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

[Christopher]

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

It was his great-grandfather, but yes, that is more consistent with a mid-2000s time frame than a 1990s one. I've tried to handwave that in my mind by assuming that either he skipped a "great" or a couple of his ancestors had kids very late in life, but this new information does make it easier to reconcile.


I’ve been thinking the best place to split the timeline is between TOS/TAS and everything from TNG after, because that's the simplest break (because of "Farpoint" retconning the WWIII date). But it occurred to me last night that if TNG/DS9/VGR were in a separate timeline from the later shows, it would reconcile the contradictory portrayals of Section 31, as a secret criminal cabal in DS9 and an authorized part of Starfleet in the later shows. So now I’m wondering if I should convert to the longstanding fan notion that the Temporal Cold War in Enterprise altered the timeline from the version seen in the earlier series. Maybe there are three distinct timelines, with most of the same stuff happening but some subtle differences here and there — which would help reconcile the continuity problems between TNG/DS9 and Picard season 3.

Although, as with Spock and I’Chaya in “Yesteryear” or the subtle changes the DS9 crew made to the events of “The Trouble With Tribbles,” (or the Prophets writing Akorem Laan back into Bajoran history), it’s not so much completely separate timelines as functionally the same timeline with certain continuity changes. We can treat the characters as effectively the same people, but with some alterations to their memories and context.

I always resist fans’ desire to use alternate timelines as a rationalization for storytellers’ continuity adjustments. Fictional series tweak their continuities all the time, and it’s only time travel-related when the story says it is. There’s a difference between in-story changes in the events themselves and metatextual changes in the depiction of the events. But now that we have a textual, canonical assertion that time travel has permanently altered the timeline, I have to admit it’s kind of liberating to embrace it as a way to make sense of major inconsistencies that I struggle to reconcile or overlook within a single continuity. I still prefer a Doylist interpretation for a lot of the inconsistencies and weirdnesses (e.g. Discovery's turbolift hammerspace roller coaster), that it’s just an embellishment or error in the dramatization, but I’m contemplating which inconsistencies are major enough to be worth explaining as timeline shifts. Better to be open to using different tools for different tasks than to try to fix every problem with the same tool.

Although I worry that if I embrace it too fully, it would complicate keeping track of things way too much. What about the difference between early TNG, where Data had emotions and the Federation had been at peace for a long time, and later TNG, when Data was emotionless and there’d been a recent Cardassian war? It’s probably best to use the time-travel fix judiciously, if at all. Maybe using it for the Section 31 thing is overkill.

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.

You'll be pleased to know that exactly that story was told by Geoff Trowbridge in 2008, The Chimes at Midnight from Myriad Universes: Echoes and Refractions. It focuses on how the movie era from TWOK onward unfolded with Thelin instead of Spock, although it doesn't address how the V'Ger crisis was resolved with in Spock's absence.

 

[Sci]

It does not fundamentally change anything. It changes the trivia points on a few Memory Alpha entries. The fundamental stories of TOS, TAS, TNG, DS9, VOY, ENT, DIS, PIC, LD, PRO, and SNW remain the same.

 

[The Wormhole]

Yeah, I'm just going to bring up these two posts I made in this thread last year.

No, I'm not seeing how anything changes. Whether the Eugenics Wars were fought in the 1990s or the 2030s has no impact on when Zefram Cochrane's warp flight happened, how the Federation fared against the Romulans or the Dominion or how badly the Burn crippled the galaxy. At worst, a few tie-ins have been negated, but that's life for a tie in.

And really who the hell cares? Is enjoying next week's new episode of SNW at all contingent on when the Eugenics Wars happened? Somehow, I doubt it.

Point still stands now.

 

[UssGlenn]

Although, as with Spock and I’Chaya in “Yesteryear” or the subtle changes the DS9 crew made to the events of “The Trouble With Tribbles,” (or the Prophets writing Akorem Laan back into Bajoran history), it’s not so much completely separate timelines as functionally the same timeline with certain continuity changes.

Now I want to count what number we are on if we count every minor confirmed change as a new timeline.

 

[Nerys Myk]

No it doesn't. (Same answer as in 2022). The date of the Eugenics War has no impact on the stories being told. it just has to happen before Space Seed and now SNW.

 

[Christopher]

Now I want to count what number we are on if we count every minor confirmed change as a new timeline.

How many Trek episodes are there? It'd be somewhere around that number.

