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

Superman's my favourite super hero. DC has given us many many great stories and characters. They are also in no way a model for how to handle continuity.

 

Heres the scene in question. Not seeing anything to suggest that the Eugenics war was moved up within the dialogue. They show a bunch of images and mention the SECOND CIVIL WAR....

 

Second Civil War comes before the Eugenics Wars here, when it should have been decades before.

 

Second civil war has meant many things by many historians. There were no dates mentioned here at all. Just 1 or 2 seconds of file footage of Jan 6th...

 

That's what Pike's phrasing implied, but people speak inaccurately all the time. He may have just been simplifying for the alien audience, or he misspoke.

 

I would actually just prefer the Eugenics War as being vaguely referred to as something that happened in Earth's history, but never actually give a specific date to it. I would actually prefer if they did that with a lot of Star Trek's "future history", or whatever you want to call it.

 

It is hinted that he is of Sikh origin, so there is the Vikrami calendar to consider, which puts 1996 at 2052/2053, which is theoretically possible, but not very plausible. But the more likely answer is that he was using a different, supposedly-superior calendar used by the augments (similar to the supposedly superior French-Republican Calendar), as they wanted to distance themselves from the human ways.

 

"The human ways?" Have we ever seen Augments claim they aren't human? I thought the idea was more that they were an improved humanity. I mean, that's literally what "augment" means -- to increase or amplify what something already has, not to change it into something different. And "eugenic" literally means "well-born" -- eugenics is about selecting or enhancing the best in humanity, perfecting the breed.

Just in general, I'm not a fan of the tendency of things like X-Men and Charmed to use "humans" as a dialogue shorthand for everyone but mutants, witches, or whatever other kind of enhanced/paranormal humans they feature. Just being a human with something extra doesn't make you non-human, any more than putting a basket on your bicycle makes it stop being a bicycle.

 

I can see that Augments might have used their own Calendar but I don’t see how history would record it that way.

If the Nazis had decided upon a different calendar and used it to say WW2 began in 1965, historians would still record the actual date as recorded by the system that the majority use.

 

Khan is obviously not religious, so calling him a Sikh would seem to be a bit of a stretch.

 

He was played by a Mexican guy in brownface, pretending to be Indian Sikh (with seemingly zero research done about Sikhs). Then just the Mexican guy without the brownface, and finally by the whitest British man alive.

Khan's backstory is more of a mess than the Eugenics Wars.

 

Lt. McGivers was the one who speculated that Khan was "probably a Sikh." But that is never actually confirmed by anyone. That's certainly an interesting guess on her part based on five seconds of looking at him in a stasis chamber, as he has none of the visual markers of Sikh religion/culture aside from longer hair. But I think that we as the audience were meant to take her assumption at face value, along with Spock's recitations of history. Any inconsistencies with details about that era that showed up in later Trek could be explained as Spock not necessarily remembering all the facts correctly, and also records and history of the time period being fragmentary and incomplete.

Kor

 

Honestly I think the recent season of 'Picard' did a lot to reconcile most perceived contradictions of what happened when, just with that one throwaway line about how they understand very little of what happened in the early 21st century.

It would make sense that a global nuclear war would have a catastrophic effect on all digital record keeping. Between EMPs, physical destruction of hardware, and a decade or more of general neglect and chaotic upheaval, I could easily see most of the internet being wiped out, while a comparatively fair amount of the old physical media survived. What fragments of usable digital records do survive could be almost hopelessly contaminated by the accompanying propaganda and misinformation campaigns that plague the period.
So from the perspective of 23rd/24th century historians, Earth history would get increasingly spotty starting around the early 90's, with the 2020s - 2060's being a gaping void of knowledge with a relative handful of confirmable facts, stitched together by a flimsy web of guesswork and intense centuries long academic debate.
Hell, there's probably a whole field of forensic study into 21st century data reconstruction, and it took them 150 years to realise that a snippet of video they'd thought was from the outbreak of WWIII was in fact from a mid 2000's found footage disaster movie, and a country they though was a member of the Eastern Coalition, was in fact entirely fictional and came from some video-game's fan wiki. It also wasn't until Starfleet fished that Bird of Prey out of San Francisco Bay and examined it's flight logs that it came to light that Earth was not in fact swarming with orbital nuclear missile platforms in the late 20th century.

Of course the rub comes when Khan mentions being "lost is space from the year 1996". Oh well!
There's still ways to write around this of course; up to and including Khan straight up lying because he'd already read what historical data Starfleet had on him, and adjusted his story to match. After all, recorded history isn't necessarily what actually happened, just a version of events most people generally agree on. So what would be the point trying to set the record straight; especially if there's things about him that they don't' know that could work to his advantage?
It just depends on how much leg work one wants to give adjusting continuity that'll be out of date again in a few decades (or it won't be, and in which case it won't matter either way.)

 

The new episode (SNW S2E3) suggests that

Spoiler

the eugenics wars were supposed to happen in the 90s, as said in TOS and WOK, but the timeline was already changed in SNW to have it happen later.

 

Spoiler

The child actor playing Khan for Strange New Worlds has a Latino background just like Montabaln.

 

Is there even a Prime timeline anymore?

Does Star Trek adhere to the multiverse posited in Parallels, or is there now one timeline that is continuously messed with by time travellers?

If it's the latter, then is everything produced prior to the timeline updates no longer canonical. Is TWOK and TOS now something that never happened?

But then, the Kelvin Universe is alternate.

So maybe all the shows are alternate universes and nothing is connected? Heck, maybe each episode is alternate?

 

It seems to be the latter, but that has precedent going clear back to "Yesteryear," where Spock's trip to the past included one minor change (I'Chaya dying) but still restored the present timeline. Basically the idea put forth in "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow" was that past events like the Eugenics Wars and the development of human spaceflight over the 20th-21st centuries have been altered by time travelers, but the inertia of history (or the counter-interventions of other temporal cold warriors) led to equivalent events happening in a different way, so that the 23rd century is still essentially the same as it was in TOS, with a few minor variations like different set and costume designs, faster starships, and less sexism. (Recall that "A Quality of Mercy" established that Spock's "destined" future is still basically the one we know.)

First, of course it's canonical. "Canon" does not mean an in-universe history, it means a comprehensive body of fictional works. If that body of stories includes multiple timelines, then all those timelines are part of its canon. Look at how the Arrowverse approached Flashpoint and the Crisis (following the example of how DC Comics approaches its timeline resets). The timeline was rewritten, but because key characters remembered the alterations, it was still a narratively continuous series. The events of the stories created the timeline shifts, and thus those shifts were part of the canon, because a canon is a set of stories.

Second, the events of TOS and the movies did still happen, just not in exactly the same way. This episode wasn't about throwing out the 23rd- or 24th-century continuity, but about adjusting the 20th/21st-century history of Trek to be more recognizable to modern viewers.

And remember, it was Gene Roddenberry who did that first, in "Encounter at Farpoint" when he retconned the date of World War Three (which "Space Seed" had equated with the Eugenics Wars in the 1990s) to the mid-21st century, because 1992 was only 5 years away at that point and he knew that was way too close a date. Every Trek production since then has been consistent with that revised chronology, so all SNW did here was to provide a retroactive, in-universe explanation for that 36-year-old revision.

 

It has been a while but didn't Archer imply the Eugenics happened in the 21st when he was talking about his grandfather?

 

This is where we're at regarding time travel in Star Trek:

 

It would be fascinating to see a one off story set in that alternate universe where Kirk's Enterprise had an Andorian first officer. I wonder what other alterations would spin off of Spock's absence.