Spoilers Does moving the Eugenics Wars into the 21st century fundamentally change things?
- Thread starter Citiprime
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^ And the SS Valiant.
Star Trek has negated lines of dialogue before. Data claimed to be part of the "Starfleet class of '78" in "Encounter at Farpoint" before "The Neutral Zone" established that TNG S1 took place in 2364. Scotty claims that Romulan ship the Enterprise is chasing in "Balance of Terror" runs on "simple impulse" engines even though it is clearly moving at FTL speeds. VOY "Scorpion, Part I" has a line of dialogue where Tuvok says the Breen use biological starships, then their ships in the DS9 Final Chapter look nothing like that. Etc etc.
If Star Trek wanted to retcon this, it wouldn't be unprecedented. But again, the lines are vague enough they don't need to be interpreted that way.
I like that explanation. It seems like the simplest way to explain everything. And it lets today's writers depict a Eugenics War with Augments as happening in our real-life future without contradicting TOS and TWOK.
They gave him Steve Rogers's Super-Soldier Serum.
Star Trek has negated lines of dialogue before. Data claimed to be part of the "Starfleet class of '78" in "Encounter at Farpoint" before "The Neutral Zone" established that TNG S1 took place in 2364. Scotty claims that Romulan ship the Enterprise is chasing in "Balance of Terror" runs on "simple impulse" engines even though it is clearly moving at FTL speeds. VOY "Scorpion, Part I" has a line of dialogue where Tuvok says the Breen use biological starships, then their ships in the DS9 Final Chapter look nothing like that. Etc etc.
If Star Trek wanted to retcon this, it wouldn't be unprecedented. But again, the lines are vague enough they don't need to be interpreted that way.
I like that explanation. It seems like the simplest way to explain everything. And it lets today's writers depict a Eugenics War with Augments as happening in our real-life future without contradicting TOS and TWOK.
They gave him Steve Rogers's Super-Soldier Serum.
I mean, other episodes and movies have already contradicted that and placed the Eugenics Wars in the 21st century, such as DS9, Enterprise and even TWOK.
And then a minute later Khan said he ruled Earth "two hundred years ago" which would be the 21st century, so it would seem as though Khan does not actually know.
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.
Eh believe how you want but its stated specifically not vague, it literally says "Second Civil War, then the Eugenics War, and finally just World War III" That implies a specific order, little room for interpretation.. In the end it makes more sense for it to be during 21st century then it does in the 90s. It would imply khans project started in like the 60s if it was in the 90s which even in the trek verse is absurd.
I'm OK with there being two sets of Eugenics Wars, one from 1992-96 and one in the 21st century. 
I guess I have MORE of a problem with the whole "second Civil War" thing. Despite what the media likes to claim, things aren't quite that bad...
I guess I have MORE of a problem with the whole "second Civil War" thing. Despite what the media likes to claim, things aren't quite that bad...
The "Second Civil War" might just be another name for/part of one of the other conflicts. If we bring Known Space into the scene (from TAS), then there are also the Man-Kzin Wars and other things that could lead to civil unrest.
Exactly: Eugenics War, singular. Every time we've heard tell previously, it's been the Eugenics Wars, plural. So as @Christopher suggested, maybe there was a Eugenics War in the 1990s and another Eugenics War circa 2020s-2050s.
Right off the bat, "implies" is doing a lot of work. It's just as likely that Pike is listing things off the top of his head and that they're not meant to be in chronological order.
I mean, it's what the original creative intent was!
I enjoyed it personally, Kept me entertained, kinda wish they spent more time in the confederation timeline tho. Also wonder if just Q died or the whole continuum because in discovery season 4 they mentioned they have not had contact in centuries.
More precisely, Spock said "The mid-1990s was the era of your last so-called World War."
That has obviously been directly retconned by WWIII being established as a separate conflict in First Contact among others. If one part of a line has been retconned, I wouldn't put too much weight on the rest of it.
It's worth noting that Roddenberry pretty much retconned the Eugenics Wars out in "Encounter at Farpoint." "Space Seed" had equated them with the Third World War, but "Farpoint" moved WWIII to the mid-21st century, since 1992 was only five years in the future at that point. So he probably intended to rewrite Trek history so that the EW either never happened or happened decades later. It was later producers in DS9 and ENT who reintroduced the EW as part of Trek history, ignoring the inconsistency with real history.
That's not the case. DS9: "Doctor Bashir, I Presume" erroneously put Khan's reign in the 22nd century, 200 years before the episode, because Ron Moore remembered the "200 years" line from "Space Seed" and TWOK and forgot to correct for the DS9 era.
