Hi. No worries. I love being able to discuss Trek with someone and come up with fun ideas rather than expect the writers to explain everything.

I know where all these discussions about where to locate episodes come from. But they’re a result of fans making up a continuity after the show had finished.

WNMHGB is a much bigger episode on a broader scale than regular episode budgets would allow. If you want to choose any Trek that could easily be watched in a 1960s cinema as a movie, it’s WNMHGB beyond all the others. It has great FX, a great, classic Trek story, good action scenes, a high body count of major characters and a sympathetic villain.

However, Spock’s character is still a bit over the place and Kirk is ‘James R.’ Kirk is described as a bookworm at the academy, although down the years, that’s increasingly been thrown into doubt – most portrayals of young Kirk, be they Shatner’s, Diane Carey’s or Orci/Kurtzmans have shown a wilder character more prone to low level criminality.

What I basically have been talking about is that all pilot episodes throw everything and its brother into the melting pot and some ideas will never be built upon. Gary Mitchell and Elisabeth Dehner are never again referenced. Mark Piper is forgotten. Indeed, Christopher Pike and his crew are more commonly thought of than Kirk’s pilot crew.

Once the pilot’s done and dusted, some ideas remain and some fall away. I love WNMHGB. It’s one of my favourite episodes (although I wish Bones could be in it!) But sometimes you just have to accept that some of the things stated as fact in a pilot, some of the designs and some of the characters will simply be let drift.

These things don’t really need explaining. So if Gary Mitchell isn’t mentioned in the new Trek film, really he’s a character from the pilot and he doesn’t have to be as relevant as characters in the main run of the show!

Nothing personal! I just love arguing about Trek. :)

I completely get that WNMHGB is set about a year before The Corbomite Maneuver, but that’s precisely the retroactive continuity I’m talking about: no one was thinking about that at the time. It was merely another episode of Desilu’s peculiar new sci-fi show!

Besides i think that most chronologies (and most fans) take the position that WNMHGB happens before all the other TOS episodes, despite the original airing schedule.

And I disagree with your assessment that it is not much like the series that followed. At the heart of the WNMHGB story are the themes of power and the abuse of power, and the nature of divinity. Not only would theses be themes we would see again in “Space Seed,” “Patterns of Force,” “Who Mourns for Adonis?” et. al, but couching the lessons in action and adventure was the essence of TOS.

Finally, WNMHGB has to count as a true TOS episode because Kirk fights the antagonist in the 3rd Act, which results in his tunic being torn :-)

Where No Man Has Gone Before wasn’t the first proper Star Trek episode: it was the second pilot and it shows.

There’s been plenty of retconning done the last few decades, but WNMHGB is an action-packed, slightly 50s-ish sci-fi adventure and not much like the 1960s iconic show we know and love.

There are loads of inconsistencies with subsequent episodes in it (remember it was broadcast part way through the first season) to the extent that you have to treat it as a typical pilot where some bits are kept and others dumped. Remember how Riker and Troi could talk telepathically in Encounter at Farpoint and Patrick Stewart was playing Picard with a (bad) mid-atlantic accent?

Realistically, there’s no reason to say the events of the story couldn’t have happened, but equally, there’s so much that’s apocryphal in it that maybe WNMHGB should be considered a lesser part of Trek continuity.

Please don’t let this movie erase or alter forty years of KNOW N Trek history. More and more this seems like a reboot so keep “classic Trek” history in tact and maybe just list this as “new Trek” snd let it spin in space and build on itself independent of what came before. I could not stand to see the history we all know and which still exists on DVDs be changed or forced to mesh with this new version of events as they seem to be presented in this movie.