I have no idea what that means. Now I feel old… Thanks.
Star Trek in the '90s into the '00s was produced by Rick Berman. Star Wars in the '90s into the '00s was produced by Rick McCallum. As you can see, they look like they could be cousins. Both were Hollywood chameleons who were good at telling the i.p. originators they worked with the right things to make Gene and George, respectively, think they'd found someone who Got It™. When, in reality, all they were good at was saying the right thing to further their careers. They both
tried, I'll give them that. But that fundamental not-getting-it-ness meant the product of their "vision" was flawed from the get-go.
Berman's name is on everything from mid-TNG on through the end of Enterprise. But latter TNG was Michael Piller's creative oversight (with assists from Jeri Taylor, Ira Behr, Ron Moore, and Brannon Braga). DS9 was Piller's at the beginning, shifting over to Behr and Moore by the end of season two. Voyager was a hobbled Taylor (Berman nixed her more daring approaches, which I wish had made it to the screen -- the cast agreed), that shifted over to Braga when she retired. And the films and Enterprise were mostly Braga.
NakedMoleRat, where I get into heated discussions with a lot of Trek fans is when I have everything Picard experiences after going into the Nexus as his Nexus fantasy -- getting the lean, mean battleship, fighting the Borg and beating them, meeting Zefram Cochrane and touching the
Phoenix, getting the girl, punching the bad guy, going on a dune buggy chase... Nemesis makes
no sense. It's like, by that point, his subconscious was yelling at him that it was all an illusory midlife crisis he was wallowing in. He gets echoes from the real world, presumably from the version of himself that eventually gets out, and much like Guinan. I hold to a future where Admiral Riker takes the
Enterprise-D as his flagship, Picard becomes a Federation ambassador and marries Beverly, and we get a version of the future setting of "All Good Things..." where he'd been able to steer things better. And Enterprise is purely AU. The size and tech level of the ship, the non-Temporal-Cold-War events... It all works much better in the 2240s as the early voyages of NCC-1701 under Captain April.
Gregatron and
Lightning... There are points both ways. I object to the Okudas' research methodology, going way back. He worshipped at the altar of Gene and it blinded him to some things. He interviewed Matt Jefferies, but missed a lot of the implications of what the guy was telling him. Continuity suffered. They used data points from
some animated episodes, but not all. They put forward
some script details and production memo factoids and deleted scene info, but not all. The script for Star Trek II says it's Kirk's fiftieth birthday. That's how Meyer directed it and Shatner acted it. That's good enough for other references to be used by the production staff, but they ignore it.
They arbitrarily add three hundred to the original episodes' airdates to set them in the timeline. Rather than just say the episodes were aired out of production order, Gene (and, later, the Okudas) scramble to come up with some way that stardates can be nonlinear to justify the aired episode order. The intention early on was that stardates were like nineteenth-century ships' logs, beginning the day they leave port, and specific to the ship. The stardate was to be MMDD of the voyage, but that was not adhered to. The trend was upward, though, and twelve hundred units per Solar year is close enough to the later one thousand units per Solar year that I maintain the one system gave way to the other, sometime around 2323 (when, counting back from TNG's first season, those stardates would hit zero).
The second season writers' bible says Kirk is "about 34". Going by the 2285 date for TWOK (which works as well as anything for stuff before, and everything later works best with it), he'd be born in 2235, not 2233, as is currently official. Putting the stardates in order and using them for their intended purpose (for some reason, a new zero point was right when Kirk took the
Enterprise out to space), and including the animated episodes (except "B.E.M." and "The Slaver Weapon", which don't work for other reasons), they top out around 6000 -- which is five years. "The Counter-clock Incident" is a milk run after the FYM is over and the ship is on its way back to dock for refit.
Some math later (and using a calendar calculator to find which dates US Thanksgiving falls on in the 2260s ("Charlie X"), TOS' first season covers about two years, second season a bit less than one, and third season one and a bit. If Kirk's birthday is in spring (adhered to in lore from the '70s on), he turns 34 toward the end of the first season. Right on target. That means he took command around September 2267 and the FYM ended in 2272. Kirk was then promoted and served as Starfleet's Chief of Operations for two-and-a-half years before the Vejur Incident, so TMP is in 2275. Kirk
did maroon Khan and his followers on Ceti Alpha V fifteen years earlier -- it's not rounded off.
