The future of Star Trek is, at best, up in the air, after the cancellation of Starfleet Academy and the lack of concrete information from Paramount on what follows the Alex Kurtzman era (or whether it’s even over). Recently, news has been dominated either by endless – and frankly exhausting – discourse over Starfleet Academy‘s divisive reception and various partial updates on the various spinoffs and non-greenlit projects that could have been or never will be. The state of Star Trek‘s on-screen future is, sadly, muddy. But at least we have other media.
Videos by ComicBook.com
This year will see a number of major Star Trek releases, from the sequel to the excellent Red Shirts comic book through to Star Trek: Picard novel To Defy Fate, several reference books, and of course, the next season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, for which we finally have a trailer and a return date of July 23rd. One of the most interesting releases is also one with a significant challenge: in November, DK will release Star Trek Timelines, which is timed to celebrate the franchise’s 60th anniversary. Crucially, the enterprising project promises to establish a timeline, including alternate timelines like the Mirror Universe to the Kelvin timeline and Star Trek: Voyager’s Year of Hell, presumably clarifying canon. And for lots of intrigued Star Trek fans, the book can, hopefully, clear up the timelines confusion around Khan’s Eugenics Wars.
Star Trek’s Eugenics War is One Of the Biggest Timeline Questions
Continuity and timelines are always going to be a difficult prospect for any franchise that sprawls across 6 decades, and sci-fi lore tends to have even more of an issue with clarity. To its credit, Star Trek doesn’t have too many examples of major timeline issues, though things have certainly been changed and retconned over the years. For instance, in The Original Series’ “Dagger of the Mind” episode, Spock claimed to have never attempted a human mind meld, but did it twice in the Strange New Worlds timeline before the time period of that 1966 episode. Hopefully, depending on the detail it goes into, the timelines book will clear up some of the smaller issues fans pick up on like that.
A more challenging concern the book will have to deal with is where the Eugenics Wars actually happened in the timeline. Originally, they were dated as happening between 1993 and 1996, but then The Next Generation, Voyager, and DS9 all ignored that, while setting some stories in the 1990s that also seemed not to reference such a historically significant conflict. Eventually, Strange New Worlds Season 2 episode “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow” revealed that “whole temporal wars have been fought over” Khan and the Eugenics War, leading to “time itself… pushing back, and events reinsert themselves“. In other words, time corrected itself and moved things around – a handy solution.
There is one persisting problem, however, which hopefully Star Trek Timelines can seek to resolve. Picard Season 2 introduced another wrinkle, with the revelation that Brent Spiner’s Dr. Adam Soong was beginning his own research into his “Khan Project” in 2024, a year after Khan is shown as a child in Strange New Worlds‘ own adjusted timeline. If the book settles on a canon position for the Eugenics Wars and the major events of Khan’s life, that would offer some resolution, but the question remains whether the book will actually do that or will lean on the Strange New Worlds shifting timelines loophole. The latter would potentially undermine the entire project, unless it’s clarified that only certain events could be impacted by temporal wars and timeline shifts. But it’s still an interesting thing to look forward to.
What do you think? Leave a comment below and join the conversation now in the ComicBook Forum!
Most Viewed
-
Courtesy of Sony Pictures Animation / McDonald's -
Image Courtesy of Netflix -
Images courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures -
Courtesy of Sony Pictures Animation / McDonalds -
Image courtesy of The Pokemon Company
