Spoilers Does moving the Eugenics Wars into the 21st century fundamentally change things?

That, or it only took him 78 seconds to complete all the coursework with flying colors and graduate. (Attoseconds work too.)

 

Plus a war with the Transformers, but that's non-canon.

 

Technically he says "we called it..." So Khan can come before the Second Civil War as long as the name Eugenics War doesn't get applied to his conflict until later. And if there is a Second Eugenics War, as implied, then the term getting retroactively applied to Khan's conflict works well.

And that's assuming that he didn't simply tweak the order because the term "Civil War" would have way more meaning to the people he is talking to.

 

Star Trek is fiction. They should have kept it in the 20th century to honor canon. Trek does not have to align with real life, it just has to align with its own canon.

 

That's been my basic sentiment towards Trek, that it was it's own thing with its own history that diverged from ours with the very first episode. In order to make Trek match up with the real world, you probably got to move it into the 32nd-Century or something.

Oh wait...

 

By that logic, Marvel "should" have kept the Fantastic Four's rocket flight in 1961 with the motivation to beat the Commies to the Moon. Yes, Trek is fiction, but fiction is imaginary and thus can be rewritten to remain relevant for new audiences. The fundamental ideas, stories, and characters matter more than the surface details of what and when. It's because Marvel Comics is fiction that they can keep updating the time frame while pretending the same general events happen. It's because Shakespeare is fiction that you can stage alternate versions of it in modern dress and settings. "It's fiction" isn't an argument for keeping it rigidly unchanging, but just the opposite. Reality is unchanging, but fiction is an invention of the mind and is thus as mutable as thought itself.

And "canon" does not equal immutability. Look at almost any long-running canon and you'll see it revises itself as it goes. Marvel is just one example. Look at, say, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, where Sunnydale was portrayed throughout as a coastal city with a dock, but then the finale depicted it in the middle of the desert. Or Star Wars, where they actually went back and re-edited the movies to change some of their events (did Han shoot first?). A canon is just something that pretends to represent a consistent reality no matter how much it changes.

 

If Trek is always trying to stay consistent with the real world, then it will never have its own consistency. It will be forever altering its story line.

Trek is a different product than Marvel and always ongoing. If it is always trying to change with real history, then it will never have its own consistency. Things will make less and less sense in the broader Star Trek storyline.

 

Personally I prefer the 90's Eugenics Wars, and kinda liked the idea of an elseworld period piece show covering it (like that rumoured 1992 show). I was thrilled when Into Darkness unapologetically put Khan and his cryopods 300 years before it's present. Move it to the present and it's... just another present-day sci-fi show.

 

It always has been. TOS started out as a show about an Earth ship; the Federation was a retcon midway through season 1. TNG portrayed a Federation that had been at peace for generations, but then in season 4 they retconned in a Cardassian war that had only ended the previous year. Anyone who thinks that Star Trek has ever had a perfectly consistent continuity has not been paying attention.

And as I mentioned before, Gene Roddenberry already retconned WWIII (aka the Eugenics Wars) in TNG: "Encounter at Farpoint," when he bumped it from the 1990s (then just a few years away) to the mid-21st century. When he made TNG, he considered TOS to have happened only in broad strokes and intended to rewrite and update its continuity for a modern audience. It was later producers who brought it back into greater consistency with TOS. Roddenberry wanted Trek to be a plausible vision of the future, and to him, that meant updating it for its current audience.

Heck, Trek chronology was retconned a lot of times in its first couple of decades. "Tomorrow is Yesterday" and "Space Seed" put the show 200 years in the future, while "The Squire of Gothos" put it 900 years after Napoleon, which would be about 700 years in the future. "Metamorphosis" put it 237 years after Zefram Cochrane's birth, which probably put it more than 200 years ahead. TMP put it more than 300 years after Voyager 6 was lost, and since only 2 Voyager probes had been launched by 1979, that implies something after the 2280s, possibly quite a while after, since it would've had to travel pretty far to hit a black hole; but TMP is now assumed to have taken place around 2273. TNG initially said Data was "Class of '78," but then gave the calendar year as 2364, and it's only since then that the timeline's been treated more or less consistently.

 

You are splitting hairs with the examples in your first paragraph.

I do not recall Roddenberry changing the timeframe of WWIII in "Encounter at Farpoint," but if he did do that he shouldn't have bothered.

I don't recall Trek ever having any significant deviations from canon until the Enterprise series. But, that series did respect canon more often than not. It was not built on a disregard for canon (even though it made some obvious errors).

 

^^this

The original show took real life elements but made its own universe and history built upon that. Because it's still not a show set in our universe, nor can it be. Nor should it be. It's usually more interesting if they play with tropes and events rather than just taking old news footage and upchucking that into a script. Case in point: "The Enterprise Incident" was based on "The Pueblo Incident" but not told directly by name (which would be condescending), and whose ideas were played with by a writer more creative and entertaining than many of today's (IMHO, YMMV, this is still ultimately subjective to the likes and interests of the individual viewers.) Sorta like "V" - 1983 kept a line between basic philosophies but the 2009 version just lazily went after actual politicians (whether you agreed with them or not, the 1983 version was still far more mature in its approach and to its audiences. A shame the 1984 sequel took a nosedive... but I digress.)

Doesn't matter if Roddenberry tweaked the dates in TNG or if later showrunners played with dates or used direct news clips. It's still just as underwhelming.

 

Is that really that important though? It's not like the exact year of the Eugenics Wars was a major plot point or anything, it's just a line.

 

The only person who has the right to say what a creator "should" do with their creation is the creator.

As I said -- not paying attention.

"Canon" does not mean absolute consistency of every trivial detail. This isn't an encyclopedia. It's a work of entertainment. A canon is a set of stories, and stories are about exploring characters and ideas and creating impressions in an audience, not just providing data points to enter on a wiki. The consistency that matters in a canon is the consistency of its characters and themes and approach, not what the consoles look like or what chronology is used.

 

"Space Seed" referred to the Eugenics Wars of the 1990s as being World War III. "Encounter at Farpoint" was the first episode to refer to World War III as happening in the mid-21st Century.

Then you weren't paying attention. There are a LOT.

 

...So's Marvel...

 

I love this community, but if there is one thing I wouldn't miss about it, it's people talking about 'honouring canon'.

Piss on canon. It's fiction.

 

I always thought the Eugenics was were in the 90's and fairly localized. WW III I thought was mid 21st century and global.

 

These CBS + All Access Trek shows are not in TOS-universe so whatever they're doing is fair game. Just watch these lack of substance shows as they entangled their grand plots to nowhere. Everything these showrunners are doing is leading to dystopia and confusion, this is now Star Trek. Better get used to it because these masterpieces are not being cancelled.

 

True about "Space Seed." It's explicit.

However, the assertion about "Encounter at Farpoint" is only arguable.

"Encounter at Farpoint" refers to the "post-atomic horror" as being in the mid-21st century. AFAIK, it makes no mention specifically of WWIII. Granted, you'd expect a nuclear exchange to occur as a part of WWIII, but as I said, it's arguable, but not definitive.