Spoilers Star Trek: Strange New Worlds - Pike series and novel continuity

Honestly, the 32nd Century Vulcan characters generally seem more emotionally expressive than their 23rd/24th Century ancestors. I suspect that the reunification of the Vulcan and Romulan peoples has led to Vulcans generally becoming more emotional (and Romulans generally becoming more stoic), so I'm not sure the concept of V'tosh kat'ur really applies on 32nd Century Ni'Var.

 

^ T'Rina and Saru do make a cute couple, don't they?

 

Figured I'd give this thread a bump since Season 2 Episode 2 revealed some information which is actually consistent with the novels.

Spoiler

Specifically, it's stated in the episode that Una had served on the Enterprise as a lower ranked officer under April's command, just as she had in the Legacies trilogy.

 

I don't think that constitutes a spoiler, since it's just backstory.

 

Alas, the next episode is continuing DIS's precedent of overriding DTI - Forgotten History. I liked that novel; oh well, it had a good run of plausibility.

 

You mean by

Spoiler

having Kirk involved in a time travel incident years before TOS?

Well, the rest of DTI is already incompatible with curent canon. At this point, I think I'm down to Rise of the Federation, my TOS stuff other than Living Memory, The Buried Age, probably Places of Exile, and my anthology stories still being mostly reconcilable.

But like I always say, all science fiction will eventually be contradicted by the passage of time. (We're already past Voyager 3-6, the Eugenics Wars, the first manned Saturn probe, the Millennium Gate, and the 2018 phase-out of DY-100 sleeper ships in favor of faster interplanetary drives, and closing in on the Bell Riots.) The goal is not to "get it right," merely to offer interesting conjectures.

 

Spoiler

The trailer/preview clip shows it being a Kirk from an alternate timeline anyways, so it wouldn't be contradicting TOS Kirk never time travelling before TOS

 

John Byrne's miniseries 'Crew' (IDW) also has Pike and Number One serving under Captain April as well.

Byrne gets around Number One not having a name in 'The Cage', by having characters getting interrupted/cut off when they're about to say her name. It happened in the other series written by him as well.

 

Well, episode 2.03 accidentally arrived early for some Amazon Prime Video viewers.

https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/sta...orrow-and-tomorrow-and-tomorrow.314483/page-5

You may go read spoilers in the relevant episode thread if you want to learn about SNW following up yet again on a matter which has already sparked no small amount of continuity grumbling in this forum, tee hee!

 

*reposted from TOR site*

Re: Tomorrow, Tomorrow, Tomorrow

I especially like the fact that they bothered to return to the Temporal Cold War and did more with it in this episode than in four seasons of ENT.

One thing that I think was a failure of ENT is the fact that they really did ignore all the implications of the Temporal Cold War and the writers clearly thought, “This is the original timeline” when the changes were there from the start. Without the TCW, there never would be a Klingon arriving at Broken Bow and arguably the entirety of the NX-01 launch would never have happened and Archer would be most famous as a test pilot. Perhaps explaining why Daniels thought Archer wasn’t the world’s most important man when he brought him out of the timeline. Then there’s the massive change of the Xindi War that absolutely was not part of the original timeline because that was the result of the Sphere Builders. You can go with the idea they were all predestination paradoxes but it seems like a waste.

I actually really like this episode suggesting that the Star Trek timeline is in-universe always changing and updating as well as shifting but keeping certain anchor-points. It actually fits with the “Year of Hell” discussion by its Nemo-figure. While Paris says that’s just him being delusional, the idea it has “inertia” and is self-correcting (either due to laws of physics or beings above time like the Q) isn’t unreasonable in Trek. Given the out of universe retcons and constant updates to visuals, technology, and prequels–I think it’s perfectly reasonable to canonize this temporal fluidity.

Plus this episode does something I love and makes worthwhile speculation points. “Were the Romulans behind Future GuyTM? If so, does this mean this woman and Future Guy are at different points? Future Guy eventually says the Federation must exist so does tampering like this eventually backfire on them and they backtrack?” Hell, maybe the Romulans discover without the Federation that they get conquered by the Dominion or without them to evacuate, they are exterminated by the Klingons after their sun explodes or assimilated by the Borg.

The fact I’m thinking of these things is a sign it’s a top tier episode.

 

I mean, I can see the benefits of the approach this episode took, and it was pretty much the only avenue available if the producers insist on doing "hard" prequels and sequels to Star Trek while also reinventing every little thing, but it's also a big change from how things used to be where Star Trek was (or, to be more accurate, had imposed upon it by fans in the lean years) a comprehensive legendarium of lore and facts and dates and figures. Even ENT, which involved intervention from the future but had the stated premise that Star Trek had always taken place in a fallen world polluted by time-travel and Daniels' (presumably) untampered Federation was a different one being warped into the Star Trek we knew over the course of the show, was keeping with that fundamental encyclopedic framework.

