Your Ideas: Star Trek III but no Leonard Nimoy

[CoveTom]

That's possible, though there seemed to be older captains around in the TOS movie era.

I'm not sure if Shatner and Kirk were the same age. I mainly go by the timeline from the Star Trek Encyclopedia, which establishes that Kirk would be 50. Shatner was a year older than Kirk in '82. As for being ordered to take a desk job, that's certainly a narrative possibility but it also doesn't seem the right way to go with Kirk. He risked a hell of a lot to get his command back in TMP and then, assuming the timeline is correct, gave it up again not a decade later. The reason this wasn't an issue in TWOK is because Meyer has been pretty clear that he and the producers ignored TMP's existence.

I agree that his exact age shouldn't have been revealed and that age shouldn't have come up as an issue in the early TOS films. I could see that by TVH but not in the second film.

In retrospect, it really is odd that they made such an issue of the age thing. I am 49 years old myself right now and although I can definitely tell differences in my body from when I was 20, short of participating in athletic competition I'm certainly as physically and mentally capable as I was 10 or 15 years ago. TWOK acts like Kirk is ready for the old folks home.

Even by today's standards in 2025, we assume people will be perfectly capable of carrying on with careers until age 65 at least, and many go well beyond that. Surely by the 23rd century, with medicine vastly improved and lifespans drastically increased (cf., McCoy in TNG), the age of 49 will mean even less.

In fact, the age that Kirk is in TWOK is basically the average age of a captain in today's US Navy. Certainly you don't have many people reaching the rank of captain and commanding major naval vessels equivalent to the Enterprise in their 30's. According to the great Google machine, the average age of someone reaching the lowest admiral rank today is 57 and full admiral is generally something achieved by people in their 60's.

I wonder if it had anything to do with the fact that Nick Meyer himself was a young guy when he wrote TWOK (around 35 if we assume he wrote it in 1981) and maybe he still fell into that trap that we all do when we are younger of certain ages seeming much older than they are.

 

[Laura Cynthia Chambers]

Although learning seems to be accelerated in Star Trek's future, it still mostly appears to follow the same pattern of elementary, middle, secondary, post-secondary, however advanced the subjects taught at these grade levels are.

 

[CoveTom]

Although learning seems to be accelerated in Star Trek's future, it still mostly appears to follow the same pattern of elementary, middle, secondary, post-secondary, however advanced the subjects taught at these grade levels are.

Which is interesting, because schooling as we know it today is mostly at 20th century invention. Throughout most of human history, there has been nowhere near that amount of formal schooling.