Star Trek: No Subtitle

[Wowbagger]

Originally Posted by Nate the Great

Canon is not silent on Pike's age. Look, Spock said he served eleven years with Pike in "The Menagerie." Fanon suggests that this means two five-year missions with a year in between for refit and long-term shore leave for the crew (many of which didn't go home in that five years). After Pike was another refit, and then Kirk. Did Pike appear to be more than ten years older than Kirk would be when he was in "The Cage?" No, they looked to be basically the same age; mid thirties. And if Kirk is 17 or whatever in Trek 11, Pike should barely be thirty.

The fanon here is both not related to canon and also... I'm not actually following your logic with it. I agree, however, that "The Menagerie" (almost) definitely took place in 2267, and therefore "The Cage" in 2254 ("thirteen years ago," according to Spock). That makes Kirk 34 for "The Menagerie" and 17 for "The Cage." 2255 is the year in the Abramsverse that Pike meets Kirk in the bar. So Abramsverse Pike in the bar should be one year older (give or take eleven months) than Prime Pike on Talos IV.

Thing is, we just plain don't know how old Prime Pike was on Talos. Canon makes no clear statement on the subject, so we can assume nothing. He is clearly older than 12 and younger than 134 (we have little canonical data on the capacity of 23rd-century medicine to slow or alter the appearance of age). Some might base their speculation on the age of the actor, Jeffrey Hunter, at the time, and this is at least a reasonable method for figuring things out. Hunter was 38 years and one day old on the first day of filming for "The Cage" (and considerably older when it finally aired ). If we go by the actor's age, which is a pretty speculative method (after all, just two years later Hunter was asked to reprise the role, but this time he was supposedly thirteen years older), that would make Prime Pike's birthday somewhere in the vicinity of 2315.

That, of course, would make him 17 or 18 years older than Kirk, not ten.

Bruce Greenwood was 52 during the filming of Star Trek XI, which (subtracting 52 from 2258, the year of the movie's main events), gives Alt!Pike a birthday somewhere in the vicinity of 2306, or about ten years older than Prime Pike. However, given the dramatic drift between actors' actual ages and the supposed ages of their characters (cf Koenig and Chekov), it is not unreasonable to suppose that, in-universe, these characters are the same people with the same birthday and the same lives up until at least the divergence of timelines in 2233.

That's all I mean by that.