Anyway, now we're committed to a more loosey-goosey approach which, in a fandom like this, seems to just be a machine for generating arguments. That's the best-case idea. Worst case, my ultimate fear from Star Trek 09 is realized (again), and Star Trek becomes the movies about DC comics Superheros, except with a time-travel gloss. Batman's parents are murdered, he fights the Joker, wait five years, recast everyone, and do those again. Superman arrives as a little space baby, fights Lex Luthor, fights General Zod, recast and repeat. Jim Kirk becomes captain of the Enterprise, fights some Romulans, fights Khan, recast, repeat. Like, I am seriously concerned that this silly in-joke about how real history has outrun Star Trek history is the keystone for a straight up, episode-for-episode remake of TOS coming soon. Probably with, like the recent Disney live-action remakes, a bunch of awkward little asides to clean up sixty-year-old Nitpicker's Guide complaints.

Anyway, I still maintain that SNW is at its worst when it's trying hardest to be a prequel, and it's probably fitting that killing the concept of "the Prime Timeline" is paradoxically both the best and worst thing they could do. It really would help if I had some sense of the production teams' goals or priorities in terms of the overarching concept of Star Trek, instead of muddled double-think about how this is the same universe as TOS et al., but they also don't worry too much about continuity, and also history is being changed off-screen so often even the people willfully changing it have no idea what the hell is going on and can only respond with bemused frustration when Khan is a little boy thirty years after he was suppose to start taking over Asia as a grown man.

 

I really liked this episode, and in many aspects am okay with these times-wimey changes, but there is still a level of disappointment. @Greg Cox’s “secret history” thesis just works so well, I can’t help but think they should have gone with that. Furthermore, and I think I’ve internalized this idea from @Christopher, but I don’t need Star Trek’s history to look like our history. I don’t need the show to explain why we (the real world) aren’t going through World War III right now or why we don’t have Sanctuary Districts. It’s not our timeline! Show me Star Trek timeline, don’t show me fixes.

 

If anything, I think this revelation might make it easier to treat Trek as a unified reality, because you can resolve contradictions by saying they took place "before" and "after" a timeline alteration. It's like DC's approach where every reboot is an in-universe rewrite of the timeline, so even the overwritten stories still happened in a sense as part of the same meta-continuity.

Given how common time travel is in the Trek universe, and given how common extremely ancient civilizations are in the Trek universe, it is utterly disingenuous to assume that any timeline we've seen in Trek has ever been "untampered." There would be no point at which timeline alterations "started," since by their very nature they can extend back indefinitely.

I doubt it. Remember how "A Quality of Mercy" established that Spock's future pretty much had to play out as we know it for the sake of the galaxy? What was established here was that the timeline (or more likely the side in the Temporal Cold War trying to minimize its disruption) tends to correct against alteration, so that even if past events like the Eugenics Wars happened in a different way, they still converge toward essentially the same future. So we can assume that the timeline DSC & SNW take place in is essentially the same as TOS, that TOS's events still happen there, with a few variations like different set designs, much faster starships, and a lot less sexism.

It's basically like "Yesteryear," where Spock managed to restore essentially the same timeline even though I'Chaya died this time around. I suggested in DTI: Watching the Clock that if two versions of the timeline are "close enough," then they might reconverge into a single timeline with some variances in its past (e.g. O'Brien and Bashir getting chewed out by Kirk after the K-7 bar fight instead of the guys who were originally standing there).

Akiva Goldsman explains the showrunners' reasoning here: https://www.cinemablend.com/streami...e-and-what-the-showrunner-has-to-say-about-it

You can't take that too literally, of course, since e.g. Picard season 2 showed a version of the present where spaceflight was much more advanced. But I understand the intent of making it feel like it could be our own future, in order to convey the aspirational message and make it relevant to our time.

I've believed for a long time that Trek should be rebooted entirely so it can be modernized and cast off the outdated conceptual baggage. This is a half-measure compared to that, but it's a good compromise between that and fidelity to the original.

Although it pretty much blows my decades-long attempt to maintain a consistent Trek chronology out of the water. Where do I draw the dividing line between timelines? How many timelines do I surmise? I'm tentatively thinking it makes the most sense to treat TOS/TAS/films 1-6 as one timeline and TNG & after as the other, since TNG was the first series to retcon the date of World War III from the 1990s to the mid-21st century. I'd consider putting the movies with the "modern" timeline, given the massive design changes from TOS/TAS, but TWOK is explicit about Khan being exiled in 1996.

