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Osama Bin Laden's Role During The Eugenics Wars

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marsh8472

marsh8472

Fleet Captain
Fleet Captain
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We get confirmation that Osama Bin Laden existed in the star trek timeline during Enterprise "Storm Front Part 2". http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Osama_Bin_Laden

Do you think he helped fight on our side against Khan and the other super humans when they took over Asia and the Middle-East during the 1990s? Or think Khan and him were buddies? Are Khan's and Osama Bin Laden's ideologies compatible or incompatible? Did he still get killed? Or played some other role in history?
 
Bin Laden only existed in some weird alternate timeline that Daniels was documenting that didn't feature the Eugenics Wars.
 
Do Greg Cox's novels address this? I haven't read them in such a long time that I can't remember.

Kor
 
Kor said:
Do Greg Cox's novels address this? I haven't read them in such a long time that I can't remember.

Kor
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I wrote the first book before 9/11. I was writing the second book during 9/11. Bin Laden was not really on my radar when those books were plotted and approved. And afterwards, it was not a topic I was going to touch with a ten-foot pole, not when I was living about twenty blocks north of Ground Zero.

True story: After 9/11 happened, I actually deleted a scene in Book 2 in which Khan turned out to be responsible for the first WTC bombing.
 
http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Khan_Noonien_Singh_(alternate_reality)
Entertainment Weekly saw parallels between the new Khan and figures such as Osama Bin Laden or Saddam Hussein, as both men were allied with the US before turning on them. [26] Simon Pegg commented "Iraq had nothing proven to do with 9/11, and yet Bush used that as an excuse to start a war with those people. You can always see the Klingons as like Iraq and John Harrison the proxy for Osama bin Laden." [27]

Lindelof further acknowledged the terrorism parallels in an interview with StarTrek.com, as Khan's 72 torpedoes reminded them of the notion of 72 virgins in paradise. Lindelof responded "Of course it is a coincidence, because that is a number taken from canon. It was pointed out to us at the scripting phase – the 72 virgins – and that actually gave us pause, because we didn't want people drawing that comparison... but there it is." [28]
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They've been compared before so one might think they'd get along then. Khan may have been a Sikh http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Sikh I don't know if extremist genetically enhanced Sikh's would get along with extremist Muslims though. Maybe they'd get along for a while and then turn on each other before long.
 
marsh8472 said:
http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Khan_Noonien_Singh_(alternate_reality)


They've been compared before so one might think they'd get along then. Khan may have been a Sikh http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Sikh I don't know if extremist genetically enhanced Sikh's would get along with extremist Muslims though. Maybe they'd get along for a while and then turn on each other before long.
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Probably not. Then again, Khan doesn't seem to have been a practicing Sikh.
 
For all we know 9/11 was something completely different in Trek. It may had nothing to do with him and/or happened on a different day altogether.
 
Pretty uncomfortable with fictionalizing and trivializing such a traumatic event that is fresh in the minds of many people. Especially those that were in close proximity to the attacks like myself. That said, I thought ENT (as the 1st post-9/11 Trek production) handled it well. It acknowledged the attacks as part of history. And that's it.

Personally, I'm not comfortable with attaching fictional explanations/rationalizations to an event that killed my neighbors. It is way too fresh and concretely documented.

As for an al-Qaeda/Sikh alliance, it doesn't make a lick of sense ideologically or historically.

In-universe: not every event of the late 20th and early 21st centuries has to be a facet of the Eugenics Wars.
 
^As bad as Roddenberry’s Spock-as-the-second-JFK-shooter idea was, a fictional depiction of 9/11 and its fallout would have been ten thousand times worse. Acknowledging that the event happened is fine, but actually having Bin Laden play a role in the Eugenics Wars is a terrible idea.
 
Osama is rumoured to have had Kidney disease.

Short of chasing down a legend about a magic pill that grows new kidneys from the 80s, putting a few billion into gene research sounds like something he would be into if his health was on the line.

The comics suggested that the supermen were "mostly" orphan street trash that were experimented on, so they were entirely disposable, and it would have been a surprise to the people bankrolling the science that the testbunnies who they were testing on were people of any complexity whatsoever.

Experimenting on your enemies, is preferable to experimenting on your friends, surely?
 
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thribs said:
I thought JFK was the second shooter?
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The way Shatner told the story in his book, Roddenberry wanted Spock to take up position beyond the grassy knoll and take Kennedy out, thereby preserving the “proper” flow of history. I don’t know of a plot where JFK shot himself.
 
Roddenberry wanted Spock to take up position beyond the grassy knoll and take Kennedy out, thereby preserving the “proper” flow of history.
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This would've stopped the franchise dead in its tracks. Just awful, as you said upthread, @Captain Clark Terrell

And that Red Dwarf clip @Guy Gardener posted? Yikes. So glad Trek never went down this road.
 
When did Enterprise reset the timeline from before the Eugenics War?

(No, not Stormfront, that's silly, 2254 was the same before and after Archer visited Alt WW2.)

I'd rather blame Henry Starling from (Voy) Future's End.
 
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