Everybody knows that Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan came out in the summer of 1982. But, what the alternate history Apple TV+ series For All Mankind presupposes is… maybe it came out in 1983?
In episode 5 of For All Mankind’s second season—“The Weight”—the writers of the show slipped in a hilarious Easter egg to the most famous Trek movie of them all. And, in doing so, confirmed that the alternate history of the show impacts the growth of popular science fiction as well as politics. The premise of For All Mankind might be fixated on an alternate development of NASA during the late ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s, but the context takes place amid some pop culture that is different from our own.
Mild spoilers about For All Mankind seasons 1 and 2 ahead. Plus, a very old 1982 spoiler from The Wrath of Khan.
Briefly, if you’re unaware of For All Mankind, and you’re mostly just here for the wacky alternate universe Wrath of Khan stuff, know this: the show takes place in a timeline in which the USSR landed on the moon before the US in 1969. In the first season, this leads to an escalation in the Cold War space race, which results in an American moonbase called Jamestown being established on the moon in 1973. This chain of events sets other historical changes into motion, including a one-term presidency from Ted Kennedy (yep!) instead of Gerald Ford. And, in season two, this means that Ronald Reagan becomes president four years earlier, in 1976.
The U.S. presidency isn’t the only change that the show writers have mapped out. John Lennon is also alive in the second episode of For All Mankind which takes place in an alternate 1983. Thanks to a newscaster (played by Star Trek: Enterprise actress Linda Park) we also learn that John Lennon may be reuniting the Beatles in a new “Concert For Peace,” in this timeline.
Just as in our timeline, the first space shuttle orbiter in For All Mankind is named Enterprise. In our timeline Gerald Ford made the call to change the name of the first test-orbiter from “Constitution” to “Enterprise” as a direct result of Trekkies writing letters. In the For All Mankind timeline, we have to assume the same letters probably had an effect on Ronald Reagan, as two episodes in For All Mankind’s first season establish that Star Trek and its fervent fandom very much exist in this alternate timeline. Specifically, in the episodes “Home Again,” and “Hi Bob,” astronaut Danielle Poole (Krys Marshall) admits to having some deep TV knowledge that includes even the name of guest stars on Star Trek: The Original Series. While the Jamestown crew watches The Bob Newhart Show, Danielle identifies the character actor John Fiedler, from the TOS episode “Wolf in the Fold.”
Thus far in season two, the Trek Easter eggs have gotten significantly less obscure. And that’s because in Episode 5, “The Weight,” we learn that in this version of 1983, The Wrath of Khan is a relatively new theatrical release. After getting into trouble for reckless behavior with both NASA and his wife Karen (Shantel VanSanten), veteran astronaut Ed Baldwin (Joel Kinnaman) tries to suggest a date night to go see The Wrath of Khan. (Which, as a movie that opens with all of its cast dying then Chekov getting earwormed, is clearly a launchpad for romance!) In Ed’s absence, Karen has already seen the movie with their daughter Kelly. Ed asks her if the movie is good, and Karen says yes, and then drops the bomb: “and then Spock dies.”
The scene is funny because we’re supposed to think, oh, Ed just had the ending of Wrath of Khan ruined for him. Bummer. This is hilarious for several reasons other than it’s funny to think of Spock’s death as a spoiler.
First of all, when The Wrath of Khan was released in 1982 (not ’83!) the death of Spock was pretty much not a spoiler. Quite the contrary, among hardcore Star Trek fans, it was widely known. Major newspapers reported on it at the time, and most research suggests that Gene Roddenberry himself leaked the planned death of Spock to the public in an effort to change it. (There are even letters printed in Roddenberry’s authorized biography where he admits he was against the death of Spock.) The point is, Spock’s death wasn’t exactly a spoiler in our timeline, so it’s fun to think that maybe in this timeline, the spoiler of Spock’s death was kept under wraps better? (Either that or Ed is too busy to follow mainstream entertainment news, which is just as likely.)
But the next piece of this puzzle is more interesting. Again, Wrath was released in 1982, not 1983. Not only that, it was a rush job, and the script was rewritten in just 12 days by Nicholas Meyer to hit the theatrical release date of June 4, 1982. So, how do we account for an alternate version of The Wrath of Khan that hits theaters in 1983? Keep in mind, in our timeline, Return of the Jedi also came out in the summer of 1983, on May 25 to be exact. Is For All Mankind creating a bizarro pop culture timeline in which a Star Trek movie and a Star Wars movie had to duke it out at the box office? (In our timeline a Trek movie and a Wars movie have only debuted during the same year twice. First, in 2002 when Attack of the Clones and Nemesis were out the same year, and again in 2016, when Star Trek Beyond was out the same year as Rogue One. But in both of those cases, at least 6 months separated those releases. Trek and Wars have never gone head-to-head in the summer or holiday seasons at the box office.)
