Hey, I’m just answering your question.
If I was writing, I wouldn’t have bothered retconning the Eugenics Wars to begin with.
Spoilers Does moving the Eugenics Wars into the 21st century fundamentally change things?
- Thread starter Citiprime
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Hey, I’m just answering your question.
If I was writing, I wouldn’t have bothered retconning the Eugenics Wars to begin with.
No, the idea is that the changes in the past balanced out so that they led to the same 23rd century, or nearly the same. We've seen in SNW last season that the events of "The Menagerie" and "Balance of Terror" are still fated to happen on schedule, as well as Spock's longer-term future, and this week's episode confirmed that the Rigel VII mission just before "The Cage" happened the same way.
People like to harp on the Butterfly Effect and how a slight change in the past can lead to a wildly different future, but what they forget is that it doesn't have to. The point of the Butterfly Effect in chaos theory is that the outcome of events cannot be consistently predicted because so many different variables can affect it. So one pebble falling may start an avalanche, but the thousand pebbles that fell before it didn't have any effect. One butterfly flapping its wings might cause a hurricane, but a thousand others won't. So while some changes in the past can snowball and lead to huge changes in the future, others just get damped out by the overall flow of events and don't really change the long-term future.
In the case of Trek, I imagine that First Contact was such a game-changer that it doesn't really matter how long before it the wars happened, as long as they happened before it. Once Earth makes contact with the stars, that's so revolutionary that it restarts the clock, as it were. So history before then may be heavily rewritten, but the ripples those changes generate run into the wall, or maybe the phase change, of First Contact and don't propagate as much beyond it. (At least within the context of how Trek timelines work, with the same individual people seemingly destined to be born at the same times.)
No you haven't. The question is "out-universe" about stories and plots as seen in the shows and films, not what ifs.
Khan was just one of 40 supermen to take over. We've no idea where the other 39 took control and how far their reach extended.
I don't think it changes anything but I wonder why keep going back to eugenics wars in the first place. Normies don't care, some fans are indifferent, and others like it all nice and neat timeline. I just don't get who this is for. Story wise I'd think you'd want to introduce your own story elements into the background, put your own mark on the franchise or some shit, instead of riffing on stuff. Make it eugenics war 2 at least.
Because Khan is a touchstone in Star Trek's timeline. Who is it for? It's for the writers who see this as popular in Trek's history, the most successful film, the most top rated villain. They are unpacking it from all sides because fans like Khan.
Yeah. For better or worse, TWOK is the most influential Trek movie, and it made Khan the leading TOS villain in the public mind. It's the same reason Sherlock Holmes remakes always feature Moriarty, even though he was only in two canonical stories.
They did. But perhaps they should actually state this *on screen* that our real world reality ( Star trek and all) is in an alternate existence from in - universe Star Trek. Then perhaps that would put an end to fans and showrunners trying to match the universes together.
As I keep saying, it's way, way too literal-minded to think that making Trek's 20th-21st century recognizable to modern audiences is simply about whether the facts and details align. Stories are not just about facts and details. Those things are just metaphors for the things the writers want the audience to think about and feel when they experience a story.
I mean, if you look at Picard and SNW, it's already obvious that their version of the 2020s is not exactly like ours. PIC showed significantly more advanced space travel than we have, and SNW put an imaginary super-bridge in Toronto. So it's not about claiming "This is our actual future." Come on, nobody with a shred of sense would believe a work of fiction is predicting the actual future. and no writer would claim it. It's just about making it feel recognizable, so that the 56-year-old continuity details aren't a barrier that new viewers have to climb over to engage with the franchise.
This is how any long-running work of fiction does things. It adapts to the current audience, makes itself accessible to newcomers, because the audience that clings to decades-old nostalgia is small and forever shrinking. That's why modern Trek shows have modern technology, why they're more diverse than TOS, why they're less sexist than TOS, why the characters engage in more informal banter, why the stories are often more serialized. A modern show is made for modern audiences. And that goes for continuity too, which is why Marvel Comics tells stories set in the present day even though they're supposedly only a decade or so after Peter Parker got bitten by a spider in 1961.
Maybe we should just be glad that, perhaps partially as a result of the wisdom and warning given to us via "Space Seed" and "The Wrath of Khan", we have so far chosen not to release the potentially deadly genie of genetic manipulation. And maybe a few decades from now, if we keep playing it smart, they'll have to move the eugenics wars further ahead in history.
Or maybe, our genetically enhanced overlords will declare all of Star Trek to be on their list of media that they have censored. For our own good, of course.
Or maybe, our genetically enhanced overlords will declare all of Star Trek to be on their list of media that they have censored. For our own good, of course.
