It’s Been a Long Road Getting from There to Here

Based on some comments posted online, it would appear a vocal minority of Star Trek fans have been expressing anger about what they perceive as apparent canon changes made in the most recent episode of Strange New Worlds. While I can respect their viewpoint (IDIC and all that), my thoughts on this subject differ, as I don’t believe the show has broken canon with “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow,” but rather has adhered to it. To explain why I view it that way, we’ll need to step back two decades, to when Star Trek: Enterprise first aired in 2001.

At the time, I came to realize something that is often overlooked in most tedious canonicity discussions: namely, that the Star Trek universe was reset with that show, creating a separate but similar timeline, long before J.J. Abrams’ Kelvin timeline, CBS All-Access, and Paramount+ had a chance to do so. On Enterprise, 28^th-century operatives, working with the mysterious “Future Guy” (that series’ never-identified Big Bad, shown with face obscured), changed time so that the Suliban possessed advanced technologies and genetic enhancements they were historically not supposed to have. This fundamentally altered all that came afterward. Previously, the Suliban had been a primitive people, but now they were warp-capable, had a different physiology, and were actively taking part in galactic events. What’s most significant for our purposes is that the change was never un-done.

A massive conflict, the Temporal Cold War, was playing out on a galactic tapestry, the effects of which could not be understated. It was somewhat glossed over onscreen, but the normal flow of time was indisputably changed in multiple respects. Time travel was now an achievable science a century before Jim Kirk and Spock were surprised to experience it in The Original Series‘ “The Naked Time.” Holodeck technology was discovered a century before The Animated Series‘ “The Practical Joker” introduced a rudimentary version, and two centuries before Jean-Luc Picard’s crew used more advanced holotech in The Next Generation‘s “Encounter at Farpoint.” The Suliban were now leaving their world, and every single thing they did off-planet thereafter would naturally change history, since they originally were bound in place. And Starfleet and the Federation were gaining a lot of knowledge about future events and technologies, which (as Star Trek has shown again and again) can prove quite catastrophic.

Meanwhile, Romulans from the future (reportedly, Future Guy would have been exposed as a Romulan) were making alterations to history. Thus, the Temporal Wars, as implied by the name, had huge ramifications for the past, present, and future. With all that taking place, it would have been inconceivable for the timeline as we knew it, from The Original Series to Voyager, to still play out as we’d seen. Similar, sure. But not exactly. Not with galactic-scale Temporal Wars being waged in multiple centuries, carried out by countless time-traveling agents from countless worlds with countless conflicting agendas. There were too many changes made, and by too many parties, for everything to be corrected. The conclusion is inescapable: following the events of Enterprise, the Star Trek timeline was forever altered.

On top of that, Q messed with the timeline as well (Picard‘s “Farewell”), as did Jim Kirk’s crew (The Original Series‘ “The City on the Edge of Forever,” “Assignment: Earth,” and “Tomorrow Is Yesterday,” as well as The Animated Series‘ “Yesteryear” and the film Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home). So did Rachel Garrett’s crew and Tasha Yar (The Next Generation‘s “Yesterday’s Enterprise”), Benjamin Sisko’s crew (Deep Space Nine‘s “Past Tense” and “Trials and Tribble-Ations”), Captain Braxton and the Voyager crew (Voyager‘s “Future’s End” and “Relativity”), and the crew of the La Sirena (Picard season two). So did the Borg (First Contact), Quark’s family (Deep Space Nine‘s “Little Green Men”), the Devidians (The Next Generation‘s “Time’s Arrow”), the “space Nazi” Na’kuhl (Enterprise‘s “Storm Front”), and so many others.

These are just the more memorable examples I’m naming off the top of my head, mind you. The total number of time-travel tales is staggering (Memory Alpha’s time travel page lists a whopping 69 Star Trek episodes and movies, which doesn’t even include the enormous number of additional temporal trips in the licensed literature), and any one of them—all of them, in theory and in fact—would have had immeasurable and dramatic impacts on history, with so many time-wimey implications that only the Doctor and his companions could possibly have sorted it all out. It would be naïve to assume everything went back to the way it originally was, every single time it happened. There have to have been changes made. Irreconcilable changes. A lot of them. And thanks to quantum physics (or at least Star Trek‘s oft-inconsistent use of it), that would result in an endless array of new timelines.

We know, from “Yesteryear” and Discovery‘s “Terra Firma,” that scientists and others have been using the Guardian of Forever, and not always for good. We know that Section 31 are unethical lunatics who would absolutely use the Guardian, the slingshot effect, the Atavachron, temporal rifts and vortexes, the Nexus, temporal transporters, the Orb of Time, time crystals, black holes, time portals, Red Angel suits, time warps, the ubiquitous tachyons, or any of a hundred other easily accessible time-travel options to change history in their favor. They would, and they do. What we thus had, long before Strange New Worlds came along, was a new timeline (or, more accurately, a string of new timelines beyond measure), similar to but separate from how The Original Series introduced the franchise (shades of The Next Generation‘s “Parallels”). It’s inevitable, given all the time jumps. In fact, it was impossible to avoid the moment the first person ever traveled through time.