Although some episodes aren't even consistent within themselves, like "Datalore" where Data uses contractions a couple of times in the first half before it's asserted later on that he doesn't use contractions.

All the more reason to save the timeline idea for the really big discontinuities.

 

[Imaus]

Since you use the word 'prefer', I prefer a trek that is basically alt history, starting with the space race never ending and interplanetary slow ships by the 90s and the fall of the USSR leading to supermen and the Khanate of the 90s.

Why does Trek have to be our EXACT future? What happens when there's no second American civil war, no World War III, no warp by 2063? Most of us here will see 2063 and we might even go to Bozeman for a celebration as old coots and a mockup of the phoenix made out of cardboard in wetbulb temps and vr in the montana deserts. We gonna kick trek up another century?

Trek isn't going to happen; and all these retroactive changes since tng and tos itself lead to well, decades of this. Shoulda just went with a design document and gone from there. Betcha the next trek in ten years might smudge the eugenics wars back if they mention it at all.

Does this impact anything? Not really and I don't watch any nutrek but snippets of Ent and TLD so no not really unless it hits TLD, but ye

 

[UssGlenn]

How many Trek episodes are there? It'd be somewhere around that number.

Although some episodes aren't even consistent within themselves, like "Datalore" where Data uses contractions a couple of times in the first half before it's asserted later on that he doesn't use contractions.

All the more reason to save the timeline idea for the really big discontinuities.

I was specifically referring to time travel episodes, of which there are apparently 56. Then just count the ones with confirmed changes. Like Trials and Tribblations, Past Tense, and Accession.

 

[fireproof78]

Why does Trek have to be our EXACT future? What happens when there's no second American civil war, no World War III, no warp by 2063? Most of us here will see 2063 and we might even go to Bozeman for a celebration as old coots and a mockup of the phoenix made out of cardboard in wetbulb temps and vr in the montana deserts. We gonna kick trek up another century?

Yes.

I was specifically referring to time travel episodes, of which there are apparently 56. Then just count the ones with confirmed changes. Like Trials and Tribblations, Past Tense, and Accession.

Yup. Two officers in the original timeline did not attend the bar fight and so did not end up with a reprimand or confined to quarters.

 

[Christopher]

Since you use the word 'prefer', I prefer a trek that is basically alt history, starting with the space race never ending and interplanetary slow ships by the 90s and the fall of the USSR leading to supermen and the Khanate of the 90s.

Why does Trek have to be our EXACT future?

It doesn't, because that's defining the question wrong. Fiction is not just about superficial facts and figures. It's about ideas, about themes, about what a story inspires us to feel and think about. The surface facts of the story merely exist in service to those deeper meanings. Gene Roddenberry intended Star Trek to inspire us to imagine a better future for our descendants, a future that we can choose to work toward building by improving the present. Of course it won't be the future depicted in a made-up story, but a story that feels like it could be an outgrowth of a recognizable present is better at getting us to think in terms of how to improve our own future. If the series were trapped in the assumptions made in the 1960s, it would just keep feeling less and less relevant to today's audiences.

More fundamentally, just because you like alt-history doesn't mean everyone does. It's a niche interest. The goal of any continuation or revival of a series is to attract a new audience, one that isn't already familiar with the universe. Requiring them to learn about an alternate version of history that was established half a century ago just adds another hurdle for new audiences. Some of them might be into alt-history, but not all of them will.

What happens when there's no second American civil war, no World War III, no warp by 2063?

First off, we're already in the second American civil war. The first shots were fired on January 6, 2021. At least, there's a good chance history will remember it that way, and that's certainly what Pike's presentation in "Strange New Worlds" (the episode) seemed to imply.

Second,, most of the fans who were attached to the older series will be gone by then, and the priority of any sane creators of new Trek will be to make it suitable for audiences of the 2060s instead of audiences of the 1960s or 1990s or even 2020s. So the question about what Trek creators will do 40 years from now is not about you or me, so it's not for us to worry about. Either Star Trek will stop being made entirely because it's no longer relevant to future audiences, or it will be reinvented for future audiences. Either way, the determining factor will not be what you or I want to see.


Besides, what's the point of arguing about this as if it were still hypothetical? It's done. It's now explicit canon that the Eugenics Wars have been redated. You can like it or dislike it, but there's no sense arguing over whether it should happen, because it already has. That debate is ended, for better or worse. This is the reality now. It's not the choice I would've made, but I accept that it's the way things are from now on, and I've moved on from the now-obsolete debate about whether it should happen to thinking about its ramifications now that it has. And I can see positive potential in it, although it has potential pitfalls too -- like most things in life.

