Oh, and another thing ...
Things within the 22nd Century were clearly described to us in the episodes TOS's "The Cage", TOS's "Balance of Terror", TOS's "Turnabout Intruder", TNG's "Matter of Time, TNG's "First Contact" (The episode), TNG's "Relics", and DS9's "Trials and Tribble-ations".
I'm really curious; what exactly do these episodes tell us about the 22nd century of the
Trek universe, respectively?
Less than people think they do. But people's
perception of how things
should be had been built up over the decades, so when we're shown something that doesn't fit that view, we jump to declare the new interpretation faulty, rather than changing our own interpretation.
But as I understand it, the snippets of info we have on 22nd century life are as follows:
- The Cage. They use lasers instead of phasers. Thus we extrapolate that lasers are more primitive than phasers, thus also extrapolate that phase pistols must be less primitive than laser pistols, due to the similar sounding name. However the is nothing to state that phase pistols are more advanced than laser pistols, since we have abolutely no idea how they work (other than the fact that they don't vapourise people).
- Balance of Terror. Three things here: 1. the Earth/Romulan war was fought with primitive atomic weapons. 2. visual communications with each other weren't possible. 3. cloaking technology is only theoretically possible until now. People extrapolate 1 to mean that no particle weapons existed and that Enterprise's phase cannons and photonic torpedoes shouldn't exist, whereas it's quite possible that they did exist, and that "primitive atomic weapons" is an incredibly vague statement. Primitive by 23rd century standards could mean anything. Atomic could mean anything. We don't even really know how photonic torpedoes work, aside from the supposed antimatter part, and as far as we know, only the NX vessels carry them. Some people extrapolate 2 to mean that no viewscreen technology existed, rather than communications simply being blocked (presumably by Romulan hands). And people extrapolate from 3 that Romulans shouldn't have any type of cloaking ability, rather than the possibility that 'cloaking' is also a very vague term, and that invisibility and detection is a constant arms race. Enterprise already shows us that Romulan ships can disguise themselves with holographic technology, technology which is easy to imagine being obsolete a hundred years later, thus requiring light-bending to achieve similar effects, much to Mr. Spock's surprise.
- Turnabout Intruder. Janice Lester said women can't be captains, therefore there being a woman captain in Enterprise is "wrong". I can't even begin to describe how silly this one is! I'll try two explanations, though: 1. Janice Lester was insane, and therefore the things she said are wrong. 2. Janice Lester was correct, and for some ridiculous reason, women weren't allowed to be captains at that particular point in history. This still has no bearing on policies of a different institution a century earlier. Progress isn't always forwards. 3. Janice Lester's words are being misunderstood. "Your world of starship captains doesn't permit women" doesn't mean they aren't allowed to be captains, it means a captain's work doesn't permit the time for relationships.
- First Contact. First contact with the Klingons led to decades of war. Well, it did. People extrapolate this to mean that it occured much like it did in the episode, with the Federation approaching a pre-warp Klingon empire. Even at the time, this would have been an unlikely extrapolation. Even so, the mental image of this means that Enterprise's depiction must be wrong as far as some people are concerned.
- Relics. The computer states there have been five ships called Enterprise, before Scotty gives the registration. People extrapolate that no other ships called Enterprise could possibly exist, despite the fact that the computer could just be narrowing down the list to Federation ships. In fact, it must be, otherwise it would have picked out navy ships, nuclear boats, NASA shuttles and Vulcan ring-ships as possible holodeck environments.
- Trials and Tribblations. Similar to the above, the number of ships stated to be called Enterprise does not include the NX-01; but, again, it doesn't include the ring ship either (as shown in Star Trek The Motion Picture). More to the point, we don't have a context for the dialogue. It is preceded by actually showing the ship in the flashback. We don't know what Sisko said to the temporal investigation agents while the viewer was watching this telling of history on screen. He could have said "and then we saw the Federation starship Enterprise", to which the response, "which one, there have been five (six)" is accurate, since NX-01 wasn't a Federation ship. I imagine some people also have (or had) a problem with the Klingons in this episode, but Enterprise did a pretty thorough retcon episode that sorts it out, so there's nothing more to be said about it. Oh, is it weird that Bashir knows nothing about Klingon appearances in Kirk's time, given it should pretty common knowledge? Yeah, but it's weird anyway, with or without Enterprise. At least there's the possibility of it being covered up by Earth intelligence at the time (being related to the augments, and all).
There are other snippets of dialogue here and there throughout the hundreds of episodes that don't easily jive with Enterprise, but that's all they are - snippets. They don't paint a full picture. They barely paint a postage stamp. We've simply filled in the blanks with our imaginations, and some people refuse to undo those imaginings, finding it easier to ignore the new interpretation as valid.
Which, you know, is fine, if you want to do that. However, Enterprise being a an altered timeline only really works for its first season or so. After that, they started tying them together.
Regeneration follows on from First Contact, but it also leads to the events of
Q Who, so if the timeline was in fact altered,
Q Who wouldn't happen - or if it would happen anyway but due to different reasons, it would be a ridiculous coincidence or require some sort of fate/destiny explanation, and I'll leave that one for the Abramsverse.
