Spoilers Star Trek: Strange New Worlds - Pike series and novel continuity

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Reasonably sure it's a "real" rank in Starfleet, though.

It is.

There were several officers with the rank of Commodore in TOS. It's subsequently been replaced with Rear Admiral, Lower Half (just like in the real US Navy).

This one I'm not terribly fond of. Into Darkness did the same thing with Carol Marcus, where a character we met as a civilian was given a Starfleet backstory. It's OK for not everyone to have been in Starfleet. (Not that this is a problem, of course, it's just story choice I wouldn't personally have made.)

Also,

Spoiler

Spock was apparently his boss at one time, and this relationship never came up once during "Operation: Annihilate!"

I basically wondered the same thing in the SNW forum. I was a bit confused as to how Sam Kirk could have been in Starfleet where there was no indication of this in TOS.

I was subsequently reminded (in not so many words) that I don't know shit.

 

[DGCatAniSiri]

Also Picard Season 1 gave us Commodore Oh, director of Starfleet Security (and, yes, secret Romulan agent).

 

[Enterprise1701]

I am surprised DIS season 2 concluded without ever bringing in the current Dax just to tie into previous continuity.

 

[F. King Daniel]

I am surprised DIS season 2 concluded without ever bringing in the current Dax just to tie into previous continuity.

They have all of SNW to do that. And Disco can STILL do it!

 

[Charles Phipps]

Sam Kirk could be a civilian researcher on the Enterprise. It's not like we've not got plenty of those in the franchise's history.

 

[Jedi Marso]

It is.

There were several officers with the rank of Commodore in TOS. It's subsequently been replaced with Rear Admiral, Lower Half (just like in the real US Navy).

Yeah, 'Commodore' is more a title than a rank in the USN these days. For example, say you have a destroyer or submarine squadron. The C.O.s of all those units are O-5 (Commander) but referred to as 'captain' or 'skipper' (more often the former in the surface navy) aboard their commands. Their squadron commander is usually an O-6 (Captain) but is referred to as 'Commodore.'

In aviation, the air wing commander aboard a carrier is referred to as 'CAG'- I'm not going to dissect that one here.
Ashore, aviation squadrons are grouped into wings by aircraft type and east or west coast, or by training base in the case of the training command. These wings are commanded by an O-6 (Captain) who is also referred to as 'Commodore.'

 

[The Wormhole]

This one I'm not terribly fond of. Into Darkness did the same thing with Carol Marcus, where a character we met as a civilian was given a Starfleet backstory. It's OK for not everyone to have been in Starfleet. (Not that this is a problem, of course, it's just story choice I wouldn't personally have made.)

Also,

Spoiler

Spock was apparently his boss at one time, and this relationship never came up once during "Operation: Annihilate!"

Hmm, the part you have in Spoiler Code is a pretty good point. Then again, it's not like Spock ever talks about his own siblings, so it's not too surprising he wouldn't mention to someone else that their sibling once worked for him.

Reasonably sure it's a "real" rank in Starfleet, though. (Just like it's a real rank in, for example, the Royal Canadian Navy...)

Yep, in fact in TOS, Enterprise and Picard we've seen specific rank insignia for Commodore, which does line up with where the rank is placed in the navies of today which still use the rank, as well as the US Navy's when they used the rank.

 

[Sci]

This one I'm not terribly fond of. Into Darkness did the same thing with Carol Marcus, where a character we met as a civilian was given a Starfleet backstory. It's OK for not everyone to have been in Starfleet. (Not that this is a problem, of course, it's just story choice I wouldn't personally have made.)

I think it made sense in Into Darkness, though, because they needed a plot device to bring Carol aboard the Enterprise during a time of crisis and to place her in a position of opposition to her father, the commanding admiral of all of Starfleet. The easiest way to do that is for her to be a Starfleet officer as well.

It is.

There were several officers with the rank of Commodore in TOS. It's subsequently been replaced with Rear Admiral, Lower Half (just like in the real US Navy).

Which never really made sense. Why would Starfleet just suddenly stop using the rank after reviving it?

 

[dupersuper]

Just read IGN’s review of the pilot, and there’s a fairly-major cameo by a character who figures pretty hugely in classic Star Trek-lore (spoilerized below):

Spoiler: SNW

Admiral Robert April (portrayed by Adrian Holmes) gives Pike his first mission when he finally returns to command of the Enterprise (to rescue Number One from a mission gone awry).

Interesting that he’s apparently Admiral April here, rather than Commodore April — this wouldn’t be a case of a canon-story being inconsistent with a non-canon story, but seemingly a canon-vs.-canon conflict (TAS: “Yesteryear”), unless maybe the IGN reviewer simply got sloppy with his rank-references, here:

https://www.ign.com/articles/star-trek-strange-new-worlds-premiere-review

Can't read until Thursday. Can't read until Thursday. Can't read until Thursday. Can't read until Thursday. Can't read until Thursday. Can't read until Thursday....

 

[Christopher]

I think it made sense in Into Darkness, though, because they needed a plot device to bring Carol aboard the Enterprise during a time of crisis and to place her in a position of opposition to her father, the commanding admiral of all of Starfleet. The easiest way to do that is for her to be a Starfleet officer as well.

I question whether they actually needed Carol Marcus to be in STID at all. Her presence was a product of Damon Lindelof's ill-conceived desire to rehash as much of The Wrath of Khan as possible rather than telling the kind of original story that the Kelvin timeline was created to permit. Certainly it didn't hurt to have another significant female character besides Uhura, but this character didn't really have much in common with Carol Prime besides her name and hair color, so she could easily have been an original character.

