khaosworks @ khaosworks @startrek.website

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I mean, I could have gone as far as citing Picard doing the entire “What a piece of work is a man” bit in TNG: “Hide and Q” or McCoy quoting “Angels and ministers of grace, defend us!” in ST IV but you got to draw the line somewhere.

Good catch!

A script slip that made it past continuity, then, is the Doylist explanation. Watsonian I would then prefer it to be that the USS Iowa be a civilian ship distinct from UEF ships rather than a different military fleet or pre-unification one.

Technically, he doesn’t say his ship is the UEFS Enterprise. He identifies his ship as the “United Earth Fleet Ship Enterprise”. Why am I splitting this particular hair? Because we hear lines like “this is the Federation starship Voyager” all the time and we never think that it should be the FSS Voyager.

Which is a roundabout way to say that it is entirely possible that it’s the United Earth Fleet Ship USS Iowa/Enterprise and no extra fleets or unification history need apply.

Isn’t the main difference that neither could survive if they remained separated? They would both eventually die unless they were reintegrated.

Whereas in Tuvix’s case, the merged being was in no danger of death and could have lived a long healthy life.

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.

It’s not because the label on Kirk’s remains at Daystrom Station indicated that they were recovered from Veridian III.

As for alt-Kirk’s body, it could be that they do, but it’s also equally possible that DTI did a clean up.

My view is that, as closely as this follows Casablanca, Garak really thought he was going to get what he wanted for turning the dissidents in, until Toran openly mocked him and he realized (like Renault) that the Cardassia he wanted to return to was no longer the Cardassia he knew. Then he turned.

I discussed this in r/DaystromInstitute here.

Kirk says that Sam is his brother’s middle name (George Samuel Kirk Jr.) and most people call him George. La’An scoffs and says nobody calls him George. In TOS: “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” the android duplicate of Kirk notes that only Kirk calls his brother Sam.

So what gives here? Precisely why Jim Kirk seemingly insists both here and in "Little Girls" that most people call his big brother George while it's clear that everyone calls him Sam can have a few possible explanations.

One is the easy out: temporal war shenanigans.

Two is that Jim's in error - he's never been the only one who calls George "Sam", and that erroneous belief is what the android picked up.

Three (and my preferred explanation) is to remember that after Korby smugly says that Android Kirk can't be outthought, Kirk says "There are some interesting differences." Kirk at this point has tried to implant a racist thought in Android Kirk's head so Spock will realize it's not really him. The idea that he is the only one who calls George "Sam" is another implant, and one Kirk is using as a control question to see if a lie could be incepted into the android's memory. So the error confirmed to Kirk that his racist suggestion would likely have been implanted as well.

I also like this because it clears up another inconsistency - the android says Sam has 3 sons, but in TOS: “Operation: Annihilate!” he appears only to have one. In this context this would have been another checksum Kirk used to verify that his false statements were incepted.

Annotations at c/DaystromInstitute here.

Thanks! Typo corrected.

(Continued from post)

Kirk says he spent 6 months in a Denobulan prison with a Vulcan cellmate, and learned to make plomeek soup (TOS: “Amok Time”) in the toilet. Kirk was a terrible driver in the Prime timeline as well (TOS: “A Piece of the Action”). Kirk says his middle name, Tiberius, was his grandfather’s, same as in the Kelvin Timeline.

Kirk says that Sam is his brother’s middle name (George Samuel Kirk Jr.) and most people call him George. La’An scoffs and says nobody calls him George. In TOS: “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” the android duplicate of Kirk notes that only Kirk calls his brother Sam. Kirk mocks La’An’s name as “Noonien-Soong” who was, of course, Data and Lore’s creator (TNG: “Datalore”).

Kirk has never heard of the Noonien-Singh name, which is telling (we find out why later). While in TOS: “Space Seed” he didn’t recognize Khan by sight and he was briefed by Spock once it was apparent who Khan was, we don’t see anything in the episode to indicate he didn’t know the name.

Sera, the girl who helps them, is streaming it on an iPhone 14 Pro. The restaurant they talk in is the real-life Lakeview Restaurant. She believes the bridge was blown up by aliens who want Earth to remain disunited and to slow down human progress. One of the pictures she shows them is a TOS-era Romulan Bird of Prey which Kirk recognizes. La’An doesn’t, because it will be about 6 to 7 years before the Romulans emerge from their space with that ship (TOS: “Balance of Terror”). In Kirk’s timeline, a few days from now, a cold fusion reactor will destroy Toronto, a Romulan first strike.

Kirk says they need to find an engineer from the “stone ages” to help them build a cold fusion detector. In TOS: “The City on the Edge of Forever” Spock tries to build a mnemonic circuit from what he sarcastically calls “stone knives and bear skins.”

True to her story, Pelia’s bunker as the words “The Archeology Department” graffitied on the door. Pelia says she has a terrible memory for faces, which may explain why she doesn’t remember meeting La’An.