Fiction always paints new scientific or medical advances as "potentially deadly genies," because people always fear novelty and you can tap into those fears to generate stories. But then the advances turn out to be generally beneficial and the old fearmongering looks quaint. It used to be that people were afraid organ transplants would erode human identity or something. Doctor Who's Cybermen were created as a cautionary tale about transplantation run amok, which is really Luddite as hell in retrospect. And novels & movies like Coma and Parts: The Clonus Horror revolved around the fear that people would be victimized and exploited by being farmed for organs for the rich. But in reality, organ transplantation came to be accepted as an invaluable benefit.
The old fears of genetic engineering have similarly subsided as it's demonstrated its enormous benefits for treating disease, growing more robust and healthy crops, etc. For decades, there's been plenty of science fiction embracing transhumanism as a positive thing, or just a morally neutral, everyday part of future life, rather than painting it as a source of fear and danger like older fiction. I've always assumed the reason DS9 posited the Federation ban on genetic engineering was because the writers looked around at the increasing ubiquity of transhumanism in other science fiction and realized they needed to explain why Trek was still stuck in the 1960s in its portrayal of an unaugmented future humanity. (Although early TNG did dabble in transhumanism with Geordi's VISOR and Picard's artificial heart, before it fell by the wayside under Michael Piller's tenure.)
Okies.
Push the Eugenics war forward 30 years, then you've pushed WWIII forward 30 years... So wtf does that mean for First contact?
Zephram is completing his warp experiments before the nukes go off.
There's a Vulcan Embassy on Earth when the Eastern Coalition strikes first.
Bye bye Australia.
Push the Eugenics war forward 30 years, then you've pushed WWIII forward 30 years... So wtf does that mean for First contact?
Zephram is completing his warp experiments before the nukes go off.
There's a Vulcan Embassy on Earth when the Eastern Coalition strikes first.
Bye bye Australia.
They won't. There is confusion as to aspirational having to be connected to our humanity vs. specific events.
In my opinion there will be the tendency to try and reset it because of the efforts Roddenberry put in to the pitch that Trek was responsible for so much inspiration that it must connect to our present time. Neverminding what Christopher has noted. But, Trek tries way too hard to have its cake and eat it too in terms of timelines so the struggle will remain.
You can consider your tracts discarded.
We're in the second American civil war? Hahahha. Bullshit, and bullshit, outdated already, shoved into trek by hacks who shoved in the headlines for some malodrama from college-hair Pike.
Everything else here follows. If Trek is about Ideas, then shoving the idea that we could had done better also goes a-ways.
"That debate is ended, for better or worse." Well, maybe to you, but not to me, or everyone else having a dialogue post this screed. Stop acting like some authority. No one responds to your tracts because they're not conductive or fruitful to discussion, and you can save yourself a response.
Yes, Trek would never discuss contemporary issues like countries about to nuke each other...
Well, in TOS Spock said the last world war was in the 90s, but then TNG moved it to the 21st Century. So TNG did it before FC, PIC and SNW.Agreed on the latter, not the former.
Besides, if anything, ST:FC got there first.
No. Prodigy showed a Crossfield Class in Season 1.
Sort of. Moriarty only appears in "The Final Problem," the story where Doyle killed Sherlock Holmes off (for good, he thought). He's extensively discussed at the beginning and the end of the novel The Valley of Fear, but he never appears onstage as it were. And he's briefly mentioned in a couple of other stories, like "The Empty House" (the story where Doyle revealed that Holmes wasn't really dead). There's at least one other story where Holmes muses that the latest villain he and Watson are dealing with is better qualified than anyone else to fill the void left by Professor Moriarty. I'm forgetting which one right now.
But even though Moriarty meets Holmes face to face in "The Final Problem," Watson (the narrator for most of the Holmes stories) never actually meets the Professor in Canon. Everything he knows about Professor Moriarty is told to him by Sherlock Holmes. This is something that several Sherlock Holmes pastiches have had fun with.
Oh, and just to bring it around to Star Trek again, "Countess Regina Bartholomew" from TNG's "Ship in a Bottle" has absolutely nothing to do with anything Doyle ever wrote. No such character ever appears in the Canon.
Hindsight is 20 / 20 but probably would of been a good idea if Star Trek took place in the 26, 27, and 29th centuries instead of the 22nd, 23rd and 24th.
Have warp be invented in the 24th century. World War 3/ Egenincs in the 23rd century. Then just mainly avoid the years 1966- 2200. That 200 year buffer would of served to keep out of the way of real history for a long long while.
Have warp be invented in the 24th century. World War 3/ Egenincs in the 23rd century. Then just mainly avoid the years 1966- 2200. That 200 year buffer would of served to keep out of the way of real history for a long long while.
Reboot it and kick it off. Seems in line with TOS originally, at least alluded to in "Squire of Gothos."
You're being mean.
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