Some of Our Yesterdays — Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow”

Okay, a lot to unpack here. Unfortunate that most of the conversation about this episode (including mine) is likely to focus on the continuity revelations in the climax rather than the overall story. It’s a pretty solid time travel story overall, with La’an and Kirk making a nice double act. I like the premise of having the two people thrown into the past together being from competing timelines and thus not starting on the same page about whose should win out — although I do find it highly contrived that two members of Pike’s crew have met alternate-reality versions of James T. Kirk within three months of each other (since the reference to Una’s welcome-back party puts this shortly after “Ad Astra,” which was about 2 months after “The Quality of Mercy”).

Paul Wesley was definitely better as Kirk this time around, both in terms of resemblance to Shatner’s version and in general performance terms. I’m glad the writing of the character was fairly authentic and didn’t play into the myths. Yes, he had a tentative romance with La’an, but like many of Kirk’s most meaningful romances, it happened when he was away from the role of captain for a time and able to let his guard down. And there were other elements true to the real Kirk, like his skill at chess, and his lack of skill at driving cars (though he had a pretty fast learning curve).

This was clearly a money-saving episode, with lots of location work, present-day costumes and vehicles, few aliens, and a moderate amount of VFX. But it was refreshing to see a time-travel story set outside the US, even if it was just the place the show is filmed.

As soon as Pelia was revealed as extremely long-lived in her debut episode, I had a feeling she’d be La’an’s contact in the past in this episode. Maybe they knew we’d anticipate that, since they did a nice fakeout by having her turn out not to be an engineer yet.

I wish I’d known Sarah was Adelaide Kane, who was one of my favorites from the cast of Power Rangers RPM, easily the strongest cast in Power Rangers history, including several people who went on to more prominent careers (Eka Darville and Rose McGowan being the others). I thought she looked familiar, but I couldn’t place her.

One thing that bugged me was the revelation that Romulans — apparently not from the future — have been meddling in Earth history to slow our progress for generations. That’s a really big deal. But I wonder if it could be a side effect of the Temporal Cold War meddling Sarah mentioned, a way to explain why space travel in our timeline is so much less advanced than it was in the original TOS timeline.

Okay, so now we get to the big revelation. For years now, I’ve been annoyed by all the people online insisting without evidence that the new shows were in a different timeline from TOS, when it was clear they were intended to be the same basic timeline but making the kind of nuanced continuity adjustments that are inevitable in any long-running fictional franchise (like Marvel Comics, where the timeline of past events keeps getting revised to keep the characters the same age over the decades). TOS itself made many such adjustments, like James R. Kirk becoming James T. Kirk and the Earth ship Enterprise becoming a Federation ship midway through season 1 (and the alternate E here was a nice nod to that). TNG did too, with Data being capable of emotion for the first couple of seasons before he was retconned as incapable of it, and the Federation being in peacetime in the early seasons but then season 4 retconning in a Cardassian war that ended only a year before. Not alternate timelines, just revisions of a work of make-believe that pretends things are still consistent in-universe.

But now, it’s been made textual that TOS is indeed in a somewhat different timeline than SNW. It seems that present and near-future events are presumed to be pretty much the same; we know from “A Quality of Mercy” that Spock’s future is “required” to unfold the way we know it for the universe to work out right. But from what Sarah said, past events have been rearranged, with things that originally happened one way still happening a different way later on, so that timeline changes correct themselves to something approximately the same in the long run. It’s very much like the approach to Skynet in the Terminator sequels and The Sarah Connor Chronicles: Even if you prevent one origin of Skynet, another one happens later and the future converges onto the same path. Although in this case, I think it was more implied that it was the corrective interventions of TCW factions that cancelled out the changes made by their enemies and put things back onto essentially the preferred path.

Now, I can see the narrative benefit of this. It allows reconciling new Trek with our own time while justifying the changes from TOS’s depictions of Earth history that have now elapsed. It somewhat allows them to have their cake and eat it too, saying that everything still happened the same way except when it didn’t, and that it’s mostly 20th/21st-century history that’s been revised while the 23rd century is still basically the same except for different set and costume designs and some moderately more advanced technology (e.g. transporter biofilters already existing). It also creates flexibility for changes in how characters like Spock and Chapel are depicted, so the writers aren’t as rigidly bound by continuity.

But the downside for me is that the overall Trek chronology I’ve maintained for decades is pretty much blown out of the water now. There are at least two, possibly more distinct versions of 20th- and 21st-century history now, and perhaps two different 23rd centuries as well. The question is, where is the line drawn? Which series and films count in which version of the Prime timeline? The same overall broad-strokes events may still happen in both, but there’s still a dividing line somewhere.