Kirk says someone at the Apple Store taught him to use DuckDuckGo, which is a search engine designed to maintain privacy of searches. La’An is being very cagey about her origins, perhaps to maintain the Temporal Prime Directive. Pelia claims she (in this time) is not an engineer and hasn’t taken a math class since Pythagoras made it up (about 1500 years prior to the present). Pythagoras is often called the father of mathematics.

Tritium does indeed make phosphor glow through beta decay, and has a limited half-life. Tritium based phosphor lighting lasts for about ten years. I’m not sure that this particular detection method with the watch would work, though.

La’An suggests Kirk can live in her timeline. In “Yesterday’s Enterprise” the alternate Tasha travels to the Prime Timeline and survives the erasure of her timeline to eventually birth Sela (TNG: “Redemption II”), so there is precedent for this.

The cold fusion reactor is housed in the Noonien-Singh Institute for Cultural Advancement and La’An’s DNA opens the door. Sera is from the future, and her people - the Romulans - have been slowing human progress, but she wants to go further and for once, a Kirk bluff doesn’t work the way he intended.

Sera’s target is the child Khan Noonien-Singh, and for the first time this firmly retcons the timeline of the Eugenics Wars and Khan’s era as being pushed up to the 21st Century instead of 1996. Sera says that she was told to do so because of a computer simulation, much like Ziggy from Quantum Leap calculated changes in history. If Khan dies, the Federation never forms - and that explains why Kirk doesn’t know the name.

Sera’s explanation that this was “supposed to happen in 1992” and time itself is pushing back against attempts to change it, events reinserting themselves, now provides an explicit mechanism as to why the chronology of the Eugenics Wars has changed. This also now implies that the Project: Khan file dated 1996 that was in Adam Soong’s hands (PIC: “Farewell”) may be related to this current Khan, or the product of another altered history.

As she is fatally wounded, Sera activates an implant and turns to dust. The light on the temporal device turns from red to green, perhaps indicating that the timeline has been restored. Older viewers like me will remember the time travel series Voyagers! from 1982, whose protagonists also used a handheld device called an Omni that had red/green light indicators to show if something was wrong with the timeline.

The child Khan, appearing about 8-10 years of age, seems to be of South Asian heritage as the actual Khan would be. He is part of a cohort of at least 6 other children of various ethnicities, likely all genetically engineered.

A lingering question is what happens to the alternate Kirk’s body. If we take the idea that a person out of time is protected from timeline changes like the alternate Tasha was, then alt-Kirk’s body would still exist, a mysterious John Doe. For what it’s worth, La’An is still wearing the now anachronistic diver’s watch.

Agent Ymalay from the DTI introduces herself, and confirms the stranger was a DTI agent, cautioning her against discussing what she just experienced lest she undo the timeline.

La’An calls Prime Kirk, who is at this point still a lieutenant and confirms his birthplace as Riverside, Iowa. In reality, Roddenberry never established where in Iowa Kirk was born, so the town of Riverside just claimed it as his future birthplace. This is the first time it’s been established on screen.

The problem with the question is that it’s based on the assumption that TAS was not considered canon because it was unavailable, which is in error. TAS was decanonised in fandom’s minds only because Roddenberry decided he didn’t want to consider it canon, not because nobody was watching it.

Ultimately, Roddenberry's stance on continuity was that it was whatever he wanted it to be, whether it was broadcast or not. Richard Arnold famously noted that Roddenberry would even decide that he no longer considered bits of TOS canon, and that his stance on what was canon and what was not even changed from day to day, but by that time Gene wasn't in charge anymore.

Star Trek is replete with contradictions and inconsistencies, and we of course it's fun to play the game where we try our best to reconcile these inconsistencies with continuity, logic twisting, speculating on things to fill in the gaps. It's the same game Sherlockians have played for generations (hence Watsonian and Doylist explanations).

But it's only fun until we reach the point where there's really no explanation satisfactory, so we then stop and quietly exile that point, pretending it doesn't exist. And that's just in the broadcast media. When we add in the tons of licensed and unlicensed fiction, it just becomes overwhelming to juggle.

But here's the ugly, unspoken truth. I once formulated this rule a long time ago for Doctor Who, which has an even looser relationship with continuity and a more massive body of licensed work, and worse still has time travel and history changing baked into its very premise: "It's all canon. It's all non-canon." Canon is whatever whoever writes it wants it to be. Nobody's there to really stop them, and any adherence to continuity in fiction is a choice, not a necessity.

You don't get to define canon. I don't get to define canon. We don't even get to define canon for each other. All we can do is define a basis for discussions to take place. It's so easy for you to assert something and me to shoot it down by saying, "oh, that's not canon," without addressing the meat of the argument itself - not whether something is canon or not, but whether that something actually makes sense. And that kind of impasse becomes infinitely more impassable if we don't have a standard definition of canon to begin with.

So questions like, "Is Prodigy still canon," are ultimately non-productive (and a classic closed question) because the answer really is, "It's canon until someone who has the authority and the ability to say otherwise says so, and even then."