 

[Shawnster]

Yes.

Yup. Two officers in the original timeline did not attend the bar fight and so did not end up with a reprimand or confined to quarters.

Or those two were injured enough to be put in the infirmary and were unable to stand before Kirk's lecture

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

No, but the in-story reason why/how the Eugenics War(s) shifted into the 21st century does.

Spoiler

Various time traveling agents have altered history. Time might push back and be self repairing, but the ripples or butterfly effect has altered the flow of time. The broad strokes are there, but there are differences. This explains how the Gorn have now become a known species, why SNW legacy characters are different personalities, ranks, and positions than their TOS counterparts, and so forth.

The Eugenics Wars are later or different. Khan is more genocidal. Chapel is an assertive ads-kicker, etc... All are the result of ripples, subtle permutations that were caused by agents altering and restoring the time line. We are seeing what happened when people turned left instead of right. Subtle changes.

SNW and all current/future Trek need never line up with TOS again.

 

[Sci]

Spoiler

Various time traveling agents have altered history. Time might push back and be self repairing, but the ripples or butterfly effect has altered the flow of time. The broad strokes are there, but there are differences. This explains how the Gorn have now become a known species, why SNW legacy characters are different personalities, ranks, and positions than their TOS counterparts, and so forth.

The Eugenics Wars are later or different. Khan is more genocidal. Chapel is an assertive ads-kicker, etc... All are the result of ripples, subtle permutations that were caused by agents altering and restoring the time line. We are seeing what happened when people turned left instead of right. Subtle changes.

Spoiler: SNW

I think it's quite the reach to attribute every little stylistic difference between TOS and SNW to time travel shenanigans. Like, no, Chapel is not more assertive in SNW than in TOS because of time travel. She's more assertive because the writers decided to give her an actual personality. It's ridiculous to look for an in-universe explanation for better writing.

SNW and all current/future Trek need never line up with TOS again.

They never needed to in the first place. It was always a creative choice, not an obligation. They could just as easily have chosen to completely contradict TOS at every turn.

 

[Christopher]

Spoiler: SNW

I think it's quite the reach to attribute every little stylistic difference between TOS and SNW to time travel shenanigans. Like, no, Chapel is not more assertive in SNW than in TOS because of time travel. She's more assertive because the writers decided to give her an actual personality. It's ridiculous to look for an in-universe explanation for better writing.

You're getting the cause and effect backward there, though. If it were only a fan speculation proposed for that reason, I'd agree with you that it was silly. But it's now a canonical fact, established for entirely different reasons, that the timeline has been altered from the way it was presented in TOS. So now that that's been done, now that it's an explicit part of the canon that it's happened, why not use it to explain other differences in detail while we're at it?

They never needed to in the first place. It was always a creative choice, not an obligation. They could just as easily have chosen to completely contradict TOS at every turn.

Again, I don't see any point in making an issue out of what could have happened instead. It didn't happen, period. That question is settled. Time to move on to the next question: Now that it is the concrete reality, how do we adjust to it going forward? "Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change."

I've been watching the Trek franchise reinvent itself since the 1970s. It has frequently made choices I found questionable or didn't agree with, but I couldn't change them. I just faced reality and adjusted to it. Trek has always been and always will be a moving target.

Heck, when "The Neutral Zone" established the calendar date of 2364, I had to throw out my entire Spaceflight Chronology-based version of the Trek timeline and push everything forward 60 years. And I did that with annoyance but without hesitation, because that's you do when presented with new facts that require changing your model of the world. Indeed, I'll be honest: I enjoyed it when I had to rearrange my Trek chronology to throw out my old assumptions in light of new canon. Because it meant I got to be creative in figuring out the new version, and that was fun to do. Having to reassess your assumptions shouldn't be looked on as a burden or an outrage, but as an opportunity. It can be enlightening to look at something familiar in a new way.

 

[fireproof78]

I've been watching the Trek franchise reinvent itself since the 1970s. It has frequently made choices I found questionable or didn't agree with, but I couldn't change them. I just faced reality and adjusted to it. Trek has always been and always will be a moving target.

Indeed yes. Not much I can do about it, save for maybe kick against the goads, as it were, or accept it.

Because it meant I got to be creative in figuring out the new version, and that was fun to do. Having to reassess your assumptions shouldn't be looked on as a burden or an outrage, but as an opportunity. It can be enlightening to look at something familiar in a new way.

