Time Frame From Star Trek 2 - 4

[USS Excelsior]

Star Trek 2 was in 2283 for Kirk's 50th birthday, but it would seem that the events of the next following movies were right after TWOK from one movie to the next so that must mean the 3 movies took place at the same time.

And the adventures on the 1701-A lasted for at least 10 years up to Star Trek 6. Maybe with a brief Klingon War unseen that took place when that Klingon ship went to sleep before Star Trek 5 perhaps.

 

[F. King Daniel]

They took place a lot further apart in the comics. In that time, Kirk recruited a Klingon officer, repelled an invasion from the mirror universe, commanded the Excelsior on a six-month sakedown cruise, Spock commanded the USS Surak.... but events transpired so that things just happened to briefly resemble how they were at the end of the last movie, in time for the next movie, before getting really interesting again afterward.

 

[Emperor Norton]

They took place a lot further apart in the comics. In that time, Kirk recruited a Klingon officer, repelled an invasion from the mirror universe, commanded the Excelsior on a six-month sakedown cruise, Spock commanded the USS Surak.... but events transpired so that things just happened to briefly resemble how they were at the end of the last movie, in time for the next movie, before getting really interesting again afterward.

How did they manage to do that? The time was very tight between 2,3, and 4, which is why it's considered a trilogy.

 

[Winterwind]

Indeed. The events of II, III and IV leave no room for that.

III takes place immediately after II. No gap. And while there was some time between III and IV, IIRC, Kirk comments that they were on Vulcan, in exile, for three months or so.

 

[F. King Daniel]

Indeed. The events of II, III and IV leave no room for that.

III takes place immediately after II. No gap. And while there was some time between III and IV, IIRC, Kirk comments that they were on Vulcan, in exile, for three months or so.

Well, the Enterprise in STIII was actually more damaged than it was by the end of II. The short Klingon/Federation war in the comics explains that.

As for STIV, that would be their second Vulcan exile, after disobeying orders, and after Spock suffered a brain damaging virus which conveniently left him in a state very similar to how he was at the end of STIII (a state which he'd previously recovered from after a mind meld with his mirror universe twin)

I think the comics did a fantastic job of doing their own thing, while reconciling events with the ongoing (at the time) movie series.

 

[Captaindemotion]

I always got the impression that STIII took place a few days to a week or so after the end of STII. I think III itself unfolds over the space of a week or two.

IV, as has been said, takes place after a 3 month exile on Vulcan.

Not part of the original question but V seems to occur a few weeks after IV (can't really remember as I haven't seen it in years), given the condition of the ENT-A. There then seems to be a gap of maybe a decade until the events of VI. Kirk and co are ready for retirement, so one would have thought he had to be at least 60. And IIRC, Sulu refers to a 5 year mission exploring the Beta Quadrant, which has elapsed in the interim.

There could well have been some sort of war or at least skirmishes with the Klingons during that time. That might explain why Kirk is so much more hostile to them in VI than he is in V (leaving aside the obvious explanation that his hostility serves the script in VI!).

IIRC, in

 

[Timo]

Star Trek 2 was in 2283 for Kirk's 50th birthday

Whatever year ST2 was, the one thing we can be absolutely certain of is that it wasn't in 2283. This because Kirk reads out this year on his gift bottle of ale, and the year is indicated to be significant somehow, presumably an alarming number of years in the past for a bottle of ale. If the year on the bottle were the current year, then there's no way it could hold such significance.

We're probably dealing with Kirk's 51st or 52nd birthday, then - all the more tragic because he's now noticeably past yet another important watershed, and still stuck in the no-future desk job. If 50 was bad, then 52 is worse.

I think the comics did a fantastic job of doing their own thing, while reconciling events with the ongoing (at the time) movie series.

Yup - they did a great job in making themselves suitably unobtrusive and easy to ignore.

Similarly, the A Time to... novels inserted a range of E-E adventures between ST:INS and ST:NEM to indicate how Picard would fall from grace and get stuck with the starship rather than proceed to meatier assignments. Which was another exercise in futility, because ST:INS already featured him falling from grace by scorning Starfleet and the Federation and starting an armed rampage.

The solid fixpoints in the TOS movies are few and far in between.

ST2: After 2283, about 15 years after "Space Seed" which must be after 2266 but before 2270
ST3: no solid fixpoints (unless we count the "Enterprise is over 20 years old" bit, which might suggest 20 years have passed since ST:TMP which was no earlier than 2273)
ST4: At least three months after ST3
ST5: A few weeks after the ending of ST4, which may be several months or even years after the beginning of ST4.
ST6: "Approximately" 80 years before VOY "Flashback"
ST:GEN teaser: 78 years before the TNG parts, so fixed at 2293

A ballpark of 2284-86 seems to work best for the ST2-4 run, then... Although 2287 would still be (barely) tolerable for events taking place about 15 years (that is, anything up to 17½ years) after "Space Seed".

