khaosworks @ khaosworks @startrek.website

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It's an interesting insight into Pike's character - the fact that he had to remember not to beat the crap out of Zac implies that innately he's not a pacifist or a nice guy; that dark side is something he's learned to keep in check.

Thanks - I basically wrote this because I was tired of explaining again and again why the two drives are different and wanted to have a single link I could just cut and paste in future. 😂

When the Dauntless is chasing the Protostar in PRO: "Mindwalk", Tysess gives the order to merge the "warp bubbles" of both ships, the first time we hear the term being applied to a warp field.

When the Enterprise is unable to go to warp in SNW: "The Elysian Kingdom", Spock theorizes the nebula may be affecting the ship's ability to create a "static warp bubble", and from context he's talking about the warp field generated by the nacelles.

Prior to this, the terms "warp bubbles" and "warp fields" were not used interchangeably, the former being a “static warp bubble”, previously established as a toroidal, non-propulsive subspace field which once trapped Beverly Crusher in a pocket universe (TNG: “Remember Me”) rather than the field used to enable warp speed travel.

“I volunteer as tribute.”

I also adore that we got to see it, but technically it was already canon - it was mentioned in the alternate universe bridge chatter in TNG: “Yesterday’s Enterprise” and Geordi asked if Briam “had a chance to see the dolphins yet”.

I post them as a stand-alone in c/DaystromInstitute every week now.

Batel’s promotion was nixed by Judge Advocate Pasalk because of her conduct during Una’s trial in “Ad Astra Per Aspera”.

M’Benga mentions that the reason he and La’An were along was because Pike needed people who could fight without phasers (as per “The Broken Circle” and “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow”).

That’s basically it, I think.

Zac didn’t intend for Starfleet to notice the delta. He was content to just stay on Rigel VII as High Lord Zacarias, thinking that Starfleet would never return to the planet because of the debris field and the radiation. But then the Kalar used the delta as a symbol and it got spotted.

PIKE: Zac. We saw your message, the, um... the Delta in the garden. It's why we came. Isn't that why you did it?

ZAC: The people here adopted it as my symbol. I should have known better. It's all getting torn out tomorrow.

It’s Cayuga, as per the closed captioning, and it’s likely no coincidence. As I noted in my annotations, the Cayuga first appeared in “A Quality of Mercy”, which shares a title with a 1961 Twilight Zone episode starring Leonard Nimoy. And TZ was produced by Serling’s production company, Cayuga Productions.

Annotations up at https://startrek.website/post/282663.

This was a very TOS episode yet in terms of feel.

The dialogue could easily have come from the mouths of the TOS cast, and the situation on the planet reminiscent of officers violating the Prime Directive like in TOS: “The Omega Glory” or “Bread and Circuses”. Even Mount's delivery when on the planet was Shatner-esque.

I can readily imagine Kirk, McCoy and a random redshirt or Chekov on the planet in Pike, M’Benga and La’An’s place, and Sulu pulling it together like Ortegas.

That particular passage from Macbeth takes place in the context of a guard telling Macbeth that Lady Macbeth is dead. Macbeth then launches into a musing about the inevitability of death and the banality of life:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

We are all heading towards death, slowly but surely, and life is just one identical day after another, our past just marking time to the fate that waits us all.

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

In this speech, as he awaits Macduff’s assault, Macbeth laments that our lives are meaningless and our actions have no impact in the larger scheme. We appear briefly on this world and then vanish completely, leaving no trace.

Macbeth is all about fate, and destiny. Macbeth had no real ambitions until he was shown a future where he was King, and then he - despite initial moral qualms - was persuaded to take actions to seize that future precisely because he knew it would happen.

But did he believe this was inevitable, that this excused his murder of Duncan and the death of Banquo? His own actions to struggle against the prophecy of his defeat speak that he was at the very least conflicted about whether the future that awaits was one that was destined or one that he created himself.

To a degree, that recalls the predestination paradox. Did Macbeth kill Duncan because he was meant to kill Duncan? And will Macduff kill him now because Macduff was meant to kill him? Did they act that way because it was already writ? Or were those events writ because they acted? Who wrote the script?

DULMUR: Captain, why did you take the Defiant back in time?

SISKO: It was an accident.

LUCSLY: So you're not contending it was a predestination paradox?