My preference would be to put TOS, TAS, and the original-cast movies in the “original” Prime timeline and everything since then in the “current” one. TOS is the one series that feels the most separate from the rest, due to its ’60s attitudes and production values, and due to creating the biggest contradictions with real history. TNG established a few things about the 21st century that may be hard to reconcile now, but TNG is heavily referenced by Lower Decks, which is having a crossover with SNW, and so forth. So it’s probably easiest to fit all the revival series together as a distinct continuity from the original, while assuming that a fairly close version of TOS’s events still happens in the current timeline (just without all the sexism and old-style equipment).

And hey, this is good for me, since it lets me say that my Uhura-focus novel Living Memory still takes place in the “original” TOS continuity, since I no longer have to keep it consistent with the “current,” post-TCW version of the timeline.

So in some ways this is liberating and positive, but it still turns Trek continuity into a hell of a mess that we’re going to be arguing over for decades (not that we haven’t been already). Like all good answers, it raises a wealth of new questions.

@25/Descent:”…a eugenics-based campaign of genocide and torture…”

Despite what Into Darkness claimed about genocide, “Space Seed” established that under Khan’s rule, there were “no massacres.” He was supposed to be a fairly benevolent tyrant, and the wars were not race wars directed against non-Augments, but battles for supremacy among the dozens of Augment dictators who’d seized power around the world. It was Colonel Green who was the genocidal one.

Although it’s possible now, perhaps even probable, that STID’s version of Khan is from one of the TCW-altered histories and may indeed have been genocidal. Maybe MontalKhan, CumberKhan, and SivanKhan are three different timeline variants resulting from different TCW interventions.

Incidentally, I believe I was the first person to propose the TCW having an effect on the Eugenics Wars, in Department of Temporal Investigations: Watching the Clock. I figured it made sense for the Future Guy behind the Suliban’s genetic enhancements to be responsible for other genetic enhancements to other renegade groups in various eras. I also wanted to account for why the 1960s genetic science depicted in Greg Cox’s Eugenics Wars novels was so anachronistically advanced.

“Unless I’m forgetting something, that’s the first time Star Trek has outright referred to Earth’s society with the word “socialist”, which is nice, even if it does rub up against parts of TOS.”

Best not to fall into the trap of assuming that every word spoken by every character in a story is objectively accurate. Pelia’s statement is only evidence for her own opinion of the Federation, an opinion that’s shaped by her very long history and might be an anachronistic notion. Remember, she didn’t even know lasers were real in the 2020s, 60 years after their invention. So she’s not exactly a reliable narrator.

Although, of course, there are a lot of things in present-day American culture that are essentially socialist (at least the way the term tends to be used today), like public education, public roads, fire departments, Social Security (right there in the name), Medicare, any services that are provided by the government for the public good instead of by private industry for their own profit.

“I also noticed that La’an indicated that vehicles aren’t privately owned in the future. The fan discussions about whether or not the Federation has private property and to what extent have always interested me (the classic being “why does Picard get a big vineyard and is that his private land”, obviously) so La’an’s line there was good stuff to think about.”

Oh, that’s about a much nearer future than that. We already have rental services like Zipcar where you can reserve one of a fleet of cars for short-term personal use, much like the shared bike and scooter services that are also around these days. I’ve seen it conjectured that that might become a standard thing over the next few decades, and that people owning their own cars might become a luxury.

@26/Mary: “See, I hate the idea of paradoxes so watching Enterprise, all I thought about was what was the original timeline like? It never occurred to me that the later shows grew from the events of the TCW. I thought those events had always happened.”

It’s only a paradox if you assume the order in which we watched the stories somehow constitutes the causal order in which the different timelines “happened” relative to each other. I’ve always found it strange when people assume that, given that the whole nature of time travel stories is that things are experienced out of order.

@50/C.T. Phipps: “I definitely feel bad that your wonderful Department of Temporal Corrections books and other continuity welding jobs have been overwritten by all of this as they really were a master-class in Star Trek continuity weaving.”

No reason to feel bad about it. All of this is imaginary. It’s just exploring possibilities. As I often say, all science fiction will inevitably be contradicted by the passage of time. The goal of writing SF is not to “guess right,” because we never will. The goal is just to offer interesting conjectures. It’s all just might-have-beens, canon as much as anything else. As demonstrated by the way this canon episode overwrote past canon.

