Logline
La’An travels back in time to twenty-first-century Earth to prevent an attack which will alter humanity’s future history—and bring her face to face with her own contentious legacy.
Written by David Reed
Directed by Amanda Row
Note: This is a second attempt, as technical difficulties were preventing people from seeing the original discussion post. Apologies to the people who were able to comment in the original.
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.
Having WW3 and the Eugenics Wars switched in canon would make a lot of sense. Humanity goes to war and ruins civilization, then the augments take advantage and seize part of the planet for their fifedom. Then people like Colonel Green start purging anyone with radiation altered genes in the west as part of a general paranoia over “divergent” evolution.
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.
But Mirror Darkly need not be correct in the exact year at this point.
It’s established now that there have been successive incursions in the timeline. Time has been resistant to forks that eliminate major events entirely, but the years in which any given major event took place may shift.
If it gives TNG Berman-era fans of Picard season three comfort, this explanation can account for how Jack Crusher was both born after Nemesis and is 23-24 years old in 2401. That is, there occurred a subtle shift in the timeline between Nemesis and Picard such that Nemesis took place a few years earlier than originally.
Again, these are not the ratcheting changes of 12 Monkeys, they are eddies in the river of the Prime Timeline that shift the flow a bit but the major points of its route remains the same.
