Friday, November 21, 2008

Star Trek Revises Kirk History

As IO9.com points out, the Star Trek revisions are up front and center with an important alteration to the live of James T. Kirk.

In the movie, Young Kirk’s brashness and recklessness is the result of losing his hands at an early age when the villain Nero destroys the USS Kelvin with his parents on board. As a result Kirk and his brother Sam are raised by Uncle Frank (Brad William Henke) who is an abusive alcoholic. Turns out that the Corvette that 11 year old Kirk takes for a cliff dive was Frank's. Essentially Kirk's childhood was pretty darn rough and focused on survival rather then care free fun.

This is completely different then the Original Series version of Young Kirk. Young Kirk grew up on the planet Tarsus IV pretty happily until age 13 when a food crisis that would starve the colony led to Governor Kodos taking the extreme measure of killing half the population that he deemed unworthy to survive. How the parents die isn't known but it’s suggested that it’s not on the colony. In the novel "Best Destiny", Kirk returns to the Iowa farm and is raised by his parents (with usual difficulties that teenagers and parents have) until he enters Starfleet Academy.

This seems to support two ideas about the movie. One is the story plot is that Nero's goal is to wipe James T Kirk and thus his Enterprise accomplishments from the history books and that this movie is truly Star Trek 2.0. It should be interesting, as more info comes out, to compare Abrams' Star Trek with TOS Star Trek.

2 comments:

  1. Though the novels have always been spotty in terms of official history or not, what I'm more interested in is how Abrams' work intersects with McIntyre's "Enterprise: The First Adventure." I wonder if any of them on his team even read the book.

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  2. I am going to go with not at all. Robert April doesn't appear to be the first captain of the Enterprise in the movie but Christopher Pike.

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