 

We have different timelines, differing adaptations of those timelines and now acknowledgement of changes to existing timelines. I'm curious how "Those Old Scientists" will address the looks of things in SNW vs TOS, although I doubt they will.

 

I still prefer to assume that changes in visual depiction are just metatextual differences in the dramatization, unless they're specifically established as in-universe changes. I mean, we don't need it explained why characters are cartoons in one show and live people in another, or why Saavik looks different in her first movie than her other two, or why Vulcan looks different from orbit in different productions. Those are just changes in the depiction of things, like if multiple artists paint the same model in their own styles.

 

I don't mind the differences being canon in-universe but I also don't sweat the details much either. This is meant to be fun, after all.

 

I was thinking more of Goldsman's answer to the question of "Why use the Gorn if you were going to change so much stuff about the Gorn?," rather than specifically about the tie-ins to the present day.

That answer just makes it stranger, because the whole thing about the one time TOS ever featured the Gorn is, while they appeared to be massacring savages killing for the sake of killing, it turned out they had rational, understandable reasons for attacking the colony and it ended up being a miscommunication, a conflict that could've been solved with a big noble speech (and it was!). Meanwhile, SNW had the first season finale, reiterating that sometimes violence was the only option with the Romulans, who are extremely relatable to a human audience.

Definitely, as this very episode both established that while the Eugenics Wars used to be in the 1990s but they weren't anymore, it also established a string of deadly terrorist attacks culminating in the destruction of a giant fictional bridge. It's the orbital nuclear weapons platform of the 2020s, a ready-made argument for "Star Trek was never our future."

Definitely, and the Augment arcs are probably the best arguments for it. As someone who is skeptical about the most enthusiastic boosters of transhumanism but is also eagerly awaiting the day I can get a customized retrovirus injected into my eyes so I can finally see what's so great about this "green" color everyone is always talking about, I feel like the Eugenics Wars, in particular, are just going to get more and more obsolete and weird as time goes on, and it's not helping that Khan's iconic status means they keep going back to that well.

 

Interestingly, "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow" has a loosely similar premise to the very old novel Killing Time (the one whose initial printing was recalled for the author Della Van Hise sneaking in Kirk/Spock slash). Probably a coincidence but nonetheless interesting now that canon has explored Romulan temporal saboteurs generating a timeline where Spock is a Vulcan starship captain.

 

Yeah, that was the one decision SNW has made that I absolutely hate, the way they completely go against the clear intent of "Arena" and the Gorn. It would've been so simple to make them something else.

Well, that's just repeating the message "Balance of Terror" already had, even down to quoting Spock's briefing-room speech about why destroying them was absolutely essential. So even TOS didn't always have a consistent message, especially in season 1.

Again, though, it doesn't matter whether ever exact facts line up, because fiction is about far more than just superficial facts and statistics. What matters is whether the show feels like a plausible approximation of a future we could have one day. Obviously no work of science fiction is ever going to say "This future will actually happen in real life," so it's a nonstarter to define the question in such preposterous terms. The point is not to predict the actual future, but to create a metaphor for the kind of future we could build going forward from where we are now.

Roddenberry's vision of the future was never about what exact events happened on what dates. It was about saying "There will be dark times ahead of us, but we have the opportunity to confront our problems, get our act together, and build something better on a lasting basis, if we're smart and committed enough to make it happen." SNW is saying the exact same thing, starting from the world this audience lives in, and the problems we face in our own future. The point is not about getting the surface facts to line up, but about making the metaphor relevant to today's audience and today's problems.

Heck, Roddenberry knew that when he wrote "Encounter at Farpoint" and retconned World War III forward from 1993 (then only 6 years away) to the mid-21st century. He himself wanted to push the timeline forward to keep it meaningful to contemporary audiences.

Good point. The whole idea of a eugenics movement is rooted in 19th- and early 20th-century history, a history so distant that most people today don't even recognize the reference.

Although even as I write that, a counterargument occurs to me. "Space Seed" was most likely alluding to the eugenics movements that led to Naziism; the thing being condemned wasn't genetic science per se but the pursuit of some to elevate themselves above others. And Naziism, authoritarianism, and fascism are very much resurging in today's world, with the people who believe they're better than others and entitled to rule over them being increasingly in ascendancy, or fighting aggressively to stay that way. So I can see people like that latching onto genetic engineering breakthroughs in hopes of making their lineages even more elite and dominant. Thus, it's not out of the question that a version of the Eugenics Wars could grow out of current events or something resembling them, although the name is antiquated.

 

All we have is the Gorn's justification for wholesale slaughter. Nowhere do our heroes negotiate with them. It was only stopped by the alien intervention.

Which goes against the intent. Star Trek is our future. That has been the intent, as well as shown with trips to the past being our past.

Exactly so.