James T. Kirk/Appendices/Ambiguities

Accepted canon regarding Kirk's early life before the Enterprise, and gaps between events portrayed in films, are scarce and ambiguous. The following notes attempt to reconcile the "mysteries" of Kirk and canon, but these questions may never be satisfactorily answered.
One of the ambiguities was when Lieutenant Kirk was an instructor at the Academy. According to , there was an age requirement of 16 years for cadets. Assuming that Gary Mitchell was born in 2242, the earliest that he could have entered the Academy was in 2258. Of course, this raised the probability that the blonde lab technician might be Carol Marcus. Speaking of his time at the Academy as an instructor, he said in a line of dialogue from the script of "Where No Man Has Gone Before" that, "I sort of leaned on cadets I liked."
The producers of have stated – including on the audio commentary – that many of the events of the alternate reality could have taken place in the original timeline. Some possible events include:
* a rebellious youth in Iowa
* disciplinary actions for cheating on the Kobayashi Maru
* meeting Spock for the first time because he cheated on his test
Roberto Orci, co-writer of , had said that in an early draft of that film, dialogue confirmed that in the prime reality, Kirk was born in Iowa and not aboard the : "If not for the attack from the Narada, the Kelvin would've reached Earth and Kirk would've been born in Iowa. The attack made Winona Kirk go into labor early."Orci & Kurtzman to answer fan question at TrekMovie + Transcript of last week's 'Impomptu' Q&A The dialogue in question was likely Prime Spock's line in which he tells the alternate that he was born on a farm in Iowa, to which Kirk corrected him, stating he (the alternate Kirk) was born on a starship. This line appears in the novelization of the film, which used an early draft of the screenplay as a basis.
In March 1985, when the town was looking for a theme for its annual town festival, Steve Miller, a member of the Riverside City Council who had read The Making of Star Trek – a book that lists Kirk's year of birth as 2228 rather than the more firmly established 2233 – suggested to the council that Riverside should proclaim itself to be the future birthplace of Kirk. Miller's motion passed unanimously. The council later wrote to Roddenberry for his permission to be designated as the official birthplace of Kirk, and with Roddenberry's consent, developed a tourist industry around the idea. then established on screen that Kirk was from Iowa.
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