Also this. Having preconceptions challenged means getting to revisit long held assumptions. Sometimes I find myself reevaluating opinions and sometimes my opinions remain. But the challenge and the imagination is the fun part.

 

[Lord Garth]

The moment SNW...

Spoiler

... had that Romulan say "The Eugenics Wars were supposed to happen in 1992!" and the change was chalked up as a result of the Temporal War, they backed up what I already theorized. And, in fact, any difference between TOS and SNW or Early-DSC can be chalked up to the Temporal War.

... so I now consider it to be a completely 100% resolved issue.

Spoiler

Picard takes place in the Prime Timeline. Discovery and SNW take place in a Modified Prime Timeline.

 

[Tuskin38]

TNG moving WW3 to the 21st century didn't change anything.

 

[Christopher]

Why are we using spoiler boxes when there's already a "Spoilers" flag in the thread title?

Picard takes place in the Prime Timeline. Discovery and SNW take place in a Modified Prime Timeline.

I'm not so sure. After all, there are some pretty major continuity holes between Berman-era Trek and Picard season 3, like the difficulty in reconciling Jack's age with the chronology of Nemesis, the portrayal of Section 31 as an authorized division of Starfleet Intelligence instead of a secret criminal conspiracy (which is consistent with how DSC and LD have portrayed it), and the differences in how the Changelings operate (PIC portrays them as far worse at pulling off convincing impersonations than they were in DS9, for one thing).

I'm leaning toward a model where there are three main iterations of the Prime Timeline. The first is the TOS/TAS/movie version, with the Eugenics Wars/WWIII in the 1990s and human space travel advancing rapidly. The second is the TNG/DS9/VGR version, where WWIII is in the mid-21st century, but spaceflight advances rapidly enough that the third attempted interstellar flight is launched in 2037 ("The Royale"). As for the third, I'm coming around to the fan theory that the Temporal Cold War as seen in Enterprise created some degree of divergence from the TNG-era timeline (rather than being what led to it, as I've assumed before now). That puts ENT and the Secret Hideout shows in that third timeline. As "Tomorrow and..." revealed, that timeline had significantly slower human spaceflight development due to Romulan intervention.

Of course, the idea is that these timelines are close enough to be essentially the same in terms of who the characters are and what experiences they've had, with the main changes being in the 20th & 21st centuries while the 23rd & 24th are largely the same. So when there's crossover between these eras and the characters, events, ships, etc. seem the same, that can be accounted for, because they are approximately the same despite the timeline adjustments. They still had mostly the same experiences, the same personal histories, aside from a few continuity variances.

 

[Sci]

You're getting the cause and effect backward there, though. If it were only a fan speculation proposed for that reason, I'd agree with you that it was silly. But it's now a canonical fact, established for entirely different reasons, that the timeline has been altered from the way it was presented in TOS. So now that that's been done, now that it's an explicit part of the canon that it's happened, why not use it to explain other differences in detail while we're at it?

Because it's tacky. In the case of "explaining" why the version of Christine from TOS is a personality-less cardboard cutout whose only trait is passively pining over a man who has rejected her and the version in SNW has an actual personality, actual goals, and actual agency? It is incredibly distasteful to treat the decision to depict a woman as an actual person as some sort of "problem" that needs a Watsonian explanation, as though the horrible misogynistic writing of TOS was something that ought to be preserved. You might as well say time travel shenanigans is the reason the visual effects in TOS don't match later shows, or the reason the musical scores are different from series to series.

 

[James Cole]

Picard takes place in the Prime Timeline. Discovery and SNW take place in a Modified Prime Timeline.

This is the argument Ex Astris Scientia and Trekyards have been making for years. And, the strategy a potential Legacy would likely take as well, assuming Terry Matalas, Dave Blass, Doug Drexler, etc are all involved and free from executive interference in that area.

Now, an interesting question might be which timeline Spock Prime came from in ST09. That could clean up some of the different details regarding the supernova, although as Nimoy was playing his Spock, I'd be cautious in pulling that wire.

 

[Sci]

This is the argument Ex Astris Scientia and Trekyards have been making for years. And, the strategy a potential Legacy would likely take as well, assuming Terry Matalas, Dave Blass, Doug Drexler, etc are all involved and free from executive interference in that area.

I don't particularly see what Dave Blass and Doug Drexler would have to do with anything. They're not writers or producers, and unless they're hired as such it is not their job to determine what timeline a story takes place in.