How Star Trek Strange New Worlds Season 2's Latest Episode Majorly Changed The Timeline, And What The Showrunner Has To Say About It
How Star Trek Strange New Worlds Season 2's Latest Episode Majorly Changed The Timeline, And What The Showrunner Has To Say About It
We've come a long way from The Original Series.
Not mentioned in the in the article or interview but DS9 of course also did an episode set in 2024 with no mention of the Eugenics Wars or WW3. Picard did reference its Sanctuary Districts though which was nice.
And yeah this was an issue in the pilot, when Like summarized Earth history. Events spiral from the Second American Civil War into the Eugenics Wars and ultimately World War III.
The Voyager crew visited 1996 as well, and things seemed pretty much fine.
Yeah, I feel like the timeline had been changed for a while, and this episode just put a tidy little bow on it.
It didn't really change the timeline though did it? DS9, Voyager, Ent and Picard already showed us a 90s/early 2000s where the Eugenics wars/WW3 hadn't kicked off yet, this just closed the plot hole to explain the shifting timeline.
It feels as though Dr Erin MacDonald has earned her consultant’s fee helping them sort out the physics.
We’re out of the mess of the ever-expanding manifold time that Marvel and DC have bought into.
Beyond that version of infinitely branching manifold time / multiverse being offside, basically contradicting modern physics, it creates a situation where every possibility exists so nothing our heroes do matters, and nothing ever done to fix a time incursion matters either.
Instead we see that forks in the timeline can prune other timelines. Both branches can’t continue to exist, and the river of the timeline has some fixed events (time crystals) that pin it, pull it back to its original course.
So it would take something extraordinary, even on the Trek scale of extraordinary, to create a true ongoing branch. The creation of the Kelvin universe is associated with the Romulan Supernova. Knowing now that the Romulans have been interfering with human development over centuries and using temporal agents to do it, having a major disaster to the Romulans impact human history seems like a corollary. With a major event like a sun blowing up, we can say we’ve got a threshold for creating a separate sustainable universe.
As for TNG Parallels, I still love the episode, but perhaps we could reframe it as all the short run alternate timelines. For as unlikely as it was, Worf got back to his own timeline and Enterprise. Time fought back.
The DTI books already retconned Parallels into a "probablity bubble" where waveforms were going mad and throwing concepts out rather than Worf actually travelling universes.
I liked that solution. Christopher L Bennet is solid on the options for physics solutions.
Funnily enough, Marvel actually use both explanations. Yes they have the infinite multiverse where every possibility has happened and forked a new timeline, however they also have a sliding timeline in the prime universe where big canon events are always shifting to keep the existence of superheros within the last twenty years or so. This is why characters like The Punisher, War Machine, Reed Richards and Ben Grimm, whin were tied to Vietnam in their origin are now veterans of a fictional war that can be moved up the timeline. DC actually uses a the multiple-multiverse concept where each one only contains 52 universes, and travel between them was limited until recently.
Where does the mirror universe fit in all this?
The Mirror Universe is some kind of true branch that happened much earlier, such that even the physics of light are slightly different.
Kovich’s explanation of branching universes suggests that they’re not common but also that as they increasingly diverge, it becomes less and less possible to corpse over and those who do may not be able to survive.
He noted that no contact had been possible with the Mirror Universe in several centuries.
The 24th century Kelvin Universe officer who came over to the Prime Universe in the 32nd century died, as would have Georgiou. But the Kelvin Universe was close enough that he was able to cross at all.
As per the DTI books, alternate universes can be created, but they need a huge change from the "prime" timeline to stop their waveforms collapsing back into it. I.e, the human physiology difference Discovery added the MU. That universe was unfixably changed as soon as that mutation took root. The Kelvin verse too, the destruction of the Kelvin hugely altered the life of one of Starfleet's most famous officers and saw the destruction of one of its founding planets.
With the dates officially pushed forward, we can now all say that the future of Star Trek is still possible in our world, provided we can work to get there.
Yeah, nah. Unless there's a switch-a-roo, and we're the Ferengis.