I'm not, like, constantly bothered by it or anything, and I know that there are already a lot of events in the Prime Timeline that let us know that it isn't our exact future or anything... ...but when I occasionally think about it, it kind of bugs me that Paul Stamets is a real mycologist who is alive now. I mean, sure, it can be handwaved away easily enough - DSC Stamets is a descendant of his timeline's duplicate of our contemporary Stamets and took after him a lot, or... something. But assuming he's supposed to BE our duplicate of Stamets, and just came at a different point in our timeline, what is the implication here? The new Space Force will have spore drive? We ended up with more Super Mario games than the Prime Timeline? (But they got REAL negative warp zones, like we saw toward the end of the season?) What?
Slightly more seriously, the fact that the showrunners directly said that the character was based loosely on the real man gives them a bit more of a connection than random chance. So I just kinda wanted to play with the idea a little.
Actually, there's a William Riker who was a very prominent political scientist. I suspect the last years of his life were plagued by many jokes about his name... Seriously, though, as much as I like continuity, it doesn't stop me from appreciating the Stamets thing as a nice subtle tribute to the real guy.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. On another note: This is not the type of thread I thought it would be when I saw the title. I thought it would be a thread about canon and time travel.
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