Spoilers Strange New Worlds General Discussion Thread

I'm somewhat surprised that pushing the Eugenics wars 40 years ahead isn't more controversial. Khan himself says that he was exiled in 1996 in Wrath of Khan. Basically all of SNW after Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow is basically in a "close enough" timeline ( https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CloseEnoughTimeline ) and even then there are substantial changes, mainly it's not clear if La'an ever fell for Kirk and that either didn't happen or happened very differently in the original Trek timeline. That's not even getting into the sheer unlikelihood of La'an herself existing as the exact same person with the exact same genome at the exact same time when an ancestor's timeline has been shifted by 40 years (since Khan is still a minor in 2022, the earliest the new timeline Eugenics Wars can take place is in the 2030s, 40 years out from the 1990s, unless he was a teen ruler or something).

And if La'an herself somehow only exists as a descendant of 21st century Khan instead of 20th century Khan that means SNW was never a prequel to TOS to begin with, as presumably then La'an never existed in the original Trek timeline.

 

I mean, when you have a series with time travel, and multiple universes, including ones were "close enough" is common place, i.e. "Parallels," the Mirror Universe, etc, I would say that saying "this didn't happen in the original" is a little bit of an academic exercise, with no real way to see the difference.

Yes, obviously, the genetic likelihood of La'an existing with the time change is infinitesima , but that's how Star Trek works.

 

TNG moved the Eugenics Wars, not SNW.

 

Look around. We'll wait. It's controversial enough.

How so? TNG may have split up the EW and WWIII.

 

TOS established the Eugenics War as being the last of Earth's World Wars, so it was World War 3. TNG in its very first episode established the war as being a mid 21st century conflict. They further cemented this with both First Contact and Enterprise. SNW's is only following on from what TNG established.

 

Which really isn't any better, because then its:
Eugenics Wars (90s): whole populations bombed out of existence.
WWIII (2000s): more populations bombed and a post atomic horror and several populations are gone. So, apparently humanity was surviving on a thread when the Vulcans swooped in and saved us. That's probably one of the least optimistic pictures Trek could portray.

 

Nope.

The fact that Eugenics Wars is plural always left it open to there being more than one Eugenics War. And that there was an interwar period between the wars.

Most people don’t call WWI & WWII the world war, despite them involving the same nation, do they? They’re the world wars.

Its completely plausible that the 1990s Eugenics war was EWI, and the 21st Eugenics War was EWII.

Moving it was nonsensical by SNW, especially after what was reaffirmed by PIC S2 i.e. Project Khan, and the Shenzhen Conventions.

We should really be asking is if there was an EWIII circa 2170s, to align with DS9.

 

It definitely was a mistake to ever use Earth years in Trek. There should have been an entirely different calendar based on the date of the founding of the Federation with the year the Federation was founded on in Earth time left vague, to allow for a perpertual sliding timescale. Obviously TOS writers were thinking along the same lines by using vague stardates, but some how real Earth years crept in regardless. I do know that the TOS writers bible did have a rule saying not to specify what century TOS was in, but by the movies that was all thrown out (and arguably was thrown out as early as Space Seed)

 

Yes. Spock said it was the last world war.

 

Actually, it's interesting (and I didn't realize this with Space Seed until recently):
(emphasis added)
KHAN: How long?
KIRK: How long have you been sleeping? Two centuries we estimate. Landing party to Enterprise. Come in.
UHURA: Go ahead, boarding party. We read you.
KIRK: Lock in on McCoy's beam. He's transporting back with a casualty we discovered here.

and then later:
KIRK: Then you can check the registry.
SPOCK: No such vessel listed. Records of that period are fragmentary, however. The mid=1990s was the era of your last so-called World War.
MCCOY: The Eugenics Wars.
SPOCK: Of course. Your attempt to improve the race through selective breeding.

I use to think that the 200 years in TWOK was a mistake, but it's one that traces right back to the original source material.

Nope, Spock's dialog is pretty specific above.

 

That could be very easily retconned as the last world war started in the ‘90s. Meaning it’s a misquote.

 

I've always interpreted the plural to refer to the multiple conflicts in different regions at the same time. India is fighting Khan while Scotland is fighting McPherson. But they are 2 different wars. Then collectively they are called the Third World War, in hindsight.

 

I don't entirely disagree, but Spock's statement about this being a 90s era conflict is just as important to the time-frame. It only becomes a 21st century conflict, and a nuclear one, with the Next Generation.

 

I don't really give a shit about this stuff, except I don't understand why it's so important for a certain percentage of Trek's fandom to believe that Star Trek is actually a possible future of our Earth.

Why couldn't it have happened in an alternate timeline which diverged in the mid 1960s? Is anything of value lost at all, narratively speaking?

 

Nothing is lost.

But, that's not how Star Trek has ever approached it.

 

Ask Paramount. They're the ones who dredged up the issue again and Khan when it had been left well alone since literally 1982 when Wrath of Khan came out. They were the ones who decided to make the Eugenics Wars "our" future again rather than leaving it in the faux-1990s. I don't think any Trek fan was seriously asking for more Khan, especially after that bizarre Cumberbatch movie.

 

Let's look at it this way.... which time period has the most material to back itself up.

The 90's Eugenics Wars has a line in a 1st season of TOS, which it full of little tidbits of stuff that has been retconned over the years. We forgive it as "First Season Weirdness." And we have a line from Wrath of Khan.

Now if we do take the Eugenics Wars as being WWIII, which is supported by both the line from "Space Seed" that connects the two, which is admittedly from that "weird first season." We also have the multiple references in SNW. Additionally, we have Voyager visit the year 1996 without any sign or mention of war.

 

Even earlier, as Space Seed was just repeating the "two hundred years" reference established in Tomorrow is Yesterday. Even before both those episodes, we had a a century established as TOS's present established in The Squire of Gothos, though there they said it was the 28th century.

Another thing to consider is the Enterprise episode Hatchery, where Archer mentions his great-grandfather who fought in the Eugenics Wars. The 1990s is too far back for a great-grandfather, but mid 21st century, a hundred years prior to when Enterprise takes place could work. For example, I am currently 39 while my own great-grandfather (who was still alive when I was a child) would have been 22 back in 1924.

 

DS9 also put the Eugenics Wars in the 22nd Century

It was a writing error, but it works now.