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Episode Discussion | Star Trek: Strange New Worlds | 2x03 "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow" (startrek.website)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

79 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Logline

La’An travels back in time to twenty-first-century Earth to prevent an attack which will alter humanity’s future history—and bring her face to face with her own contentious legacy.

Written by David Reed

Directed by Amanda Row

Note: This is a second attempt, as technical difficulties were preventing people from seeing the original discussion post. Apologies to the people who were able to comment in the original.

(page 2) 34 comments

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I'm just kinda thrilled to see Canada in the Star Trek universe. Obviously they've been doing a bunch of filming out of Toronto so technically we have seen it, but it's nice for them to sidestep the fact that 99% of the time they get thrown into Earth's past and they end up in California. Kirk "recognizing" the city as New York was a cute touch given how often Toronto doubles for it. Also technically I guess this means that the greatest tyrant in Earth's history technically is canonically Canadian too.

Kirk being a chess hustler was cute too, explaining how he's able to keep up when playing Spock in TOS.

Aside from that, the episode was fine. I like seeing La'an getting some development, and seeing her spar with M'Benga (and getting beaten) was nice since it justifies him being actually kind of a badass, and makes the fight scenes in the first episode of the season more reasonable. Also a bit more behind the curtain of Pelia.

A lot of the episode was just goofy "man out of time" stuff, which is cute in its own right but doesn't really add a ton. But it was entertaining and fun, and worth watching again, so I'm still calling it a winner.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Toronto passing as New York for characters was so meta and hilarious.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

After the first episode of the season and seeing how he handled himself as a sparring partner, M’Benga should henceforth be called Dr. Seen-Some-Shit

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I enjoyed that episode a lot, although it would have benefitted from its length being tightened up by ten minutes.

What do we think was the nature of the Romulan interference with Earth? And what time period is Sera, the Romulan agent from?

The DTI agent appears to use 29th century tech, which is several hundred years after the Romulan Empire’s supernovae-driven collapse but possibly around the time of the Romulan-Vulcan reunification of Ni’Var. Is she from that same time period?

Sera also shows Kirk a picture of what looks like a TOS-era Bird-of-Prey as part of her alien conspiracy photo deck. It has the round nacelles typical of the 23rd century, rather than those seen in ENT’s 22nd century designs, or some other design representing the 20th/21st century in which these attacks take place.

Is she a time agent from the 23rd century (with the appropriate Romulan ship in orbit)?

Is that her guessing who Kirk is, and planting the evidence he’s most likely to recognize? Or was that really a Romulan design from the 21st century?

Which leads to me wonder if the Romulans started interfering with Earth’s development only due to temporal war shenanigans, or had they been doing flybys for as long as the Vulcans?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Never thought that letting an episode run longer in streaming would be viewed as a negative.

I wouldn’t have cut anything.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

This is the best episode of modern Trek since Magic to Make…

It hit all the right notes and felt so Star Trek. Don’t get me wrong, I love serialized seasons, but Star Trek is at it’s best when it doesn’t take itself too seriously, while also simultaneously dealing with serious plot points.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

repost my original comment from last night's failed thread:

Canon purists are making leaps about the placement of the eugenics wars. Sounds to me like they’re blaming the Temporal Cold War for changing things.

Must be pre USS Relativity time agency…

Fun episode, but the gymnastics to tell Kirk stories without impacting TOS is getting a bit obvious, this is our 2nd alternate Kirk

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Seriously. They need to stop giving us time travel stories to shoehorn Kirk into the series. Let it stand on its own without having to hearken forward to the Original Series.

It's a good show, and it deserves to be its own good show.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I agree. SNW has a really strong cast, and great writers. The show truly can be episodic without referencing any previous canon and still be fantastic and even appreciated more by new watchers of Star Trek.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I would like to see a Short Trek of what went down during that 16hr+ road trip with Kirk & La'An

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Its interesting what they are doing but god damn are they hamstringing the timeline by moving Khan to 2022/3.

First Contact happens in 2064 pretty reliably. So that means this PreTeen Kahn needs to become a Tyrant. Rule over a quarter of the globe, I guess start or be involved in WW3 and bounce on the botany bay. All in 40 years.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

It can still kind of work. Montalban was about 45 when he was Khan, so let’s say Khan was around that age when he was exiled. The young Khan we see seems to be about 10 years old, maybe a bit younger.

