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!).
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