DULMUR: A time loop. That you were meant to go back into the past?

SISKO: Erm, no.

DULMUR: Good.

LUCSLY: We hate those.

Applying the themes of this to the episode: the question is whether the Eugenics Wars are meant to happen, or must we take steps to ensure that they do (or don't) happen? How free is our will when faced against Time? Do the Eugenics Wars happen because we made it happen or did we make the Eugenics Wars happen because they're supposed to happen? Who wrote that script?

Sera believes that history is not inevitable. Her Romulan computer simulations tell her that if she prevents the war, then the Federation will not arise - and to a degree, she's correct (for now), because alt-Kirk's presence shows that happens. But she is also aware that there are certain things that want to happen, so like Macbeth she struggles against that inevitability by trying to persuade La'An to let her kill Khan.

In a similar way, La'An is also struggling against her perceived destiny as a descendant of Khan. La'An is afraid that she will become dangerous like him, so she tries to deny that as well although Neera told her that her genetics are not her destiny.

So what we have here is the same question raised in Macbeth: are we all fated, locked into our roles and places in history? Do our actions lead us inevitably on the path to death, and our struggles mean nothing in the larger analysis? These are not questions to which Shakespeare has a neat answer to, and neither does this episode.

La'An accepts that she is Khan’s legacy as much as the Eugenics Wars are - but does that mean she accepts that she's dangerous or will she still guard against it?

Sera refused to accept she couldn't stave off the Eugenics Wars even though she's been trying and not succeeding for 30 years and died because of it. Was she fooling herself? Or did she go down in the same way that Macbeth went down fighting Macduff even though he knew he would fail - because sometimes you just don't bow down to fate no matter how hopeless it seems?

MACBETH: I will not yield,

To kiss the ground before young Malcolm’s feet,

And to be baited with the rabble’s curse.

Though Birnam Wood be come to Dunsinane,

And thou opposed, being of no woman born,

Yet I will try the last. Before my body

I throw my warlike shield. Lay on, Macduff,

And damned be him that first cries, “Hold, enough!”

The future comes for all of us in the end. How we decide to face it tells us who and what we are.

My gut plonks for between 2024 to 2025. This handwaves a few issues:

1. Why didn't the Travelers intervene? Talinn was dead by mid-2024, and in any case, it's possible that since they saw the DTI was already involved, they allowed the humans to work out the problem for themselves.
2. The production art in "In a Mirror Darkly" (which is shaky canon at best, I admit, given other dates in that same art which have since been retconned) puts 2026 as a start date for WW III, prompted by issues over genetic enhancement and involving Col Green. It's not a stretch to say that if the existence of the Augment children became public, it could trigger this.
3. Khan's age. Ricardo Montalban was about 46 when "Space Seed" was broadcast, and Khan did look like he was in his late 30s to early 40s then - which is plausible for a ruler of about 1/4 of the Earth for a period of 4-5 years. Our current date for the end of WW III is 2053, Riker saying that was 10 years before First Contact in 2063. So the year that Khan left Earth can be no later than 2054 or thereabouts. If we work backwards, then Khan would have been born around 2014. The young Khan we see in this episode looks to be about 10 years old, so our window becomes about 2024-2025, and I go for the later date because that would give Green a little bit of a runway before blowing things up.

The 2022 date is based on a very literal interpretation of Sera’s line that this was supposed to take place in 1992 and she’s been stuck here for 30 years. I’m not convinced that’s a good basis to pin down the year.

That wasn’t the Prime timeline, though, or it never really got the chance to be for very long - that was the timeline when Pike decided to write to the kids and avoid his fate. So while a butterfly effect may have ended up having Una still incarcerated, that wasn’t what we wound up with, not at the end of the episode, and not in “Balance of Terror”.

Having Una have temporal shivers from a timeline that no longer exists would be a neat idea, regardless.

The Narada incursion had the benefit of three things - a black hole, a very intense ion storm, and the magical red matter. We can minimally accept that as a unique confluence of events that led to a branched rather than overwritten timeline, at least.

To support the resilient river of time model, when I was studying history in grad school I came up with this axiom: history isn’t inevitable, but it has momentum.

