Especially since Greenwood has *played* JFK (Thirteen Days).
As for Pike's age: When Mendez mentions that, what does he mean? Obviously Pike and Kirk could not be the same age.
Pike - not sure if this hasnt been asked before.
- Thread starter KendraW
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Especially since Greenwood has *played* JFK (Thirteen Days).
As for Pike's age: When Mendez mentions that, what does he mean? Obviously Pike and Kirk could not be the same age.
Which, I'm pretty sure, was the allusion Supervisor 194 was making there.
Pike was about the age Kirk is currently (ie. in "The Menagerie") when Pike was promoted to Fleet Captain.
He means "about your age." It's just an inconsistency in the script.
With the Tantalus Field? That would be AWESOME!
Has anyone here read the original script? I've always wondered if the line was meant to be "...about my age" but Malachi flubbed it.
I always took it to mean that Pike was promoted (then) to Fleet Captain at about the same age as Kirk is (now) at the time of the conversation he's having with Mendez. It's common enough way of describing someone at some point in the past; "about the same age you are now" would have been clearer, but either works.
As far as how the original script might have read, Sir Rhosis might be someone to ask (I believe this is his review of it.) Shatmandu also collects old scripts, and there are at least one or two others around.
Not sure whether mentioned explicitly anywhere, but I thought that Kirk was supposed to be the youngest Starship Captain. Now, if Pike was promoted to Fleet Captain at about Kirk's age, then he would have been younger when became a Starship Captain, making Pike the youngest.
But once again, not sure if on-screen or simply fanon - the only time I can certainly remember ever hearing someone being explicitly mentioned as being the youngest captain was Scott in TNG's "Conspiracy".
But once again, not sure if on-screen or simply fanon - the only time I can certainly remember ever hearing someone being explicitly mentioned as being the youngest captain was Scott in TNG's "Conspiracy".
At the time of TOS, humans have a longer lifespan. Therefore, an age gap of about 20 years wouldn't be much. Can anyone tell I'm bullshitting?
At the time of the pilots, both Kirk and Pike were in their mid-30s.
Technically not allowed by "The Menagerie", in which Kirk explicitly says he got the ship from Pike... If Kirk pried her out of the dead hands of some other predecessor, why would Pike be there to do the formal handing-over?
No script could plausibly have such an inconsistency. It's a massive story point that Pike preceded Kirk in just about everything, that Pike used to be what Kirk is now. The writer would never have fumbled this particular ball.
It's also a bit unlikely that the actor could have fumbled, and the director and everybody reviewing the shots would have missed it before the episode went on air.
Nope, not mentioned in any episode or movie. And it's unclear whether Roddenberry or the writers intended such a thing, beyond a few early ideas.
As for the Fleet Captain thing, it could be that this is a rank higher than Captain, in which case Pike would once again precede Kirk. But it's also possible that Fleet Captain is the very same thing as Captain, just a fancier way of saying it. After all, "Captain" is ambiguous because it can refer both to rank and to position. Perhaps when it's important to make the distinction between those two, the rank is called "Fleet Captain"? That is, Pike would previously have been captain of the Enterprise at Commander rank, but would at this juncture have been promoted to be captain at Captain rank, which is confusing unless specific language is used.
Timo Saloniemi
I've got no horse in this race, but I feel compelled to point out that many flubs made it to air. They were a stressed, under-budgeted hour-long tv show with a tight shooting and editing schedule. Even premiere mega-shows occasionally air flubs. TV is a fast-paced medium and sometimes you even know a mistake is there but simply don't have the time or money to fix it, so on the air it goes.
And yet, "The Menagerie" does contain exactly that inconsistency. It's an explicit and unqualified statement by one of the characters - all attempts to make it fit with the rest of what's established in the episode require rationalizations and debatable interpretations, but the line itself stands as an unambiguous statement.
Not exactly shocking, considering how quickly it was written and how many silly things slipped through on TOS. "Raised to the first power," anyone?
The fact that something is illogical, unreasonable or silly does not mean that it didn't happen in "Star Trek."
You can always make the argument that from "ST: First Contact" onward, that the timeline is slightly skewed from what we saw in the 60's
Yes, of course you can. But do you really have to?
I'd rather not.
It's much more enjoyable to think that everything we ever saw on film from Archer to Janeway and everything in between occurred in the same universe and in the same continuity, and that any inconsistencies that can't plausibly be explained are simply errors by the writers.
I have no problem with that.
EDIT TO ADD: Although as a fan, I do enjoy trying to explain those inconsistencies in a plausible manner without resorting to saying "writers' error".
Blasphemy!
It's fun to speculate, to try to come up with imaginative ways to reconcile seemingly unreconcilable artifacts of years of somewhat loosely linked stories in even more loosely linked television series and movies--but it is insane to make that the primary basis for judging said stories, series, and movies. From what I've seen, Abrams & Co. are keeping a lot more of 'canon' than I would have expected, but that will not make or break the movie--quality as perceived by the general audience will.
