TMP's 2 1/2 years after the TOS-TAS makes no sense. They look too old. This isn't Doctor Who.
The
Chronology didn't make that up. It's right there in TMP's dialogue -- Kirk references "my five years out there," precluding the possibility of a second 5-year tour pre-TMP, and he says he's spent two and a half years as Chief of Starfleet Operations.
Evidently, the filmmakers' intention was in fact that the interval between TOS and TMP was considerably less in-universe than in real life. And I don't think they look too old. They don't look substantially older to me in TMP than they did in TOS. Now, compare TWOK through TFF, four movies that came out over a span of seven years but cover no more than 9-10 months of story time (and that's only if you accept Harve Bennett's assertion that there's a 6-month shakedown cruise prior to TFF). The actors aged a lot more than the characters would have. That's just part of the illusion of filmmaking.
I like this:
Final Frontier five year mission
The Cage five year mission
WNMHGB five mission
TOS/TAS five mission
five year mission
2 1/2 years
TMP - TWOK five mission
Agree? Disagree?
Well, first off, we know "The Cage" was 13 years before TOS and that Spock served under Pike for 11 years, so there's no way that adds up. And if you're referring to the novel
Final Frontier, it's impossible to reconcile with modern canon, since (among other inconsistencies) it assumes TOS took place in the first decade of the 2200s (i.e. the timeline assumed in the 1980
Spaceflight Chronology), and that contradicts modern Trek, which explicitly says (in VGR: "Q2") that Kirk's "historic five-year mission" ended in 2270.
I'm always surprised by how rarely people question the assumption that 5-year missions are the norm. I mean, we only have canonical evidence that
one ship had
one 5-year mission. Without any corroborating examples, there's no way of knowing if that was normal, unique, or somewhere in between. A single example just doesn't let you determine a pattern.
Indeed, strictly speaking, if you discount the opening narration as metatextual, the only actual in-story evidence we have that the E's tour was five years long comes from the TMP and VGR references I cited above. So all we know for a fact is that Kirk's mission in TOS/TAS lasted five years; we have no canonical proof that the ship was actually
assigned to a mission of that duration.
And really, where's the sense in assuming that every mission profile has the same duration? Do starships only do one thing? Sure, a 5-year general patrol/survey/colony support tour is one possible mission profile, but there must be others. For instance, the
Enterprise's trip to the edge of the galaxy in the second pilot. The nearest face of the galactic disk is at least 500 light-years away (going perpendicular to the plane of the disk, of course), so the round trip would probably take months. To me, it doesn't seem logical that that would be part of a general 5-year patrol; it seems more like it would be a special mission all its own, with a duration of as long as was needed to complete it.
In my view, Kirk got command of the ship in 2265, his first assignment was this months-long mission to the edge of the galaxy, and then once the ship finally limped home, it underwent a refit and crew reassignments before being sent on a new, different mission, which was a general 5-year survey tour. After TMP, it could've had mission profiles of all sorts of types and durations. And to me that's a lot more interesting and imaginative than just mechanically tossing in one "5-year mission" after another.