To put another way, any given historical event is the natural outcome of historical events before it, and therefore when changing history you’re not just trying to change the one thing, but dealing with the weight of everything before pushing the timeline in that direction. That’s why it’s so hard to change history, that - in Sera’s terms - it seems like Time itself is fighting you. Call it historical momentum, call it historical inertia, what you will. And so the more “momentous” the event, the harder it is to just change it - things will “want” to go back to the way it was.

This deserves a lot more looking into. Possibly a post in c/DaystromInstitute at some point, but, like Holmes, I cry out for more data before wanting to form a workable hypothesis. As a side note, I’m already gathering data for working out Una’s chronology. It’s filling out nicely.

We don’t disagree in broad terms. I just recoil from the easy (and potentially dismissive) answer if I don’t think it’s actually necessary for the most part, so I’ll stick to not futzing around with established dates until something really tells me otherwise. As someone who’s been playing around and figuring out Trek chronologies since the early 90s, this is where I’m most comfortable being.

A general observation: I think that this episode is consistent with the way time travel is seen to work in the Trek universe - that the timeline is overwritten rather than branched. The Kelvin Timeline remains the one sole example of a branched timeline that was created as the result of a temporal incursion. In all other cases, the timeline becomes (in my favorite comparison) like a palimpsest.

It might not, but until there’s an explicit on-screen contradiction or mention that the timeline did shift, for the sake of fostering discussion it’s better to say that the dates stand and see if we can work around it.

I grant that you are correct because the dates have to slip since hopefully WWIII doesn’t actually start 2 years from now, but there’s a larger point I’m trying to make here.

If we use the Temporal Wars as a trump card to every Trek inconsistency, there’s really no point playing the Watsonian game. “The temporal wars changed it” is functionally equivalent as “a wizard did it” or “God made it so”. It’s a cop-out that shuts down discussions instead of extending them.

I mean, it’s very tempting. Why did Chekov recognize Khan if he didn’t show up on screen until Season 2? Temporal Wars. Why did Wesley say the Klingons joined the Federation? Temporal Wars. Why was Sam Kirk said to have 3 sons in one episode but shown only to have 1 in another? Temporal Wars. I could go on. Every query becomes a closed question from this point out and that’s no fun. That’s been the danger ever since the TCW was introduced in ENT.

That was a reason why alternate timeline discussions were very closely regulated on the old r/DaystromInstitute. So I would rather not invoke the butterfly effect for anything if there’s no particular reason or explicit statement that it happened.

If we take the chronology in “Mirror Darkly” as still valid, then Green started the war in 2026.

2026: Earth's World War Three begins, over the issue of genetic manipulation and human genome enhancement. Colonel Phillip Green leads a faction of ultra-violent eco-terrorists resulting in 37 million deaths.

It can still kind of work. Montalban was about 45 when he was Khan, so let’s say Khan was around that age when he was exiled. The young Khan we see seems to be about 10 years old, maybe a bit younger.

So say baby Khan was born in 2012 if we want to take Sera’s 30 years literally rather than as an approximation. World War III (according to ENT: “In a Mirror Darkly” but the years may have slipped) starts in 2026 and lasts until 2053 (ST: FC, SNW: “Strange New Worlds”). Khan could easily have fought in the war and took power in the end days of the war - he’d only be 41 in 2053.

Even in the old timeline Khan only ruled one quarter of Earth for about 4-5 years between 1992 and 1996. So it’s not implausible that the Eugenics Wars happen around 2048-2053 (Khan would be in his mid-thirties, and augmented) and Khan escaped after his reign was toppled during the Last Day in 2053 on a non-warp powered sleeper ship, because Cochrane only managed warp 10 years later.

In fact, having the Eugenics Wars take place around 2050 works better because Archer said his great-grandfather fought in them (in North Africa). Since ENT takes place in the 2150s, that only makes about a century between their births, which is certainly reasonable, whereas if Archer-great-grand-pére fought in the 1990s then it'd be stretching his longevity just a tad.

The way Illyrians were segregated into Illyrian and non-Illyrian cities except for people who could pass echoes the Jim Crow era of US history, with black people being segregated and some of them trying to pass for white.

The refusal of service to those who were found to be Illyrian is like antisemitic attitudes in pre-war Nazi Germany, or the refusal of service to homosexuals. Most of what happened can be compared to any persecuted minority, racial or sexual.

That’s the beauty of a good metaphor. And the ugly universality of bigotry.