Where No Man fits in?

[Warped9]

Is it possible that Where No Man Has Gone Before takes place in the first year of the five year mission..and when the next episode comes along, Corbormite or Man Trap or whatever, that two years have passed (uniform change--ship looks different) and that season one of TOS is actually year 3 of the show? This would make since, I think, with the quote from Kirk to Spock in Amok time (year 4 of five year mission) when he says "in all the years I have known you"..ect...

What do you think?

Rob
Scorpio

As far as I'm concerned it makes more sense that WNMHGB happens before the 5-year mission, in effect something of a trial period for a young Captain in only his second starship command before the ship is refit and launched on its 5-year voyage. And "in all the years I've known you" isn't at all specific enough as a reference.

Also the excerpt from the Writer's Guide reprinted in The Making Of Star Trek says Kirk has commanded the Enterprise for about four years and TMoST was released between Seasons 2 and 3. That does lend support to the ship and equipment and personnel in WNMHGB looking distinctly different from the rest of the series. Add it up and that suggests Kirk got the Enterprise about two years before the refit and 5-year mission.

This is reference material during the show's production and I think has far more weight than anything written thirty some years after the fact. Meaning: the latter series like VOY and ENT have nothing of substance to say in regards to this. And that goes for the "official" chronology as well. I could make a good argument that the 5-year mission more likely started about 2270 or '71 rather than ended. 2265 was likely chosen more because it "tidily" resonated with 1965 around when WNMHGB was produced.

 

[Captain Robert April]

That "all the years I've known you" line could also be seen as an out for the idea of Kirk and Spock at least knowing each other prior to TOS (like what we're apparently going to be presented with in the new movie). Not necessarily being buddy-buddy, but at least knowing each other.

 

[Warped9]

^^ "All the years I've known you" could also simply be something of an exaggeration seen so often in everyday conversation. It could mean anything more than two years.

 

[Timo]

This is reference material during the show's production and I think has far more weight than anything written thirty some years after the fact. Meaning: the latter series like VOY and ENT have nothing of substance to say in regards to this. And that goes for the "official" chronology as well.

I'm not sure this logic can carry. After all, whenever an episode was written for TOS, it overrode whatever impression the audience had gotten from the previous episodes. First Spock's parents were dead, then they were alive, for example. More importantly, while each episode consisted of writer intent and production outcome, the piling up of the episodes had an obvious effect: the new outcome plus the new intent plus the old outcome formed the Truth, while the old intent almost invariably had to be discarded (i.e. Spock's parents were "never" dead).

It is a bit too much to claim that TMoST would have had a direct effect on TOS writing even for the third season. The book is merely the Truth from one stage of TOS production, outdated already when it came out. That happens to any writers' bible sooner rather than later, let alone to works that are something less than.

One might analyze something like "Balance of Terror" merely through writer intent and production outcome, and for example choose to interpret the surrounding pseudohistory differently from what is established in preceding or succeeding episodes. Say, Spock could be the only Vulcan known to the Federation, rather than a member of an important member culture. But as soon as one starts to treat a number of episodes or entire seasons as an integral whole which they really never were, drawing of distinctions becomes awfully artificial. By "Turnabout Intruder", the writing intent of the first two seasons is dead and buried anyway, and all one can go by (while still wishing to assume the episodes take place in one and the same universe) is the production outcome. Adding the spinoff shows to that does not significantly alter the situation.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Timewalker]

Where the heck do they say Spock's parents were dead?! I don't remember that.

 

[Timo]

That's one of those things where writer intention is separate from production result: in several early episodes, from "Corbomite Maneuver" on in fact, Spock speaks of his parents exclusively in the past tense. Clearly the writers thought that those parents were long dead. However, their deaths are never actually mentioned, and when they appear in full health in "Journey to Babel", it is a shocking departure from previous writer intent but not a continuity violation.

The same happens with Sisko's dad, too. At first ("Playing God", I think), Sisko speaks of him in the past tense and tells how an illness reduced him to a human wreck. But later on, it turns out the father is still alive and becomes an active character; his illness is retconned into something that wasn't actually fatal, but cleverly still remains part of the character. And again there is no continuity violation even though writer intent is gangraped, hacked to mincemeat, dipped in gasoline and ignited.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Warped9]

This is reference material during the show's production and I think has far more weight than anything written thirty some years after the fact. Meaning: the latter series like VOY and ENT have nothing of substance to say in regards to this. And that goes for the "official" chronology as well.

I'm not sure this logic can carry. After all, whenever an episode was written for TOS, it overrode whatever impression the audience had gotten from the previous episodes. First Spock's parents were dead, then they were alive, for example. More importantly, while each episode consisted of writer intent and production outcome, the piling up of the episodes had an obvious effect: the new outcome plus the new intent plus the old outcome formed the Truth, while the old intent almost invariably had to be discarded (i.e. Spock's parents were "never" dead).

It is a bit too much to claim that TMoST would have had a direct effect on TOS writing even for the third season. The book is merely the Truth from one stage of TOS production, outdated already when it came out. That happens to any writers' bible sooner rather than later, let alone to works that are something less than.

