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

So it's been a long time since I read Rise of the Federation: Tower of Babel -- do any of the revelations about Rigel VII contradict what it established about the United Rigel Worlds and Colonies?

(I suppose it begs the question of why the other Rigellian worlds would have left Rigel VII alone for centuries before the Federation was formed just because it's a pre-warp civilization, or why they wouldn't have also been affected by the memory radiation. Maybe this is another example of there being a "second" Rigel system?)

 

They certainly contradict what the book asserted about Rigel VII itself, but that's a minor part of the book so it can be shrugged off. And they contradict the general idea of Rigel having other inhabited planets, but that's been a problem since the 1960s. (Why were Trek writers so obsessed with Rigel????)

 

Probably because it was a star name the average viewer might recognize.

 

I personally loved the old FASA backstory, where the Rigel system was the result of ancient superaliens re-arranging planets and seeding life.

 

No. The new timeline has been around at least since Enterprise, probably since "Encounter at Farpoint," because that's where the timeframe of World War III was bumped up from the 1990s to the mid-2000s. Just because we didn't learn about it until last week doesn't mean it only happened last week. I mean, Archer's reference to the Eugenics Wars in ENT is more consistent with mid-2000s than 1990s, unless the men in his family were really old when they had kids. And in retrospect, it's clear that Akiva Goldsman was working from the same Eugenics Wars chronological model in the SNW premiere episode and Picard season 2 that he spelled out more explicitly in "Tomorrow and Tomorrow...".

And uniforms, set designs, all that, it's just storytelling. It's not "evidence" of an altered timeline any more than Kirstie Alley changing into Robin Curtis. It's dramatic interpretation. Altered timelines are narrative changes, a function of the actual story, not the way the story is presented visually.

Besides, it should be obvious that the only timeline changes SNW has posited are in the past, not the series present. Yes, the Eugenics Wars happen decades later now, but the Rigel VII mission still happened exactly as described in "The Cage," Pike is still fated to experience "The Menagerie," "Balance of Terror" is still going to happen, etc. The model they're using is that the alterations in the past are cancelled out by the 23rd century, so that everything is still the same, possibly aside from minor details when convenient to give the storytellers freedom.

Anyway, no way in hell would an alteration to events on 20th- or 21st-century Earth change the movements of asteroids in space or the nature of the Kalar civilization on Rigel VII. That doesn't even make sense.

The only possible "fix" is just to ignore my brief mentions of Rigel VII. I got that part wrong. It's hardly the first time some detail or other in one of my books has been contradicted while being minor enough that you can just skip over it.

 

It's pretty much wholly the chronological element, so far as I'm aware - the collar of the uniforms looked more like the SNW iterations, rather than the larger collars used both in Discovery's second season and the Q&A Short Trek.

 

No weirder than "Friday's Child" where McCoy was wearing a TOS-style uniform in the recording of his visit to Capella years earlier.

 

Perhaps not. But it's still a handy explanation.

Not proven in canon, obviously. But still possible.

And it has the added benefit of taking the butterfly effect into account...I mean, you can't just move a major world war and NOT have consequences. So there's that.

 

TNG did it.

 

It's a make believe universe with a make believe history. And they changed it. End of story.

 

Oh really now?

 

I suspect they want the Eugenics Wars moved forward, but everything else stays the same? That's absolute nonsense. But it's a TV show, and they can extend and excuse any changes they want with it. Chapel's a badass now, Spock's wife was a big part of his life... the "TOS wasn't what you thought!" trope is getting kind of old now. Maybe we can think TOS was how it was and enjoy SNW as a separate thing if we want to? The fandom arguments will last forever, even after SNW's final episode ends on the TOS set tour bridge or whatever they're probably gonna do.

 

So are humanoid aliens, universal translators, telepathy, Q, most Trek depictions of genetics, etc. So is pretty much every Trek time travel episode or movie ever made.

I think the idea is that the attempts of some temporal cold warriors to undo the Eugenics Wars were corrected by other cold warriors, who weren't able to restore things exactly the original way, but were able to construct an alternative path that dovetailed with the original future eventually. If it was by design rather than happenstance, it's easier to excuse the unlikelihood.

Also, it's always pretty much been a rule in Trek that individuals' lives have a way of converging on the same paths even in alternative histories, like the Mirror versions of the characters all being born and ending up serving on the same ship together despite all the other changes that make that incredibly unlikely. Ditto the United Earth Enterprise in "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow" having mostly the same crew, and Spock still having been born despite Earth and Vulcan not being allies. As Lex Luthor put it in the Arrowverse's Crisis on Infinite Earths, "The multiverse has a way of aligning fates." So if there is some kind of probabilistic resonance guiding things to happen in parallel, that could also help account for the divergent versions of the Eugenics Wars converging on the same overall future.

I don't care for the supersoldier-serum twist, but otherwise this Chapel is such a huge improvement on the original that I'm totally fine with the idea that we simply didn't learn who Chapel really was the first time around.

Oh, I think it's great. They've done a marvelous job recontextualizing what we thought we knew in a way that still fits the overall facts. Chapel's TOS interaction with Spock works better if they have a romantic history than if it's just an unrequited crush. DSC: "Lethe" brilliantly recontextualized Spock & Sarek's relationship, giving a compelling explanation for why Sarek resented Spock joining Starfleet so much. These stories let us see TOS in a new light, and that deepens TOS and makes it better. (Though not always, of course -- SNW totally misfired with the Gorn.)

 

Indeed, the revelation of "Tomorrow and..." does allow for concluding that the TOS timeline is slightly distinct from the modern timeline, that basically the same people had mostly the same life experiences, but some details here and there are different. The broad strokes are the same, but there's flexibility in the specifics. Which is just an in-universe excuse for how fiction always works.

 

I really like SNW, probably my favorite of the current shows right now. Yes, I still have bugaboos about production design and that sort of thing. I know, creator's vision and all, and it's their show, they can do what they want. But it is what it is.

The only thing that still bugs me is all the original series era characters showing up on the Enterprise years before the original series. I know some complain about how the characters remain together for so many years after a show ends (like in the movies). But this is going in the other direction.

And I'm having a hard time buying the Chapel/Spock affair. While I may have issues with Chapel (and others) being on the ship so many years before the original series, I do like the characterization of her now, so that's not the issue. It's just the affair doesn't seem consistent with their later relationship to me.

 

I agree. Some people have said that it enhances the Spock/Chapel scenes in TOS or SNW makes them see their relationship in a new light, but I think the two series are pretty incompatible at this point. Chapel's love for Mr. Spock is pretty obviously unrequited on TOS.