Another possibility is that Wrath and Return of the Jedi don’t come out in the same year at all, because if they did then wouldn’t Ed and Karen want to choose the highly-anticipated conclusion to the Star Wars trilogy as their date movie? This leads to speculation that’s even more interesting than an alternate pop culture history for Trek: Star Wars might not exist at all in For All Mankind!
Although the show is taking place in the ’80s, there has been no direct reference that indicates that the Star Wars franchise exists in this timeline. Yes, in the second season opener, Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative is being referred to by the media as “Star Wars,” just like in our timeline. But here’s where things get tricky. In our timeline, Senator Ted Kennedy mockingly refers to the Strategic Defense Initiative as “reckless Star Wars schemes” in March of 1983, clearly referring to the events of the (then only two) Star Wars films. The Washington Post picks up the comment and it goes viral. But in the timeline of For All Mankind, Ted Kennedy is a disgraced former president and most likely wouldn’t be making any public comments. So where does the nickname come from?
Now, naturally, it’s tough to imagine the Star Trek film franchise without the existence of Star Wars, only because the pilot episode from the second TV series “Star Trek: Phase II,“ is largely attributed to Paramount seeing the success of Star Wars, and thinking a Trek film was a better bet. That said, there were other factors as to why “Phase II,” eventually became Star Trek: The Motion Picture, so who knows? Maybe the Trek film franchise in the For All Mankind timeline developed on its own, without the influence of Star Wars. (EDIT! Hey guess what Star Wars definitely exists in this universe thanks to sneaky bonus content. See the comments below!)
There’s at least one other “geek” franchise in this timeline that has a wildly different trajectory. In season two of For All Mankind, we briefly see a clip from the cartoon The Real Ghostbusters, but… the film Ghostbusters didn’t come out until 1984, and the cartoon debuted in 1986, a full three years later than its appearance in For All Mankind. Dan Aykroyd didn’t even start writing the movie until 1982, and he intended Venkman’s role for John Belushi… but we clearly see Bill Murray’s Venkman in the cartoon, so did Belushi die earlier in this timeline? And is it somehow connected to John Lennon surviving? But wait! It gets even creepier! In our timeline, there’s an oft-repeated story about John Belushi visiting The Wrath of Khan set hours before he died. Although Belushi possibly visited the set at some point, the timing of this story is disputed. In For All Mankind, it almost certainly didn’t happen
So, to recap: For All Mankind has John Lennon alive in 1983, The Wrath of Khan premiering a year late, The Real Ghostbusters cartoon airing three years early—perhaps suggesting an even earlier version of the film that stars Jim Belushi—and possibly has teased a pop culture ’80s where Star Wars might not exist at all. For All Mankind has also not mentioned the existence of the 1978 series Battlestar Galactica, which was certainly made viable by the existence of the first Star Wars. But what’s also telling about a pop culture timeline sans Battlestar, is that For All Mankind co-creator Ron Moore is, somewhat famously, responsible for the popular Battlestar reboot in the 21st century. Does For All Mankind’s timeline lack a Battlestar?
All of these anachronisms are (probably) 100-percent intentional. Ronald D. Moore got his start writing for TV on Star Trek: The Next Generation during its third season. (Specifically, the episode “The Bonding.”) Moore later became a producer of TNG and DS9 and co-wrote both Generations and First Contact. And one of the writers of the specific episode with the Wrath Easter egg is Joe Menosky, who has writing credits on TNG, DS9, Voyager, The Orville, AND Star Trek: Discovery Season 1.
When it comes to roads-not-taken in pop culture in general—and Star Trek in specific—Ron Moore and Joe Menosky know exactly what they’re talking about. The only question is what happens when For All Mankind jumps into the ’90s. Season 3 is coming, does that mean Ron Moore and Menosky are going to have to deal with addressing alternate versions of themselves working on a slightly different version of The Next Generation? If we’re lucky this Wrath of Khan Easter egg is just the beginning, and someday, we can get a spin-off show of For All Mankind that only explores the alternate dimensions of pop culture. What do John Lennon’s post-1980s albums sound like, anyway? (For that matter, what do post-1980s Paul McCartney albums sound like?)
For All Mankind airs new episodes on Apple TV+ On Fridays.
Ryan Britt has contributed to Tor.com for over a decade. He is the author of the forthcoming non-fiction book Phasers On Stun! How the Making and Remaking of Star Trek Changed the World, to be published by Plume Books (Penguin Random House) in June 2022; the 40th anniversary of The Wrath of Khan. (In this timeline!) His other work has been published with Inverse, Vulture, Den of Geek!, SyFy Wire, and StarTrek.com. Ryan’s first book was the essay collection Luke Skywalker Can’t Read, published in 2015, also by Plume Books. He is an editor at Fatherly.
