The Clever Way Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Covers Up A Potential Plot Hole
This post contains spoilers for "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" season 2, episode 3.
The latest episode of "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds," called "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow," sees Lieutenant La'an Noonien-Singh (Christina Chong) encounter a time traveler in the corridors of the U.S.S. Enterprise. He straps a widget to her hand and she is immediately thrown into an alternate timeline where she is allowed to meet an alternate version of James T. Kirk (Paul Wesley). When Kirk confronts La'an, the pair are just as quickly whisked away to the past — specifically, Toronto in the 21st century. The bulk of the episode is devoted to the pair investigating how they might return to the future while avoiding any damage to the timeline.
Time travel is nothing new to "Star Trek," and there are multiple stories about how "Trek" characters wind up in Earth's past. In the original series, the crew travels to the 1960s. In "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home," they travel to 1986. In "Deep Space Nine," the crew travels into the early 21st century (which, for 1990s audiences, was still the future). Perhaps infamously, the crew of the U.S.S. Voyager once strolled around Venice Beach in 1996. Sadly, they do not groove to "Who Will Save Your Soul" by Jewel.
But because "Star Trek" has persisted for nearly 60 years, an error has appeared in its continuity. According to Michael and Denise Okuda's sourcebook "Star Trek Chronology," Khan and a race of genetically altered superbeings seized power of 40-some nations simultaneously, instigating an extended conflict called the Eugenics Wars ... in 1993.
The Okudas joke in their own book, published in '93: "Fortunately, none of this seems to have come to pass, at least not the last time we checked with CNN or our local newspapers."
With its latest episode, "Strange New Worlds" tries to account for that discrepancy.
This should have happened in the 1990s
While pursuing all their options in the 21st century, La'an and Kirk encounter a secret enclave of genetically enhanced children in a distant warehouse. One of the kids in the warehouse, one replete with high-security doors and an air of secrecy, is none other than a young Khan Noonien Singh, La'an's grandfather who would grow up to be one of the more notorious villains in the "Star Trek" franchise.
Khan's appearance in 2023, of course, contradicts the known timeline of "Star Trek," which dictated Khan should have been born in the late 1960s.
One of the excuses one might immediately be able to glean is that La'an's time-travel widget didn't just throw them into the past, but into an alternate universe where Khan wouldn't be born until the 2010s. But rather than rely on viewers' intuition on the matter, the "Strange New Worlds" showrunners actually addressed it in dialogue. It seems that Khan's caretaker is an alien spy who has been hiding out on Earth, in disguise, for many, many years. There was some vague description of how the alien was waiting to take action, and they mentioned that all of this genetic rigmarole "should have" taken place in the 1990s. It appears there was some sort of time-travel accident that delayed the Eugenics Wars, leaving 2023 Toronto clean and free of war for La'an and Kirk to visit.
So it seems the Eugenics Wars are still inevitable in "Star Trek," but they were somehow pushed back. How or why they got pushed back was not explained. But worry not, continuity-obsessed Trekkies, they will most assuredly happen.
But wait ... what about Dr. Soong?
That's not much of an explanation, but it's something. Weirdly, it also puts "Star Trek," ordinarily an assertively humanist show, into the realm of fatalism. By Gene Roddenberry's measure, Earth needed to pass through several devastating wars and nearly face self-annihilation before it could realize the utopian ideal seen in the future envisioned by the show. But the Eugenics Wars have been an important part of "Trek" continuity for so long, now it seems they are destined to happen.
Of course, even the timeline "update" in "Strange New Worlds" isn't completely clean. It seems that it contradicts events as they were depicted in season 2 of "Star Trek: Picard." In that season, an evil geneticist named Dr. Adam Soong (Brent Spiner) was growing a series of cloned daughters in his underground lab. The daughters tended to die out quickly, so he would accelerate their growth to adulthood. He did this for unethical eugenics reasons. When his latest daughter (Isa Briones) finds out about his weird plan, she escapes his clutches and trashes the lab. While poking through his lab's cluttered remains, Dr. Soong finds a folder labeled "Khan Project," clearly implying that Dr. Soong was about to start his own genetic manipulation experiments to create Khan himself.
The problem is the second season of "Picard" takes place in the year 2024. By that gauge, Khan wouldn't be born for a few more years yet, grown in a lab by Dr. Soong. By the "Strange New Worlds" timeline, however, Khan was already a boy in 2023, and Dr. Soong doesn't seem to be anywhere in sight.
Was this parallel universe tinkering, or were the writers simply not paying attention? It's more likely it was the latter, but I'm sure someone, somewhere will ask about this and we'll get an answer soon enough.