ENT only said Archer's great-grandfather fought in them, which implies they were less than 160 years before, but it doesn't make it explicit. Maybe he left out a "great," or his great-grandfather and grandfather didn't procreate until rather late in life.
Remember that the specific dating for TOS had not yet been established when TWOK was made. Heck, TWOK was the first time it was even narrowed down to the 23rd century in any onscreen source. At the time, there were two prevailing schools of thought in fandom: that TOS took place in the 2260s, exactly 3 centuries after its airing, and that it took place in the 2200s, the first decade of the century, which was the best way to reconcile Khan's "200 years" from the 1990s with a 23rd-century setting. It wasn't until six years later, when TNG: "The Neutral Zone" gave a calendar year of 2364 -- after "Farpoint" established McCoy as 137 -- that the earlier time frame was definitively ruled out.
And really, people speak approximately all the time. I can totally buy someone saying "two hundred years" when they mean 270, because sometimes people just go by the century and don't pause to work out the exact math.
Of course there's room for interpretation. Pike wasn't delivering a history paper, he was making a speech and simplifying the details that weren't relevant to the message he had to deliver.
Not really. People today assume it was done with genetic engineering in a single generation, but "Space Seed" said the supermen were created through selective breeding, the same technique used for millennia to domesticate plants and animals. I presume that WIlber was thinking of the real-life eugenics programs that began in the late 1800s, usually in service of white supremacist ideologies, and ultimately leading to the Nazis. I figure he was positing that if one of those programs had been successful and had continued operating in secret for a century or so, it would've had maybe five generations of breeding to produce their desired results. It's implausible that it would've been so successful in so few generations, but it's probably what Wilber intended.
That's not the case. DS9: "Doctor Bashir, I Presume" erroneously put Khan's reign in the 22nd century, 200 years before the episode, because Ron Moore remembered the "200 years" line from "Space Seed" and TWOK and forgot to correct for the DS9 era.
ENT only said Archer's great-grandfather fought in them, which implies they were less than 160 years before, but it doesn't make it explicit. Maybe he left out a "great," or his great-grandfather and grandfather didn't procreate until rather late in life.
Remember that the specific dating for TOS had not yet been established when TWOK was made. Heck, TWOK was the first time it was even narrowed down to the 23rd century in any onscreen source. At the time, there were two prevailing schools of thought in fandom: that TOS took place in the 2260s, exactly 3 centuries after its airing, and that it took place in the 2200s, the first decade of the century, which was the best way to reconcile Khan's "200 years" from the 1990s with a 23rd-century setting. It wasn't until six years later, when TNG: "The Neutral Zone" gave a calendar year of 2364 -- after "Farpoint" established McCoy as 137 -- that the earlier time frame was definitively ruled out.
And really, people speak approximately all the time. I can totally buy someone saying "two hundred years" when they mean 270, because sometimes people just go by the century and don't pause to work out the exact math.
Of course there's room for interpretation. Pike wasn't delivering a history paper, he was making a speech and simplifying the details that weren't relevant to the message he had to deliver.
Not really. People today assume it was done with genetic engineering in a single generation, but "Space Seed" said the supermen were created through selective breeding, the same technique used for millennia to domesticate plants and animals. I presume that WIlber was thinking of the real-life eugenics programs that began in the late 1800s, usually in service of white supremacist ideologies, and ultimately leading to the Nazis. I figure he was positing that if one of those programs had been successful and had continued operating in secret for a century or so, it would've had maybe five generations of breeding to produce their desired results. It's implausible that it would've been so successful in so few generations, but it's probably what Wilber intended.
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just wanted to quote and repost this —as it's something that genre fans just don't seem to grasp very well, so it bears repeating.
That one's easy enough: "78" was a stardate.
If they are grading on a curve, and Data shows up and starts scoring unrealistically high in exams that are supposed to be impossible, or he's taking three times the course load as extra credit... What if Data fucked up the curve so bad that only 78 people (mostly Vulcans) graduated that year, when Starfleet was expecting thousands of cadets to graduate.
That means that the year after Data forces failure in thousand of cadets that would otherwise pass, they would have to do-over their final year, or start again from the beginning, and it's these 4000 Officers, initially a year behind Data, who are in a conspiracy to screw over Data and make sure that he's never promoted.
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I don't think it changes things but I do think it was a wasted opportunity. Trek has been catching up to current day events for decades. A lot easier to just say it's a different timeline/universe than our own than to continually retcon stuff. Also allows a lot more freedom for the writers.
Especially since we are hitting really important time sin the trek verse
Especially since we are hitting really important time sin the trek verse
It seems so...judging by the content of various threads.
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