So say baby Khan was born in 2012 if we want to take Sera’s 30 years literally rather than as an approximation. World War III (according to ENT: “In a Mirror Darkly” but the years may have slipped) starts in 2026 and lasts until 2053 (ST: FC, SNW: “Strange New Worlds”). Khan could easily have fought in the war and took power in the end days of the war - he’d only be 41 in 2053.

Even in the old timeline Khan only ruled one quarter of Earth for about 4-5 years between 1992 and 1996. So it’s not implausible that the Eugenics Wars happen around 2048-2053 (Khan would be in his mid-thirties, and augmented) and Khan escaped after his reign was toppled during the Last Day in 2053 on a non-warp powered sleeper ship, because Cochrane only managed warp 10 years later.

In fact, having the Eugenics Wars take place around 2050 works better because Archer said his great-grandfather fought in them (in North Africa). Since ENT takes place in the 2150s, that only makes about a century between their births, which is certainly reasonable, whereas if Archer-great-grand-pére fought in the 1990s then it'd be stretching his longevity just a tad.

[+] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

[deleted]

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

If we take the chronology in “Mirror Darkly” as still valid, then Green started the war in 2026.

2026: Earth's World War Three begins, over the issue of genetic manipulation and human genome enhancement. Colonel Phillip Green leads a faction of ultra-violent eco-terrorists resulting in 37 million deaths.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

But Mirror Darkly need not be correct in the exact year at this point.

It’s established now that there have been successive incursions in the timeline. Time has been resistant to forks that eliminate major events entirely, but the years in which any given major event took place may shift.

If it gives TNG Berman-era fans of Picard season three comfort, this explanation can account for how Jack Crusher was both born after Nemesis and is 23-24 years old in 2401. That is, there occurred a subtle shift in the timeline between Nemesis and Picard such that Nemesis took place a few years earlier than originally.

Again, these are not the ratcheting changes of 12 Monkeys, they are eddies in the river of the Prime Timeline that shift the flow a bit but the major points of its route remains the same.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

It might not, but until there’s an explicit on-screen contradiction or mention that the timeline did shift, for the sake of fostering discussion it’s better to say that the dates stand and see if we can work around it.

I grant that you are correct because the dates have to slip since hopefully WWIII doesn’t actually start 2 years from now, but there’s a larger point I’m trying to make here.

If we use the Temporal Wars as a trump card to every Trek inconsistency, there’s really no point playing the Watsonian game. “The temporal wars changed it” is functionally equivalent as “a wizard did it” or “God made it so”. It’s a cop-out that shuts down discussions instead of extending them.

I mean, it’s very tempting. Why did Chekov recognize Khan if he didn’t show up on screen until Season 2? Temporal Wars. Why did Wesley say the Klingons joined the Federation? Temporal Wars. Why was Sam Kirk said to have 3 sons in one episode but shown only to have 1 in another? Temporal Wars. I could go on. Every query becomes a closed question from this point out and that’s no fun. That’s been the danger ever since the TCW was introduced in ENT.

That was a reason why alternate timeline discussions were very closely regulated on the old r/DaystromInstitute. So I would rather not invoke the butterfly effect for anything if there’s no particular reason or explicit statement that it happened.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I appreciate the risk, but it seems that we’ve got a canon confirmation already.

There will be slippage. We already know that Voyager changed the timeline after the events of DS9. The Romulan Supernova and Picard season 2 perturbed it further.

The key thing is that there do exist some time crystals (as defined in physics not necessarily the glowing blue ones on Borath) which are events that are fixed points in the timeline. Those have to happen, like Pike’s injuries, and cannot slip too much without a fork.

Physics just doesn’t support the rigidity of precise dates in the timeline that would give many fans comfort nor does it support the infinite branching that makes everything meaningless.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

This deserves a lot more looking into. Possibly a post in c/DaystromInstitute at some point, but, like Holmes, I cry out for more data before wanting to form a workable hypothesis. As a side note, I’m already gathering data for working out Una’s chronology. It’s filling out nicely.