That’s a good thing, though, for the altered history created by Enterprise (and, by extension, the pre-Kelvin flashback scenes in Star Trek Beyond) easily explains a lot of inconsistencies that have cropped up throughout the years. Try to make sense of the depictions of androids on The Next Generation and shapeshifters on Deep Space Nine compared to how those species had previously been portrayed, and you’ll see what I mean. Or how Christopher Pike and Robert April have changed from The Original Series‘ “The Cage” and The Animated Series‘ “The Counter-Clock Incident” compared to their portrayals in the modern era. Or how James Tiberius Kirk’s middle initial was once “R.” Viewing Star Trek from this angle could even explain why Spock had never mentioned his siblings Sybok and Michael… though, really, that doesn’t require an explanation since Spock plays things pretty close to the vest.

Strange New Worlds has not, as many are saying, added to the problem (it has created some inconsistencies regarding the Gorn, but that’s a topic for another article). On the contrary, it has fixed the problem, which already existed. Deep Space Nine changed the dating of the Eugenics Wars to the 21st century in “Past Tense,” Voyager reinforced that by showing a non-apocalyptic 21st-century Earth in “Future’s End,” and Picard‘s second season had Adam Soong involved with the Khan Noonien Singh project in the 21^st century, even though Khan had been ousted in the 1990s in The Original Series‘ “Space Seed,” and even though that’s when the wars originally occurred. All of those fundamental changes predated Strange New Worlds, representing a break from The Original Series‘ canon (someday I will write another article about why the canon debate doesn’t matter to me, and why I cringed every time I typed the word for this article). Meanwhile, both “Space Seed” and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan claimed the Augments had reigned “200 years ago,” even though the eras of Kirk and Khan were actually three centuries apart.

“Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow” strives to make sense of all the alterations and inconsistencies in a rational, believable way. And, I’d argue, it succeeds in doing so. The changes introduced by Future Guy, the Romulans, the Suliban, Q, the Borg, Braxton, Kirk, Garrett, Yar, Picard, Sisko, Janeway, the Guardian scientists, Section 31, and who knows how many other entities—not to mention Gary Seven and the Travelers (“Assignment: Earth” and “Farewell”), who run around tinkering with time; Braxton’s people (“Future’s End” and “Relativity”), who run around stopping people from tinkering with time; Daniels’ 31^st-century temporal agents (Enterprise‘s “Cold War”), who run around observing people tinkering with time; and the Department of Temporal Investigations (“Trials and Tribble-ations” and “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow”), who run around providing guidelines for tinkering with time—have resulted in an altered (time-tinkered) reality in which Khan’s Augments were genetically designed decades later than before. This time, Adam Soong and the Noonien-Singh Institute for Cultural Advancement were involved in their creation.

Thus, the Eugenics Wars now occur in the 21^st century instead of the 20^th, much to Commander Sera’s frustration, retroactively addressing the inconsistencies of Deep Space Nine‘s Gabriel Bell two-parter, while simultaneously shedding some light on the motivations of Enterprise‘s Future Guy, whom I assume is Sera’s superior on the Romulan side of the Temporal Cold War. This could also explain the contradictory histories for Khan and his people as presented in Greg Cox’s The Eugenics Wars novels, IDW’s comics Khan and Khan: Ruling in Hell, and the Star Trek Spaceflight Chronology (all four of which are great reads, despite not aligning well). Only the Great Bird of the Galaxy knows where Gary Seven’s people, Braxton’s people, Daniels’ people, and the DTI weigh in on all this, but I personally have no problem with any of it. It makes sense to me.

The stories and families of Noonian Soong and Noonien Singh are inextricably intertwined, in name and in legacy, and kudos to Strange New Worlds‘ writers for riffing on that in the episode. As we’ve seen, the Soongs and Singhs are everywhere, with Star Trek an often-sung Singh-Soong sing-song (say that ten times fast!). Heck, a Soong probably worked with Stavos Keniclius (The Animated Series‘ “The Infinite Vulcan”) on his clone research, and their work probably led to the rise of the Mariposans (The Next Generation‘s “Up the Long Ladder”). They’re misguided geniuses, and they’re responsible for so many of mankind’s past and present problems, very likely including temporal tampering at some point. They probably even know what God needs with a starship. Maybe someone should ask them.

When it comes to time travel, Star Trek is basically an LSD-laced (or would that be LDS-laced?) episode of Quantum Leap, a show that quite appropriately starred Scott Bakula, whose Jonathan Archer character was instrumental in causing all this Star Trek chaos in the first place. Some fans may be upset at the changes they believe were made to Trek history this past week, but while I certainly respect their opinion, the truth is that those changes were made decades ago, during the events of Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise.

Strange New Worlds is simply working out the other shows’ kinks, and I got a kick out of seeing all the past changes tied together so cleverly. I doff my hat to the writers, cast, and crew who gave us “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow,” which plugged a lot of existing holes in Star Trek‘s temporal fabric. It did not, as some claim, change canon. No, it strengthened canon by providing context to the many, many, many canonical changes already made by prior TV shows and films. Bravo.