That's what happens when one actually researches and deduces. The only hard-and-fast datum we got for any of the TOS period was that TWOK was "in the 23rd century" and the Romulan ale Bones gave him was bottled in 2283 (and it was some time past that, given McCoy's comment about it taking a while to ferment). Dating referents in TOS itself were a lot more vague and sometimes contradictory.
Everything else I hew to comes from the shows and movies themselves, scripts, deleted scenes, production memos, and so forth. First sources, wherever possible. If a later production contradicted an earlier behind-the-scenes tidbit, that's that. If a later production contradicts earlier
aired/
screened lore, the later datum has to be rejected. For instance, TNG's "The Royale" gave us the
Charybdis being launched in the 2130s as the third attempt to probe beyond the Solar system. But the
Botany Bay had launched toward Tau Ceti in 1996, and was not the only DY-100 ship in existence in the 1990s. By TNG and later, a lot in the production staffs had forgotten that Trek's history is not ours -- especially of the 19th, 20th, and -- so far -- 21st centuries. By Voyager, these problems were compounding. Although one of my favorite bits from Voyager was when they visited 1990s Los Angeles, with Janeway commenting how it was all gone by their time. In his novelization for TMP, Gene had Kirk switch from a suborbital shuttle to the regional tram to San Francisco on "Los Angeles Island", implying a catastrophic quake sometime after the twentieth century. That sort of thing makes me happy, and was probably an accident, as the same episode had a model in Rain Robinson's office of a DY-100 launching from the surface with a booster stack, when Matt Jefferies intended they be built and operated solely in space.
By Enterprise, the lore and continuity were already shot to hell. JJ's take and everything subsequent is a flat-out reboot, despite incorporating
a version of the original timeline. Gregatron is right in saying that "Prime" was an invention of CBS describing their version of the original material from Paramount, that was a separate intellectual property. Eaves' "twenty-five percent" comment was a glib way of saying they were told to make the new takes on old things
juuuust different enough to not be the thing they didn't have the rights to. Everything that's come since the mid-to-late-'90s has strayed further and further afield from the original source material and creators' intentions. Especially after all the corporate rights-massaging of the CBS/Viacom purchase of and split of Paramount into film and television properties and the merry hob that wreaked with prior Trek lore, I tend to dismiss anything contradictory from those sources, even if what it contradicts was never explicitly seen or stated onscreen in the prior incarnation of Trek. Something, something letter of the canon defeating spirit of the canon, or thereabouts. Not saying you need to agree -- just that I didn't arrive here by some flighty and rosy-tinted view of a past that never was or something. I am very rational in my irrationality.
Similarly, Gregatron, Jim Kirk's parents being George and Winona dates back to original production materials. The beta canon of the '70s and '80s stuck to that much more than not (to the point I don't know of any source that gave his mother a name other than Winona). There's a lot of stuff that they threw back and forth in production memos that fandom and tie-in authors picked up on and stuck with, even with nothing to back it up shown on-screen. At the same time, some of the things Gene said are... well... complete shash. His BSing an explanation for non-sequential stardates rather than just say "NBC aired the episodes out of production order"... His creating "Roddenberry's Rules of Starship Design" to invalidate the designs Franz Joseph Schnaubelt had come up with for his Star Fleet Technical Manual after the two had their falling-out... His instruction to FASA and Mike Okuda to ignore FJ's starship lists, and failure to provide an alternate source, leaving them to find the purely conjectural, unofficial, and flat-out wrong article by Greg Jein...
My takeaway is that there's a lot more internal consistency earlier on, so I feel a lot more free to ignore, dismiss, rationalize, or tweak the stuff that came later and later, to the point pretty much everything from Enterprise on is "guilty until proved innocent" -- that is, I incorporate
versions of the new lore introduced, massaged to fit the lore that came before, to keep it from overwriting first sources. It's not everyone's approach, but it's the only way
I personally can stay intellectually, creatively, and emotionally invested in Star Trek as a fictional universe. And I'm sorry,
NakedMoleRat, but the Trek09
Enterprise is a travesty, from it being the size of TNG's
Enterprise-D and being built on the frikkin' ground to the nightmare confusion of brewery piping that was an "engine room" to the window on the bridge. It took the clean classic lines of both the TOS and TMP versions of the ship and made a bloated mockery of them. I had high hopes until about halfway through the trailer, but when I actually saw the ship in the movie, it felt like this famous amateur attempted restoration of a ****** painting in Spain compared to the original:
