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.
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.
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.