Kirk and co are ready for retirement, so one would have thought he had to be at least 60.

FWIW, the animated episode "The Counter-Clock Incident" sets Starfleet retirement age for human officers at 75, and suggested it might be revised upward soon enough. And in TNG "Too Short a Season", a man in his eighties believes he would still be in active service as a starship commander if not for his debilitating disease.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Tom]

Sulu's mission was 3 years IIRC.

 

[Christopher]

Star Trek 2 was in 2283 for Kirk's 50th birthday...

That's never been officially established. It's just a fan conjecture. In the film itself, Kirk's age is never given, and it's unclear just how old the "vintage 2283" Romulan ale is. (How ironic is McCoy being when he says it takes a while to ferment?)

According to the Star Trek Chronology, TWOK is in 2285, even though this would be 18 years after "Space Seed" rather than 15. Its dating scheme for the movies is rather bizarre; TWOK & TSFS are placed in '85, TVH in '86, and TFF in '87. It's never been adequately explained why the Okudas made this choice, but my best guess is that they needed TFF to be more than 20 years after "Balance of Terror" to reconcile Nimbus III being 20 years old and having Romulan participation. But it's very difficult to reconcile with internal evidence in the films.

To all indications, TSFS is only a week or two after TWOK. It can't be too long, since Baby Spock regenerated pretty quickly. But it had to be enough time for Carol, David, and Saavik to be offloaded, and apparently for Saavik to graduate from the Academy, since her turtleneck and insignias changed from cadet red in TWOK to command white in TSFS.

TVH is explicitly 3 months after the end of TSFS, and the Okudachron conjecturally places Kirk's birthdate in March (same as Shatner's). So TVH can't be later than summer of the same year as TWOK, and the Okudachron placing it in the following year is problematical.

The interval between TVH and TFF is unclear; it seems like a matter of weeks, but Word of God from producer Harve Bennett is that there's a 6-month shakedown cruise in between, which would put it maybe 9-10 months after TWOK.

And the adventures on the 1701-A lasted for at least 10 years up to Star Trek 6.

We don't know that. If anything, the vibe of the crew-briefing scene in TUC is that Kirk's old crew has been reassembled for the first time in a while. Uhura says she's supposed to be chairing a seminar at the Academy, and Scotty's just bought a boat, so neither of them seems to have been on active starship duty prior to the events of the film. Kirk doesn't even know Spock's whereabouts, which would seem unlikely if Spock were still under Kirk's command. (This was originally going to be more explicit. An abandoned opening sequence for the film would've featured Kirk tracking down his old crew individually and recruiting them for one last mission.)

 

[Captaindemotion]

^ The recruitment scene was re-used in the novel The Fearful Summons, by Denny Flinn Martin, who has a (disputed) writing credit on TUC. Crap book, incidentally.

 

[T'Girl]

The time was very tight between 2,3, and 4, which is why it's considered a trilogy.

Really should be considered a quad-ology. From the beginning of TWOK, through to the end of TFF.

 

[Christopher]

Really should be considered a quad-ology. From the beginning of TWOK, through to the end of TFF.

The word is "tetralogy." But no, I don't think TFF counts as part of the same narrative sequence. TWOK through TVH tell a fairly unified sequence of events, each growing out of the events of the former. TWOK is about the Genesis Project and how it leads to Spock's death. TSFS is about the aftermath of those events, including Spock's resurrection on Genesis, the battle with the Klingons for the Genesis technology, and the theft and destruction of the Enterprise. TVH is less closely linked plotwise to the previous films, but it involves Spock's recovery, the ongoing political fallout over Genesis, and how the crew resolves being in trouble with Starfleet and gets the Enterprise back. So the three films are unified by common threads that are all resolved by the end of TVH. TFF isn't a continuation of the same story, it's the story that comes next after the end of the trilogy. It fits with the others in the categories "Trek films set in the mid-2280s" and "Trek films produced by Harve Bennett," but narratively the four films make up a trilogy and a standalone, not a tetralogy.

 

[USS Excelsior]

Then just before TWOK Kirk would have been making eggs for Antonia to say he's going back to Starfleet and his dog Buster was there, around 2284.

 

[Christopher]

Then just before TWOK Kirk would have been making eggs for Antonia to say he's going back to Starfleet and his dog Buster was there, around 2284.

Yes, that's about right. The dates in Generations put Kirk's retirement 11 years before the launch of the Enterprise-B and his return to Starfleet 9 years before, so he was retired and living with Antonia from 2282-84. Which canonically rules out a 2283 date for TWOK; it has to be sometime after 2284, which bolsters the Chronology's 2285 date (not surprising, since Moore & Braga no doubt used the Chronology as their reference when writing GEN).

