When did they decide when it takes place?

[Noname Given]

As has been stated by others, the first absolute 'on the screen' timeframe reference was STII:TWoK's opening placard of:

"In the 23rd Century..."

During the original series run it was all over the place:

In the original series second pilot "Where No Man Gone Before" gary Mitchell references a poem:

GM: "The Nightingale Woman, written by Phineas Tarbolde on the Canopius planet back in 1996. It's funny you picked that one, Doctor." ..."That's one of the most passionate love sonnets of the past couple of centuries."
^^^
Placing Star Trek in the late 22nd to late 23rd century.

However in "The Squire of Gothos", where Trelane is discussing Napoleon's exploits of the early 1800's, you have a crewman commenting to Kirk:

JAEGER: "Notice the period, Captain. Nine hundred light years from Earth. It's what might be seen through a viewing scope if it were powerful enough."
^^^
And suddenly, Star Trek is firmly in the early 28th century.

And yet later in the first season (as other's have commented) you have "Tomorrow is Yesterday" where the Enterprise is in 1968; and in repose to a Air Force officer commenting that he'll lock Kirk up for 200 years, Kirk replies:

KIRK: "That ought to be just about right."
^^^
Firmly placing Star Trek in the mid 22nd century (2168 - 200 years from 1968).

But, since TWoK, and later solidified with ST:TNG - the accepted time frame for the adventures shown in the original Star Trek series are 2265-2269.

 

[Christopher]

Actually the tune Trelane made Uhura play was composed in 1880, which suggests a late-28th century setting for "Gothos." Either way, it's a hell of an outlier, as we've already established.

And you left out "Space Seed," which assumed Khan's people had been frozen for an estimated 200 years after leaving Earth in the 1990s.

 

[Timo]

Either way, it's a hell of an outlier, as we've already established.

...Yet it also contains its own rationalization in a neat package. The idea of lightspeed observations connecting two timeframes and establishing the latter when we know the former from history books requires us to know the distance - and that's something we are really hard pressed to do when one end of the observation setup is capable of outrunning a starship!

Sometimes we have episodes in need of retconning for lack of compatibility, sometimes episodes with major internal shortcomings; here we have an internal feature enabling and indeed necessitating a painless retcon! If the writers wanted us to believe in the 900-yrs-in-future model, this wasn't the way to write it...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[JonnyQuest037]

One thing I didn't, even at the time, like about The Motion Picture was that tag-line 'The Human Adventure Is Just Beginning'. I don't know why, but it struck me as un-trek-ish and cold.

Well, I find the movie very un-Trekish and cold, so the tagline sums that film up perfectly for me!

TMP was trying very, very hard to be 2001: A Space Odyssey when it should've been trying harder to be TOS.

 

[BillJ]

However in "The Squire of Gothos", where Trelane is discussing Napoleon's exploits of the early 1800's, you have a crewman commenting to Kirk:

JAEGER: "Notice the period, Captain. Nine hundred light years from Earth. It's what might be seen through a viewing scope if it were powerful enough."
^^^
And suddenly, Star Trek is firmly in the early 28th century.

That works under the assumption that Trelane viewed Earth though a viewing scope. Trelane says he's been looking in, but doesn't give any details on the how.

 

[Nebusj]

However in "The Squire of Gothos", where Trelane is discussing Napoleon's exploits of the early 1800's, you have a crewman commenting to Kirk:

JAEGER: "Notice the period, Captain. Nine hundred light years from Earth. It's what might be seen through a viewing scope if it were powerful enough."
^^^
And suddenly, Star Trek is firmly in the early 28th century.

That works under the assumption that Trelane viewed Earth though a viewing scope. Trelane says he's been looking in, but doesn't give any details on the how.

Though we can rule out any simple optical system. Leaving aside the problems of seeing stuff through the Earth's atmosphere and, ah, roofs, to get one-meter resolution at 900 light years requires being able to discern things that are about 0.000 000 000 000 000 000 1 degrees apart, which you're not going to be doing with visible light; you'd need a lens aperture more than thirty times the distance between the Earth and the Moon in diameter. And much of the stuff in Trelane's castle was even smaller than that, implying a really big lens.

Technologies other than simple telescopes have to have been at work (I would accept wormholes reducing the effective distance Trelane-to-Earth) and so, really, a lot of things suddenly go.

 

[Warped9]

Trek 2009: "The human adventure is getting a do-over."

In 2009 the human adventure was shot in the face.

 

[HIjol]

For what it is worth, the bottle of Dom used to christen the Enterprise "B" is labeled "2265" in "The Movie That Shall Not be Named, For Some."

 

[Maurice]

Trek 2009: "The human adventure is getting a do-over."

In 2009 the human adventure was shot in the face.

With a squirtgun.

 

[HIjol]

Trek 2009: "The human adventure is getting a do-over."

In 2009 the human adventure was shot in the face.

With a squirtgun.

"Could I get a towel?"