And we can pile qualification upon qualification upon this kind of definition until we miss the forest for the ever-expanding numbers of trees, when in the end Star Trek is fiction, fiction is malleable, and the hallucination can only be shared if we share common ground as to what exactly the hallucination is.

So it's not availability rules, it's not Roddenbery rules, it's simply the agreed on rules of engagement that canon is whatever's been broadcast by the main rights holders. Discussion is only productive if we agree on a foundation like this. Otherwise it dissolves into headcanons and no one is more valid than the other. So the conversation trundles to an awkward halt (and sometimes name-calling) as we hug our individual ideas of what constitutes canon and refuse to accept anything otherwise. It's a fun-killer.

And that's why we really shouldn't quibble about canon.

Also I know this is splitting hairs, but "Space Seed" doesn't even actually say "genetic engineering", Spock refers to Khan and Co. as having been "selectively breed". It's not until Wrath of Khan when they get into the "artificial" genetic augmentation stuff.

That’s because genetic engineering wasn’t a thing until the early 1970s. When Spock was talking about eugenics, at that point in history it was purely a case of not allowing certain people to breed and making sure that only the “right” people were matched for the “best” offspring. That’s right out of the Nazi eugenics playbook, so despite the South Asian aspect of Khan’s supermen the expectation that they would become fascist and tyrannical was never in doubt. So Khan would never have been NOT a khan, and “Space Seed” does a good job in portraying the insidiousness of the eugenics argument and the seductiveness of it, what with McGivers being turned and even the senior staff expressing admiration for Khan, describing him as the “best of tyrants”, to Spock’s horror. It’s played off as a joke, but it does show how easy it is to buy into the “better world” rhetoric.

I would love to see an episode about a species who's had their own Eugenics wars, or perhaps even one who's embraced gene augmentation, or goes full-on "Khan did nothing wrong".

We’ve got TNG: “The Masterpiece Society” right there, which is a ready made premise for a sequel. Maybe after Picard made off with a sizeable chunk of their population, throwing it into imbalance, they resorted to more desperate means. And desperation does breed darker motivations.

It was the same stunt they pulled on Kirk in "Court Martial": we don't need to have a starship captain on trial, claim negligence, fatigue, and we'll quietly give you a permanent ground assignment. Kirk pushed the issue, and Stone said, well in that case we'll throw the book at you, break you and drum you out in disgrace. As Areel Shaw put it, they have to, to show zero tolerance for starship captains - senior personnel - who break the rules, "for the good of the service".

So no change there.

I’ve been making that observation for at least 30 years about how Starfleet components are silicate based.

One of thoughts I’ve had over the years is that what we as see as rocks is actually the afterproduct of an internal fire suppression foam.

There’s a lot of high voltage coursing throughout consoles, what with electroplasma conduits and all, and in a battle situation with shields trying to absorb energy from impacts the danger of overload is very real. When that happens, fire suppression systems spray the inside with a rapidly hardening foam to prevent catastrophic explosions. But when the systems get inevitably overwhelmed and the console blows, the expended and hardened foam shatters, expelled like rocky debris so make room for the next level of suppression to take over. Without the foam, the explosion would have been much worse.

If the purpose of prosecuting Una was to signal the Federation’s seriousness about a genetic ban to appease the Klingons, then why offer a plea deal with a sweetheart sentence? Why keep the records sealed? Why even bother with not charging her with sedition initially?

No, this isn’t plausible to me. If it was a show trial for a diplomatic purpose, it’d be full on from the beginning, no deals and having a Klingon observer in the courtroom. There’s no need to be coy about it.

It’s obvious that Starfleet and the Federation is embarrassed at having had an Illyrian not just join, but climb the ranks to be the best first officer in the fleet. That’s reason to sweep it under the rug, not use it as a message for the Klingons.

The sponsorship thing is a bit tricky. In DS9: "Heart of Stone", Sisko says this:

SISKO: As a non-Federation citizen, you need a letter of reference from a command level officer before you can even take the entrance exam.

And yet, we hear that Chakotay asked (a) Captain Sulu to sponsor him to the Academy (VOY: "Tattoo"), La'An had Una sponsor her (La'An was on the Puget Sound, a distinctly Earth-named colony ship), and Kirk was sponsored by the father of the late LT Mallory (TOS: "The Apple").

So Academy sponsorship seems to be a regular thing, Federation citizen or not. The only difference is that for non-Federation citizens it has to be a command level officer. April was command level, and did sponsor Una, but that doesn't mean she couldn't have been sponsored by someone else. As a side note, Una was likely command division, but she most certainly wasn't command level at the time she sponsored La'An (would an XO be considered command level?).

So we can't rely on the need for sponsorship as a reliable indicator of an applicant's citizenship status in the Federation.

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.

The difference though, is that Una is already a Federation citizen and so was Julian. Dal wasn’t. So there was likely a real question as to whether he could even be a Federation citizen.

(Although to be fair you don’t have to a Federation citizen to be part of Starfleet, e.g. Nog, Kira as examples)

Of course you may be correct too, that there was no problem with Dal’s existence as an augment in the Federation, but if my point still is that if there was, the asylum law can probably cover it.