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this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2023
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My gut plonks for between 2024 to 2025. This handwaves a few issues:
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.
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.
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.
The 2026 date didn't come from the Mirror Universe, although it was in the MU episode of ENT. It was from the USS Defiant's database - the Constitution-class ship from the Prime Universe that fell through the interphase in TOS: "The Tholian Web" and somehow ended up in the Mirror Universe and over a century in the past.
But as we saw with the Discovery transiting back and forth to the MU (albeit via a radically different mechanism), the calendar was not aligned when they returned - days became 9 months.
So we have no reassuring whatsoever that the Defiant was in sync, or that their database was still in sync with the Prime Universe that carried on without them.
Addendum: Calendars are dependent on where they function and the speed of travel (as we are aware from relativity) unless insulated in a warp bubble or equivalent. Not sure why we expect the computer databases on starships to compensate accurately for unknown phenomena like falling through a vortex.)
All I’m saying is that until we get an explicit mention that the dates for the start of WWIII in 2026 have indeed slipped, I’m not going to assume they have.
As I’ve pointed out, I accept that they will probably slip, and that the 2026 date is shaky because other dates in the same art have already been retconned, but I’m not going to depart from on screen evidence until there’s another bit of on screen evidence that directly contradicts it.
Otherwise you can have any date you want and nobody can say otherwise because temporal wars - and that’s the very thing I was warning against.
I understand your position.
One of the things I’ve been considering in relation to the Defiant’s database is whether we should consider the dates in there artifacts or translations.
When I was younger, I thought the reason for the existence of stardates was to account for relativistic effects when ships were travelling at sublight. Not exactly what they are supposed to be but the point is that Starfleet is aware that relativistic effects occur and adjusts for them in recording times and dates.
An artifact date in the Defiant’s historical database would be a record that has a fixed date that wouldn’t be adjusted by the computer or the universal translator. I think that’s what most of us assume it would have been when we see the graphics onscreen.
However, there’s a possibility that it was something else, a date that may have been translated or adjusted for some reason, either in relation to the war or in relation to the Defiant’s own continuity. That’s to say the ship may in itself not be a reliable narrator in its own continuity.
I agree however that we shouldn’t assume a shift in specific dates until and unless we get it onscreen - just that we should equally avoid going so far as to break the sequence of causality in order to respect a given date.
Is M-5 here yet? This should be nominated.
Sadly not yet.