 

[Sci]

I question whether they actually needed Carol Marcus to be in STID at all. Her presence was a product of Damon Lindelof's ill-conceived desire to rehash as much of The Wrath of Khan as possible rather than telling the kind of original story that the Kelvin timeline was created to permit. Certainly it didn't hurt to have another significant female character besides Uhura, but this character didn't really have much in common with Carol Prime besides her name and hair color, so she could easily have been an original character.

I think they needed it to be Carol because a secondary goal was to set up a relationship between her and Kirk in the third movie. The Kelvin movies are all about doing variations on a theme, so I think they wanted to have a parallel to the Prime Timeline's relationship between Kirk and Carol that we never actually saw. (I still think it's a pity Star Trek Beyond didn't bring her back.)

 

[Christopher]

I think they needed it to be Carol because a secondary goal was to set up a relationship between her and Kirk in the third movie.

Kirk had other relationships. It didn't have to be Carol Marcus. And the plan crashed and burned anyway, in part because they handled the "love interest" angle sophomorically by reducing it to Kirk seeing her in her underwear rather than approaching it in a meaningful way. There was nothing in the movie to suggest they had a relationship in their future, besides the fact that the character was named Carol Marcus.

The Kelvin movies are all about doing variations on a theme

No. That's how Lindelof saw it, which is why he insisted on rehashing Khan over Roberto Orci's objections, but that wasn't the sole intent. The intent of creating a new timeline was to let the filmmakers tell new stories about Kirk's crew, unfettered by the restrictions of canon. That's what the first and third films did. So 2/3 of the series is not just "variations."

 

[Avro Arrow]

Which never really made sense. Why would Starfleet just suddenly stop using the rank after reviving it?

I'm honestly not convinced they did. AFAIK, that "upper half/lower half" thing @Mr. Laser Beam mentioned has never appeared in any episode of Star Trek, ever. As mentioned by @The Wormhole , we've seen commodores in ENT, TOS and PIC (so both before and after TNG). And according to MA, there's a commodore identified in dialogue in TMP, there are commodore rank pins in the other films, and a commodore was mentioned in an on-screen graphic in TNG (admittedly difficult to read, though).

I think it's probably fair to say that Starfleet had commodores all along, we just never met any on-screen during the TNG-DS9-VOY years. I know there was one of the producers who said behind the scenes they weren't using commodores, and derogatorily compared them to members of a yacht club, but that doesn't mean they didn't exist in-universe. (Just like they didn't like using aliens with antennae, but Andorians still "exist" during TNG.)

(And the assertion that Starfleet somehow "revived" the rank is kind of Americentric anyway, because, as mentioned, it is still widely in use in the rest of the world, which is probably how it made it into the rank structure of the United Earth Starfleet.)

 

[David cgc]

Well, we got a USS Archer in the premiere, but it was an FJ-style scout ship, not a novelverse Archer-class scout ship. Given the crew of three, though, I wonder if at an early stage it wasn’t intended to be an Archer-class, but only the “scout” part made it to the VFX team. My theory was always that something similar happened that caused Yeoman Colt and Lt. Mann to switch actors back in the DSC S2 finale, with the left hand not fully informing the right hand what their intention was. Or even this very episode, where on-screen chyrons used TOS-style star dates and Pike’s log narration had a KT-style date.

 

[Tuskin38]

So everyone brought their families too? I hope the entire crew get Michael Burnham-style secret siblings.

Sam Kirk was in TOS, albiet as a dead body, he isn't another Sybok style sibling.

This one I'm not terribly fond of. Into Darkness did the same thing with Carol Marcus, where a character we met as a civilian was given a Starfleet backstory. It's OK for not everyone to have been in Starfleet. (Not that this is a problem, of course, it's just story choice I wouldn't personally have made.)

Meanwhile Chapel is a civilian, even though for some reason she's wearing rank insignia and a uniform. Maybe it's a temporary commission.

 

[Christopher]

Or even this very episode, where on-screen chyrons used TOS-style star dates and Pike’s log narration had a KT-style date.

Yeah, I wondered about that. I hope they stick with the former going forward. It makes no sense to call something a stardate when it's just a Gregorian date formatted a bit differently.

Sam Kirk was in TOS, albiet as a dead body, he isn't another Sybok style sibling.

And he was name-dropped in "What Are Little Girls Made Of?" Jim Kirk said that he was the only one who referred to George Samuel Kirk Jr. as "Sam," though I guess that doesn't entirely conflict with Pike calling him "Samuel" here. I guess calling him "George" might lead some viewers to confuse him with his dad.

 

[Disposable_Ensign]

It makes no sense to call something a stardate when it's just a Gregorian date formatted a bit differently.

This probably isn't the right place for this discussion, but does anything indicate that they aren't using Julian dates?

 

[Christopher]

This probably isn't the right place for this discussion, but does anything indicate that they aren't using Julian dates?

Same difference -- both are Earth (specifically Western) calendars, so there's nothing remotely "star" about them. Stardates are supposed to be the universal time standard of an interstellar civilization, not dependent on the orbit and rotation of any single planet. It was bad enough when TNG etc. defined 1000 stardate units as equal in length to an Earth calendar year. Actually using the calendar years as the stardates is just lazy.

 

[Leto_II]

Wow, it looks like SNW just canonized

Spoiler: SNW

both J.M. Dillard's Star Trek: First Contact novelization and The Lost Era: The Sundered's notion that NYC and Washington, D.C. were struck by nuclear weapons during World War III, and also canonically confirmed that Paris, France (and another unidentifiable city?) were also mostly-destroyed by detonations during that war.

 

[thribs]

Sam Kirk could be a civilian researcher on the Enterprise. It's not like we've not got plenty of those in the franchise's history.

But he had a rank and a starfleet uniform on.