“In our timeline, John Belushi visited the Wrath of Khan set mere hours before he died. That probably doesn’t happen in For All Mankind.”
It didn’t happen in our timeline either, as principal photography on the film ended a month before Belushi’s death. The myth is debunked here: https://www.facttrek.com/blog/john-belushis-last-trek
Now, are you going to explain how M*A*S*H showed Radar O’Reilly reading a 1969 issue of The Avengers during the Korean War in the early 1950s?
Star Wars definitely exists in this alternate universe. There’s a bonus video that occurs after this episode. Gordo’s son spends the entire time absolutely slagging “Return of the Jedi”.
There are a few little bonus clips on Apple TV+ that present in-universe news clips to update us between seasons.
One of them has Close Encounters winning 12 Oscars and beating out Annie Hall for best picture. Star Wars is also mentioned, but it’s noted that it only won two Oscars.
@1. ChristopherLBennett: I’m sure you’ll agree that the most logical, sensible and inarguable reason for a 1950s character in a Korean War medical drama having a late-’60s comic book is, of course, TIME TRAVEL.
Don’t give me that look man, it’s a comedy! If cartoons have taught us anything, it’s that laughter and those capable of eliciting it have strange powers to reshape reality for their own capricious purposes … so long as it makes people laugh.
@4/ED: Well, M*A*S*H is an 11-year series about a 3-year war, and about midway through, the date references jump from 1953 back to 1950 while the character evolution continues forward. So clearly its continuum is fraught with temporal anomalies. (It may share this continuum with Happy Days, as evidenced by the abundance of 1970s hairstyles in the 1950s.)
Interesting you should bring up time travel, since I caught an anachronism like this in an episode of Syfy’s 12 Monkeys (“Shonin”) which had the characters time travel to a nightclub in Japan in 1987. There was a song playing in the scene that I knew I recognized, and I eventually determined it originated in an anime movie I’d once seen, Zillion: Burning Night, which was released in 1988. Missed it by that much.
They’re really, really not putting that much thought into it.
@2 His absolute RAGE at the Ewoks rings true. I and my friends, then seniors in High school (I made it into Gen X by 7 months), were more amused than outraged, but yeah, we all knew it was a blatant merchandising ploy then.
What I thought was HILARIOUS was his Boba Fett obsession. I was thinking, “Just wait til you’re in your fifties, dude. You’ll LOVE the Mandalorian.” (Assuming we aren’t already traveling FTL by then in that timeline.)
@7/Rdclark: Star Wars has always been about the merchandising. It was historically as much a toy franchise as a movie franchise. There are countless characters (including Boba Fett, to a degree) who were barely there in the movies yet whose names and life stories are well-known to the fans thanks to the action-figure packaging. So it strikes me as disingenuous to complain that the Ewoks were about selling toys too.
But then, the people who were in the core target audience for the original movie (i.e. people in my age cohort) were six years older when ROTJ came out, which meant we were in our mid-teens and driven to scorn childish things out of our need to be perceived as grown up.
Yeah, no. Sorry. Occam’s Razor says that they’re remembering early-’80s pop culture and not bothering to research exact details. (I.e.: I’m with H Walker just above.)
I think the scorn directed at the Ewoks is primarily due to their placement in the movie. Star Wars had had short cutesy characters before, but Ugnauts and Jawas hadn’t played a significant role in the second and third acts of the previous movies. Ugnauts didn’t rescue Lando and company from the stormtroopers. Jawas didn’t help defeat the Empire.
Of course there’s also Yoda, but his cuteness was countered by scenes of wisdom and an early one of genuine creepiness. “You will be…”
Ewoks were very cute and highly marketable and in the movie for quite a long time, and… that’s about it. So, it’s no wonder the perception is that this was the point when Star Wars fully suction-cupped itself to a car window, even though it had been doing so from the very beginning.
OP/#1: The Belushi anomaly is even more complicated than either of you think it is…
Here’s why. The reason the cartoon series based on the Ghostbusters feature film is called The Real Ghostbusters is that the film franchise had to retroactively license the rights to the movie title from Filmation, who’d produced a live action series in the 1970s called The Ghost Busters (“I’m Spencer. He’s Tracy. “I’m Kong.”) starring Forrest Tucker and Larry Storch. Filmation, after failing to reach a deal with the movie folks to produce the animated series that became The Real Ghostbusters, produced one of its own as a sequel to the ’70s show, calling it Ghostbusters, and – in our timeline – the two cartoons premiered in the same week in 1986 (one on ABC, the other in syndication).
