the movie, but it at least it's consistent to what we know in the old canon.
 
He enlisted cause of divorce? I didn't know that. What book was this?
The TOS writer's guide described McCoy as having one child from an ended marriage which he doesn't talk about.

For completeness, here's that section of the April 17, 1967 version of The Star Trek Guide:

mccoy_bio.gif
 
The bio they have for him on the movie site mentions him attending the University of Mississippi (reference to "Trials and Tribble-ations") before going to Starfleet. Not sure if that's going to make it into the movie, but it at least it's consistent to what we know in the old canon.

That's interesting that he went to the University of Mississippi...I know that it isn't official, but didn't one of the books say that McCoy did med school at Emory University in Atlanta? Maybe the first Crucible book or the story from The Lives of Dax?
 
If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Sign up / Register


Back
Top