One might analyze something like "Balance of Terror" merely through writer intent and production outcome, and for example choose to interpret the surrounding pseudohistory differently from what is established in preceding or succeeding episodes. Say, Spock could be the only Vulcan known to the Federation, rather than a member of an important member culture. But as soon as one starts to treat a number of episodes or entire seasons as an integral whole which they really never were, drawing of distinctions becomes awfully artificial. By "Turnabout Intruder", the writing intent of the first two seasons is dead and buried anyway, and all one can go by (while still wishing to assume the episodes take place in one and the same universe) is the production outcome. Adding the spinoff shows to that does not significantly alter the situation.

Timo Saloniemi

TMoST itself likely wouldn't have had any effect. Perhaps I was unclear. What I meant was that in TMoST we have excerpts from the show's Writer's Guide dealing with the character bios. Throughout TOS I cannot recall anything revealed about Kirk that contradicts the Writer's Guide character bio.

And so in my view Kirk's history is established primarily in the TOS episodes as well as secondarily from the Writer's Guide source material. Subsequently I cannot recall anything else in the six spinoff films that tries to contradict what's written in the Writer's Guide either.

After that anything else is pretty much revisionism.

Writers' intent is difficult to decipher unless you have actual documentation or the writers themselves to speak on the issue. We've only got the onscreen evidence and whatever archival printed material that supports (or contradicts it) and vice-versa. In any inconsistency the onscreen material generally takes precedence. But if the printed source material isn't contradicted by the onscreen material then I think it argues for the intent of the printed material to be honoured as how things were intended.

I admit this has been an issue for me since the '80s and even in some respects aspects of TMP. I disagree strongly with how much revisionism or reinterpretation of what TOS established either onscreen, in subtext or in the apparent intent of the reference material that was meant to serve as a guide for the show's production.

 

[Nerys Myk]

Timo's point is that TOS was constantly revising it's self. Nothing was set in stone early on. They made changes on the fly when the new idea sounded better than to the old. The character's evolved too. The grimmer Pike-like Kirk from WNMHGB and Season One evolved into the more Shatner-like Kirk we know. And that Kirk evolved in to the Superhero Kirk from the movies. Young WNMHGB Kirk is a stack of books with legs. Young Movie Kirk is a guy who likes to win. ( and cheat)

 

[Warped9]

^^ Hmm. I think I'd call that character evolution within TOS as Kirk became more at ease with his command position.

 

[Timo]

It is that, when you choose to squint just right.

Most "development" within the framework of Star Trek is the result of a chain of accidents, not unlike a massive monument of metal art formed from a succession of car crashes. TOS as a package is certainly such a result; the later spinoffs may have featured more preplanning, including story arcs of varying lengths.

It just doesn't strike me as logical to truncate Trek at points such as the last episode of TOS, or the last movie with the original characters, or so on - the story is incomplete if weird references from the fictional future, past or parallel realms of TOS aren't included. Of course, the story still remains largely incomplete even when all references from everywhere are put together, but IMHO that level of incompleteness is the one that leaves the right percentage of the story to the imagination of the audience. A level that steadfastly refuses to acknowledge contributions from outside the 1960s is missing too much of the picture. IMHO.

I guess it boils down to this: for me, Star Trek as a 1960s TV show isn't all that interesting a phenomenon, while Star Trek as a fictional universe is highly entertaining - to a large part because it's made of such diverse and often ill-fitting elements from 1960s-2000s (plus ispiration from the preceding centuries) that still fuse together thanks to the sheer total mass of the material.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Warped9]

Well as I understand it there was a deliberate intent to lighten things up some during the 2nd season and this shows not only in the obviously humorous stories but throughout many of the other episodes as well in S2. The first season is definitely more "intense" in overall sensibility. I also get the feeling that they tried to get some of that back in some of the 3rd season. Some of the dialog written for Kirk sounds a bit more formal in S3 compared to how he expressed himself in S2.

 

[Nerys Myk]

^^ Hmm. I think I'd call that character evolution within TOS as Kirk became more at ease with his command position.

That might work "internaly", though the idea of Kirk as a wet behind the ears nube doesnt quite fit with how the character was written. I think "externally" Kirk evolved because of what Shatner brought to the table and the writers playing off that.

 

[Shatmandu]

Most "development" within the framework of Star Trek is the result of a chain of accidents, not unlike a massive monument of metal art formed from a succession of car crashes.

This man speaks the truth. Most of us know Trek as a whole, not as it developed week-to-week, year-to-year.

One writer, very early on, saw who was playing the Doctor (De Kelly, well-known from westerns), saw the name McCoy (which brings up the Hatfields and McCoys; rural folks, resistant to change and new technology), and that flowed into the notion that he would not like transporters.

You put that in a script, it gets through, it is played well by the actor, it films well, and bada-bing, you've planted the seeds of a character trait.

And you run with it.

If an elderly English gentleman had been cast as McCoy, the writers/producers would have written the character to suit him.

Joe, bumpkin