This is the Daystrom Institute Episode Analysis thread for Strange New Worlds 2x03 Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow.
Now that we’ve had a few days to digest the content of the latest episode, this thread is a place to dig a little deeper.
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.
Okay, I’m glad to hear I didn’t miss anything. So the episode could well be set in the 2030s or later.
My gut plonks for between 2024 to 2025. This handwaves a few issues:
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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.
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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.
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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.
I’m going to say that I am always dubious about relying on dates in the Mirror Universe to pin down the Prime Timeline.
There seems always to be slippage or error in correspondence between the two universes, and time spent in one doesn’t necessarily map one to one to the other (transit mechanics notwithstanding).
If we take Kovich’s point that there haven’t been interactions between the Prime Universe and Georgiou’s Mirror Universe for centuries, it seems that the two universes had already diverged so profoundly by the late 24th century, that DS9 offers us some of the last crossovers.
More generally, I’m comfortable with taking Sera’s statement as an approximation of speech. She’s not Vulcan. With that, I would put T+T+T as taking place no earlier than say 2021 but unlikely later than 2030.
As for the rest, I’m comfortable with time and events being overwritten somewhat within the Prime Universe as long as the major event marker points remain effectively in place. It’s these key events, and their casual relationships that are essential to maintain - not a date.
To me, it’s much more problematic that fans (and writers) tried to retcon a disconnect between the Eugenics wars and WW3 in order to respect Roddenberry’s direction that in the TNG pilot Encounter at Farpoint, WW3 was described as being in the mid 21st century.
Likewise, moving the development of space technology back from the late 90s, especially the first FTL flight, was key to placing Warp technology post WW3, but it takes a lot of selective interpretation to discount the statements in TOS.
For those of us who were already longstanding fans when TNG premiered, these were significant inconsistencies in the sequencing and causation..
For some, it was one of the major barriers in accepting TNG a as a continuation of the same universe. While many of us, myself included, rolled with it, it wasn’t all that different than many of the criticisms of Discovery and SNW in terms of changing the timeline.
I have also taken note that tie-in author Christopher L Bennet has been pondering (over in the comments on the TOR review of this episode), that there’s been a longstanding discontinuity (or rather shift) in the timeline between TOS and TAS and TNG.
I can see why, especially as their astrophysics consultant will back up the science of it, Goldsman as TOS fan since the 60s & 70s would want to clean up the sequencing of key events over the previously established dates in order to enable fans to view the Star Trek their possible future.
My own view?
If we use the major river of time analogy for events in the Prime Universe, we could think of the version of Eugenics wars, WW3 and Warp / First Contact of TOS in the 1990s and early 21st century as a kind of oxbow, an arc now cut off, but with the bend in the river replicated slightly further down the time stream.
I also like @khaosworks@startrek.website ’s notion of a palimpsest analogy where the incursions into the time stream over write past versions but there remain artifacts of the earlier versions.