“However, a part of me also notes that a lot of this episode actually reminded me of your books in that series as well as how they handled time travel within them.”

Exactly. It’s not about whether the imaginary “facts” agree, it’s about how ideas and possibilities are explored. When SNW revealed a backstory for Uhura that disagreed with the one I’d offered in Living Memory not long before, I was disappointed that it got overwritten so soon, but I was mainly glad that the makers of canon had come to the same conclusion I had that Uhura deserved more backstory development.

“One thing that I think was a failure of ENT is the fact that they really did ignore all the implications of the Temporal Cold War and the writers clearly thought, “This is the original timeline” when the changes were there from the start.”

As I said above, there’s no reason to assume the TOS timeline wasn’t already the result of the TCW’s alterations, which is what I always took ENT to be implying. There’s no reason temporal causality is required to happen in the order we see the stories. And in a universe where time travel is so common, there’s no reason to think we’ve ever seen an “unaltered” version of the timeline.

In retrospect, though, given what this episode established, there’s more reason to believe that ENT is an altered timeline from TOS. Although it seems the alterations date at least as far back as the Eugenics Wars.

@52/Wyatt: Sera said it took her a while to recognize Kirk, so I doubt she knew right off who they were. I think she just wanted to learn more about these people who were prying into the bombing and seemed to know something about the explosives used. She couldn’t do that if the police hauled them off.

@80/kurtzwald: “Something I’m finding odd this season is the amount of screen time with characters who are not core cast members. With a large ensemble and just ten episodes a season I find it a strange decision.”

One: Anson Mount had a baby around the time the season was starting production, so the producers arranged things to allow him time for paternity leave.

Two: This is an ensemble cast, so the actors listed in the main titles are all equally “core” cast members. There were plenty of TNG episodes that barely featured Picard or Riker, DS9 episodes that barely featured Sisko or Kira, VGR episodes that barely featured Janeway or Chakotay.

“Honestly I think they should have swapped Kirk out for any workable member of the core cast. It would I think made a much larger impact on La’an and for an audience already invested in the existing characters.”

Who would count as a “workable” candidate for La’an to have a romance with? M’Benga? Chapel? Ortegas? They would’ve had to be an alternate-timeline version anyway, so they’d still be a stranger to her, so having it be an alternate version of someone she knows would add unnecessary baggage. The relationship here is very much a “getting to know you” kind of story, so it works if it’s someone La’an doesn’t know but who carries built-in meaning to the audience (even the SNW-exclusive audience, since they met another alternate Kirk three episodes ago).

Also, Kirk and La’an are both very driven, “married to the job” kind of people, so you need to get them both away from their ships and crews for an extended period to get to a point where they’d lower their guard and open up.

@86/a_risch: “So the temporal agents have mastered ftl space travel as well as time travel? When La’an presses the button on the time device, not only does she and Kirk go back in time, but also from wherever they are in space to earth.”

All time travel is space travel, because everything in the universe moves. If you start in your home and travel ten minutes into the future without moving from your starting point, you’ll materialize in the vacuum of space and suffocate to death, because Earth orbits at such high speed that it only takes seven minutes to traverse its own diameter.

Besides, we’ve seen countless earlier Trek time-travel stories where time travelers moved between distant star systems — “City on the Edge” and “Yesteryear,” “Time’s Arrow,” “Trials and Tribble-ations,” “Future’s End” and “Relativity,” “Shattered” (same ship, but over tens of thousands of light-years’ travel), “Shockwave,” “Carpenter Street,” “Storm Front,” etc. So why only call attention to it now?

@87/Chuk: I don’t think La’an crying was just about Kirk. She went through some very complicated feelings facing young Khan, confronting the hated ghost of her past as an innocent child. She’s gonna be wrestling with that for a long time.

@101/Cybersnark: “I’d put the dividing line between the Berman and Secret Hideout eras. The Berman-era Trek series all went out of their way to maintain timeline consistency (even when they didn’t really need to, as with the Qu’Vat virus).”

Within themselves, yes, but again, let’s remember that according to the episode, it’s late 20th and early 21st-century history that were altered, whereas both timelines converged on essentially the same 23rd century. SNW has made it clear that Pike’s and Spock’s futures are essentially the ones we know from TOS, even if the sets and costumes look different and there’s less sexism.

So the key difference should be in the depictions of the 20th/21st centuries, and that’s where TOS/TAS conflicts with everything after it, not only with the war but with the overall development of space travel being much faster than it turned out in reality. Roddenberry himself chose to push the timing of WWIII up from the 1990s to the mid-21st century in “Encounter at Farpoint.” That was the most drastic retconning of Trek’s historical timeline, and everything since “Farpoint” has been consistent with it.

