Time travel is basically always new to our heroes, any heroes, even when they encounter it for the sixth time. So nothing wrong with Stamets being a time machine. It's just that they have conveniently written him as being out of spores, so we can't get an instant fix that way.
We see the border on the map move to the upper left a lot. But the map really describes a very small area - any set of Trek heroes travels much farther than that in their adventures. Even in the deliberately "small" Star Charts take of Trek astrography that everybody onscreen seems to be basing their maps on nowadays, the losses on that map are minuscule. We know the Klingons like to squabble about the border, and this really only amounts to that so far.
That is, until we learn of a major world getting conquered. But Star Charts places no "major worlds" at the Klingon border, and quite deliberately so. The enemy is now at the Southeast Gates (okay, Antispinrim Gates), and those gates in modern reckoning are Vulcan and Andoria, but whether they are gone or not depends on the minutest minutiae of that map.
Nevertheless, this is much bigger than the war before "Into the Forest". And up until "Magic to Make", there really was no war - even with Kol distributing those cloaks, there were few if any Starfleet casualties other than those from the initial battle, and we never heard of civilian ones, or of lost planets or whatnot. Now we see what must be bona fide conquest. Is TOS in actual contradiction of that? "Errand of Mercy" is sort of ambiguous on past Klingon conflict, but a couple of other episodes have our heroes boast on Starfleet maintaining a long peace. Was that by winning all the wars?
Timo Saloniemi
We see the border on the map move to the upper left a lot. But the map really describes a very small area - any set of Trek heroes travels much farther than that in their adventures. Even in the deliberately "small" Star Charts take of Trek astrography that everybody onscreen seems to be basing their maps on nowadays, the losses on that map are minuscule. We know the Klingons like to squabble about the border, and this really only amounts to that so far.
That is, until we learn of a major world getting conquered. But Star Charts places no "major worlds" at the Klingon border, and quite deliberately so. The enemy is now at the Southeast Gates (okay, Antispinrim Gates), and those gates in modern reckoning are Vulcan and Andoria, but whether they are gone or not depends on the minutest minutiae of that map.
Nevertheless, this is much bigger than the war before "Into the Forest". And up until "Magic to Make", there really was no war - even with Kol distributing those cloaks, there were few if any Starfleet casualties other than those from the initial battle, and we never heard of civilian ones, or of lost planets or whatnot. Now we see what must be bona fide conquest. Is TOS in actual contradiction of that? "Errand of Mercy" is sort of ambiguous on past Klingon conflict, but a couple of other episodes have our heroes boast on Starfleet maintaining a long peace. Was that by winning all the wars?
Timo Saloniemi
