From Newsgroup: alt.tv.star-trek.tos
From Address: graemecree{at}aol.com
Subject: Re: The alt.tv.star-trek.tos FAQ

On Friday, November 8, 2013 1:19:30 AM UTC-6, anim8rfsk wrote:
> Of course in The Menagerie they said no ship kept records that detailed 
> so maybe it was a new addition.  :)
I consider that to be a continuity error.  Court-Martial and Menagerie were
made back to back.  In one, Kirk says that no such recordings are made
(present tense), and in the other we see such a recording.  I don't see any
way to reconcile it except to admit it as an error.
But again, I have no trouble believing that the bridge is videotaped 24/7. 
It's the most important area of the ship.  But Enterprise was more than
just scenes on the Bridge, it was scenes in private quarters,
shuttlecrafts, on planets, you name it.  Given the revelation at the end,
that it was just a historical novel, I think of it as a Tom Clancy novel. 
The characters are fictional.  Even within the fictional Trek universe,
Archer is a fictional character.  As Wiseguy says, we have to go with what
we see onscreen, and nobody could take that kind of liberties with a
genuine historical personage.  Given that it's a novel, the whole thing,
characters and all, must be fictional.  You simply couldn't take these kind
of liberties with a historical personality who lived in an era when video
recording was common.
> It's weird though that if there wasn't a real guy, that 
> Riker was hoping to get inspiration by watching Archer's stirring speech 
Good point, but I don't have a problem with it.  Take Gandalf on the bridge
of Khazad-dum, facing the Balrog.  Fictional character, fictional
confrontation.  The way Tolkien wrote it, it took about 500 words to tell. 
The way Jackson, it took up nearly 20 minutes of film time.  It just
grabbed people.  Incredible as it seems, I suppose that Archer is a
fictional character who really inspires 24th century people.
> I'd have still vastly preferred that the exploits of Archer the 
> Executioner had led to the Mirror Universe, and the reason the Kirkverse 
> was so much better was that Archer had been run over by a lumbering beer 
> truck like Edith Keeler or something.
B&B didn't think of it.  That would have been a GREAT ending, for the
entire series to have taken place in the Mirror Universe.  People on the
net bandied that idea around for years.  But B&B didn't have that kind
of imagination.
> Whether he was real at any point or not or in any series or not, I think 
> we have to concede that Archer didn't exist in the Kirkverse.
Absolutely.  Everything that Kirk did first, they tried to tell us Archer
actually did first.  Including discovering Tribbles.  It's impossible to
believe that tribbles were completely unknown to Kirk if Archer had dealt
with them.  More likely that Archer is a fictional character who was
dreamed up after the events of Trouble With Tribbles.
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