(Granted, it’s not a perfect divide; e.g. TNG: “The Royale” posited the third attempt at a crewed interstellar probe being launched in 2037, only 14 years from now. But I’d find it too bothersome to split the continuity into too many alternate timelines. I’m content to treat most of the inconsistencies as what they actually are, just inconsistent claims in works of make-believe, and only invoke temporal changes when there’s a textual reason to do so.)

“When the Temporal Agent showed up at the end, I actually thought “Jena Noi?!” and headcanoned that she was passing herself off as a DTI agent for some reason”

Hmm, I hadn’t thought of it, but I can see the resemblance. Though she would’ve had to alter her ears to look human, at least.

“And the time gap between (OG) Khan in the 90s and WWIII in the 20XXs isn’t really a problem for me: look at our real-world timeline.”

Sure, it can be reconciled that way, and that’s how I reconciled it up until this week, but that requires ignoring “Space Seed”‘s explicit assertion that the Eugenics Wars were the last World War. There has always been an inconsistency between “Space Seed” and “Farpoint”/First Contact that we’ve had to pretend didn’t exist in order to reconcile them. But now we no longer have to. Now we have a textual, canonical way to resolve that inconsistency.

@109/Emily: I still say that, no matter how fraught her feelings about Kirk, they’re going to be trivial compared to the emotional impact of meeting Khan. All her life, she’s hated Khan as this monster who left a terrifying legacy within her, someone she would probably have gladly gone back in time and killed given the chance, and now she met him as a frightened little boy and chose to save his life, and even comforted him and dried his tears. Her whole image of herself has been shattered and reassembled, and oh, incidentally, she’s responsible for ensuring that a great tyrant from history would grow up to inflict his acts of tyranny and violence. That’s far, far more to wrestle with than feeling sad about losing a guy she only knew for a couple of days.

@125/lance_sibley: There are streets with bollards around the university near my home, and at least some of them are of the retractable type that can be lowered into the ground to allow traffic to pass. That picture isn’t very clear, but the bollards look like they may be a similar type.

@128/Agent6: “Dammit, Chris! Now I can’t unsee Stephen Amell as Kirk.”

Then my work here is done.

“Toronto has appeared on a few other occasions, but it’s still very rare.”

Flashpoint was cagey about being set in Toronto at first, but eventually became more explicit about it. Orphan Black was set in Toronto but tiptoed around it, with the evidence being mainly in things like license plates, paper money, and neighborhood names. Also Lost Girl, which was even vaguer about it, but there were clues (like being close to cherry-orchard country).

@129/Brian: “After all is said and done, Star Trek is going down the rabbit hole that consumes comic books… endless “alternate” timelines, endless reboots and confusion over “What Matters””

I don’t think so. This isn’t like Kelvin where the new timeline was license to go in a totally new direction. I mean, last season came down pretty firmly on the idea that both Pike’s future and Spock’s have to happen in the way we know from TOS (and Kirk’s too, at least where “Balance of Terror” is concerned). As I said before, the idea is to readjust the 20th-21st century backstory of the universe to be recognizable to modern audiences, while still keeping the 23rd century onward essentially the same, with the same stories happening aside from some variations in technology, attitudes, etc. It’s not a reboot, just an in-story retcon.

@141/noblehunter: “Maybe the suite was cheap because everyone left town because of the bridge explosion?”

They rented the suite before the explosion. They saw the explosion from the suite.

@143/noblehunter: Good point about the right individual at the right time being able to make a difference. Temujin/Genghis Khan was so effective because he was exceptionally good at bringing people together, convincing them to cooperate. Without him, the Mongols might not have become as unified and overwhelming a conquering force.

And of course, SNW is pretty clear that nobody but Spock could achieve the great things he’s destined to do.

” Khan seems to fit the mould of someone who is more than the sum of historical forces.”

I’m not so sure about this part, though. People tend to forget it, but Khan was just one of dozens, even hundreds of Augments who seized power at the same time. He wasn’t their leader, he was one of multiple clashing leaders in various parts of the world, albeit the most successful of the bunch. Without him, the Eugenics Wars would still have happened. Indeed, they might have been worse, since Khan was the least brutal of the tyrants. Although maybe that’s why he’s important to ensure the future — because whoever replaced him could’ve had an even more devastating effect, like what Ben said about the alternatives to Hitler.