 

[Harvey]

^ The recruitment scene was re-used in the novel The Fearful Summons, by Denny Flinn Martin, who has a (disputed) writing credit on TUC. Crap book, incidentally.

Who says he has a disputed writing credit on the movie? He co-wrote the screenplay with Nicholas Meyer; I haven't seen anything to suggest otherwise (including Meyer's memoir, as well as his papers at the University of Iowa).

The dispute as to writing credits on the movie had to do with Lawrence Konner and Mark Rosenthal, who wrote a draft based on Nimoy's story (as delivered to them orally, by Nicholas Meyer) that ultimately went unused. They eventually received co-story by credit with Nimoy, even though Nimoy came up with the story alone (he had to threaten a lawsuit to receive that much credit).

 

[doubleohfive]

Then just before TWOK Kirk would have been making eggs for Antonia to say he's going back to Starfleet and his dog Buster was there, around 2284.

Yes, that's about right. The dates in Generations put Kirk's retirement 11 years before the launch of the Enterprise-B and his return to Starfleet 9 years before, so he was retired and living with Antonia from 2282-84. Which canonically rules out a 2283 date for TWOK; it has to be sometime after 2284, which bolsters the Chronology's 2285 date (not surprising, since Moore & Braga no doubt used the Chronology as their reference when writing GEN).

Butler. The dog's name was Butler.

 

[Captaindemotion]

I never liked how GEN brought this Antonia one out of thin air, someone we'd never heard mentioned before yet who was supposedly so important in Kirk's life.

And we were supposed to believe that he retired from Starfleet during that timeframe? Could they not have picked a number that placed his supposed retirement during say, the lost years between TOS and TMP or between TMP and TWOK? The whole scene just seemed plucked from thin air to me.

 

[Christopher]

Butler. The dog's name was Butler.

In honor of a dog of Shatner's who had recently died, according to Memory Alpha. I used to think it was an homage to Robert Butler, who directed "The Cage."

I never liked how GEN brought this Antonia one out of thin air, someone we'd never heard mentioned before yet who was supposedly so important in Kirk's life.

It was good enough for Ruth, Areel Shaw, Janet Wallace, Janice Lester, and Carol Marcus.

And we were supposed to believe that he retired from Starfleet during that timeframe? Could they not have picked a number that placed his supposed retirement during say, the lost years between TOS and TMP or between TMP and TWOK? The whole scene just seemed plucked from thin air to me.

It is between TMP and TWOK. Like I said, the movie dates it to 2282-84, and the filmmakers assumed TWOK to be set in 2285.

 

[doubleohfive]

Butler. The dog's name was Butler.

In honor of a dog of Shatner's who had recently died, according to Memory Alpha. I used to think it was an homage to Robert Butler, who directed "The Cage."

In the TNG Companion, Ron Moore indicated he had originally named Kirk's dog "Jake" after his own dog who had recently passed away, but Shatner renamed the dog on set in honor of his own dog Butler.

Moore got the last laugh though naming another dog Jake - the dog Lee Adama gives to Romo Lampkin on BSG.

 

[Captaindemotion]

Butler. The dog's name was Butler.

In honor of a dog of Shatner's who had recently died, according to Memory Alpha. I used to think it was an homage to Robert Butler, who directed "The Cage."

I never liked how GEN brought this Antonia one out of thin air, someone we'd never heard mentioned before yet who was supposedly so important in Kirk's life.

It was good enough for Ruth, Areel Shaw, Janet Wallace, Janice Lester, and Carol Marcus.

But all of those relationships were supposed to have taken place in his youth, before we knew Kirk, before TOS. Given that GEN showed his twilight years, I don't think the same trick worked again. Particularly if she was supposed to be so important that he was prepared to leave Starfleet over her; surely we, the audience, would have heard her mentioned before? It would just have been nice if they'd had him refer to a love interest we'd heard before. It's not a biggie, but I just didn't find it convincing that we'd never heard this woman of such importance referred to before.

And we were supposed to believe that he retired from Starfleet during that timeframe? Could they not have picked a number that placed his supposed retirement during say, the lost years between TOS and TMP or between TMP and TWOK? The whole scene just seemed plucked from thin air to me.

It is between TMP and TWOK. Like I said, the movie dates it to 2282-84, and the filmmakers assumed TWOK to be set in 2285.[/QUOTE]


Okay, fair enough. I sort of worked it out that it was post TFF; I always thought that there was maybe a decade or so between that movie and TUC, if Kirk went from having a midlife crisis in TWOK to retirement in TUC (I think the novelisation of TUC posits the same). There was certainly time for Sulu to assume command of the Excelsior and complete a 3 year mission in the Beta Quadrant.