Now I have not seen the cartoon clip mentioned above, so I don’t know whether it definitively establishes that Mankind‘s version of that show is also called The Real Ghostbusters. On one hand, it seems likely; if the deal with Filmation had not collapsed, a Filmation-produced series based on the movie(s) would have used different writers, animators, and designs – there had been work completed on such before the two sides parted ways. The other major possibility is that in the alternate timeline, the 1970s live-action series didn’t exist – but in that instance, a lot of other dominoes have to fall over just exactly right to get a cartoon that looks exactly like The Real Ghostbusters, complete with a clip that matches our timeline’s version.
And what that appears to give us is not just a cinematic Ghostbusters franchise several years early, but one that has to account for movie-Venkman being played by Bill Murray. If John Belushi dies early enough in that timeline to miss playing Venkman, how many other dominoes fall over with respect to other adjacent movie and TV casting choices? Also, if the Filmation Ghostbusters cartoon also exists in the alternate timeline (which it most likely does, assuming the other show is still using “Real” in its title), it’s worth wondering how successful that franchise was in the parallel continuity.
On the other hand, if the Belushi death happens that much sooner in the Mankind universe, the whole set-visit story relative to Wrath of Khan certainly never becomes an urban legend in that timeline….
@13/John C. Bunnell: I’m not sure the Bill Murray thing is important. The Real Ghostbusters didn’t have likeness rights to the movie actors and redesigned all the characters (making them more distinct in build, hair, and costuming so they’d register better in wide shots), so we got a lanky, narrow-faced Venkman who didn’t look a thing like Bill Murray. And his original voice actor, Lorenzo Music, didn’t sound much like Murray — indeed, he lost the job after a couple of seasons because Murray remarked offhand that Music didn’t sound like him and the execs misconstrued that as a demand that he be replaced with a Murray impersonator (Dave Coulier).
(I’ve always found it ironic, then, that Bill Murray much later ended up succeeding Lorenzo Music as the voice of Garfield. I mean, they don’t sound the same!!)
Now, if Belushi had played Venkman, maybe the character design would’ve been more of a fat slob. But his design was different enough from Murray anyway that it’s hard to be sure.
#14: Ah, but if – as the essay suggests – Dan Aykroyd wrote the original movie script with John Belushi in mind, and if in the alternate movie timeline he writes that screenplay early enough that John Belushi is still alive and able to play the part…then possibly Belushi doesn’t in fact die by drug OD at all in that timeline, and is also therefore alive and available for a set visit to Wrath of Khan in the Mankind universe.
Given that the Star Trek Easter eggs are clearly the most carefully planted of all those the essay contemplates, that strikes me as a genuine possibility, since in our timeline it’s one of those urban legends that people believe because they want to be true, and making it true in the alternate timeline would be just the sort of thing that a couple of longtime Star Trek pro/fans might decide to make into an Easter egg.
@15/John: You need to reread the article. There’s no mention of a Belushi set visit in For All Mankind; the article erroneously restates the myth that it happened in the real world, then says it probably didn’t happen in FAM.
I personally find the Ewoks to be thematic but YMMV.
But more to the point – it’s funny you mention the Beatles at the end of this because this article was actually making me think of the movie Yesterday where the main character inexplicably finds himself in a timeline where the Beatles don’t exist, as well as the twist at the end,// where it turns out Harry Potter doesn’t either.//
#16: Actually, I knew exactly where I was going, but I failed my “make the explanation clear enough” roll.
You’re right, the article doesn’t cite the Mankind series as planting a Belushi Easter egg, and also right to note that the set-visit story is pure urban legend in our real-world timeline. But if I’m right, that’s because Moore and Menosky knew they couldn’t credibly plant a set-visit Easter egg without first laying the groundwork for it…and so the Real Ghostbusters Easter egg had to come first, thereby setting the stage for an upcoming Easter egg sometime in Season 3 where we find out what John Belushi has been up to in the alternate timeline.
Yes, this is meta on an unreasonably absurdist scale, but that’s part of what geek culture is about.
@18 “meta on an unreasonably absurdist scale.” John, you get me. :-)
@ryan Britt, am I correct in surmising that you’re a friend of DeSoto?
@ryan britt, I’m fairly sure that Nixon served his full term and Teddy became the one term president, instead of Carter. That would put Reagan on track to win the election in 1980.
I chuckled at the news clip of Teddy canceling his trip to Chappaquiddick because the Russians beat us to the moon. That kept him out of trouble long enough to screw up in the White House. Supposedly Watergate was not Nixon’s Waterloo in this time line.