With the (finally) arrival in Spain of ‘Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’, a certain debt with the trekkies was settled through a series that is all that the franchise has been for decades. With our pluses and minuses, the adventures of Captain Pike’s Enterprise (Anson Mount) and his crew have convinced us.
But, as often happens when dealing with spin-offs in the same universe, we find ourselves with certain mismatches in the Star Trek timeline. And in this series we have an interesting mismatch or, at least, a conflict between the events of the original series and this prequel.
With the chronology in hand, ‘Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ would start a few months after his appearance by Pike and company in “Star Trek: Discovery.” This places us around the year 2259, about seven years before the start of the Original Series (TOS).
By the way, here we will have spoilers for season 1 of ‘Strange New Worlds’.
Little mismatches everywhere
Already from the beginning of the series we observed certain discrepancies in the continuity of the franchise (Spock’s relationship with his fiancée, for example, is “retconned“) in which one of Captain Pike’s motives is that vision of his future and death. Something that torments you and that corresponds to what we saw in ‘The menagerie’ (episodes 1×12-13 of ‘TOS’).
Although there are details here and there, it has been the final episode of season 1 of ‘Strange New Worlds’ that has set off the alarm a bit by showing us a possible future that would directly conflict with all the continuity of the saga to be fulfilled.
‘a quality of mercy‘ puts Captain Pike in the dilemma of warning a young boy of the danger that will put their lives at risk in the future. At that moment, he will receive a visit from a future self who will warn him that this will have dire consequences for the Federation, leading him to a key moment that is actually well anchored in the past of the saga.
The episode takes us to revisit the events of ‘the balance of terror‘, the presentation of the Romulans in ‘Star Trek’ (TOS 1×15), implying that Pike would continue to command the Enterprise at those times instead of James T. Kirk (played here by Paul Wesley) and thus causing a mismatch in the chronology of the saga.
In the words of Henry Alonso Myerscoshowrunner of the series, at that time had several ideas on the air:
«We had three ideas on the table. One was “What if we found a way to retell a classic TOS episode but with our characters?” and one was what I would call Pike’s ghost of the future, the classic time travel idea of ”what if your older self comes along and tells you not to do that thing you’re about to do?” And then there was that third idea… the Spock from Menagerie is a person who steals the Enterprise and clearly has a loyalty to Captain Pike, what if we tell the story of how that happened?”
Although it is still a classic episode of a possible future to be avoided, the scriptwriters leave it up to the protagonist to assume his destiny or try to change it. In fact, this vision of the future makes him undo the decision he had made… but there are still years ahead and this torment is one of Pike’s leitmotifs during ‘Strange New Worlds’.
Kelvin play in sight?
We could even talk about this episode as a little trial balloon by the writers: things can change a lot depending on the decisions of Anson Mount’s character. Even with this knowledge you might decide to try to change things and we could end up in an alternate Kelvin-style timeline.
Let’s remember that in 2009, JJ Abrams proposed together with Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman (who, let’s remember, is the architect of this new trekkie stage) a new timeline that was created by preventing the future destruction of Romulo (something that is in the background of the first season of ‘Star Trek: Picard’).
If we are honest, unlike other universes such as Star Wars, which maintains its style and aesthetic guideline well-founded and practically immovable (the designs of forty years ago and those of today hardly differ beyond subtleties), with Star Trek there is much more leeway.
There is quite a lot of flexibility in both events and designs, which is noticeable in, for example, the appearance of the original Klingons with respect to later representations. What would make a new small reboot in the saga would not be something strange for the science fiction franchise. Who knows if that’s the plan, but now that Marvel is with the “multiverses” it wouldn’t be strange if they wanted to emulate it.