We don’t disagree in broad terms. I just recoil from the easy (and potentially dismissive) answer if I don’t think it’s actually necessary for the most part, so I’ll stick to not futzing around with established dates until something really tells me otherwise. As someone who’s been playing around and figuring out Trek chronologies since the early 90s, this is where I’m most comfortable being.

A general observation: I think that this episode is consistent with the way time travel is seen to work in the Trek universe - that the timeline is overwritten rather than branched. The Kelvin Timeline remains the one sole example of a branched timeline that was created as the result of a temporal incursion. In all other cases, the timeline becomes (in my favorite comparison) like a palimpsest.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Our household has been coming at it from our understanding of physics, and have been since at least the 90s. It means that we’ve been watching through that lens for a very long time.

Without it, the episodes in Voyager where Harry Kim or Janeway came back to correct the timeline are meaningless. We would just assume that the unchanged timeline went forward offscreen.

This resilient river of time version offers a continuity where actions matter, and corrections to the timeline mean something more than just a shift in point of view.

As you note, multiple universes can exist but it takes something very large to do it. In Star Trek, we’re not in the infinite and ever expanding continuum of branching universes where every possible permutation of events exists. (And that version of the multiverse doesn’t stand up for hard scientists.)

So far we know that the Mirror Universe has different physics of light - something that’s so enormous that it’s hard to credit that it’s developed in any kind of parallel. It suggests some fixed events in the past development of the two universes that are extraordinarily resilient against branching.

The Romulan supernova is a major event but of a much lower order of magnitude than say the establishment of the physics of light. It seems like that would be a kind of lower bound for a branching trigger.

All to say that I agree that a Daystrom Institute deep dive would be worthwhile. In fact, it may be possible to go through onscreen canon and itemize the various events and inconsistencies that support this construct.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

A little remarked side effect of time travel is that it causes infatuation (Kirk, in "City on the Edge of Forever") and horniness (Spock, in "All Our Yesterdays"). La’An experienced both!

Edit: I forgot about Bashir and Jadzia in "Trials and Tribble-ations" but honestly they just seemed to be acting in character!

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Ah, well I had a more thorough comment typed out, but unfortunately that was on the thread that got locked and the app I'm using on mobile ate my response when it failed to post.

The gist of it though was that I was pleasantly surprised by this episode, as I'm not usually one for the time travel themes. The ending was painful (as in, the writing was very well done) to watch and hit me harder than I expected!

And it was also cool for them to reference DDG instead of Google, I'd be happy to see that sort of thing happen more often on TV.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Really enjoyed this episode! Wasn’t quite sure where it was going at first but just went along for the ride and ended up really liking it. Refreshing to see a good temporal mechanics Star Trek episode again.

I’m not 100% sold on new Kirk yet but I also don’t dislike him either. It’s kind of surprising given how well Ethan Peck fits as Spock, I would have thought that Kirk’s casting would be equally spot on.

Still, curious to see where this goes, definitely loving the ride!

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

So.. La'an goes back in time to bootstrap paradox Pelia into becoming the engineer she is in the current timeline, and saves Earth's next Hitler from being killed, because without that, humanity never really gets it's shit together. And ::speculation alert!!:: maybe her leaving that gun there begins his murderous spree, so maybe she bootstrap paradoxed Khan into being the tyrant he becomes, too.

What a wild ride.

I just ... this series.. is just so consistently enjoyable. I love it.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I know I was like, “wait she just left the gun there??”

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Chekovs gun (for a very long time I actually thought the phrase related to the good old Enterprise navigator)

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I ended up liking this a lot. For one, I'm glad Pelia really is a part of the cast now because I LOVED her introduction and was fearful she'd be a one-and-done character.

But secondly, in the past all I could see with La'an was (as someone else said) "a budget Camina Drummer". And I love Drummer, but seeing almost!Drummer every time La'an was on screen was so fricking weird.

I think this episode gave La'an some of the development she needed so I wasn't seeing almost!Drummer all the time.

(And for those who don't know Drummer is...go watch The Expanse. It's as if the new (is it still considered new?) Battlestar Galactica and Star Trek had a baby. One part grittier sci-fi universe, one part wonderful character/crew exploration.)

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I agree. At one point, I wondered if the EPs had wanted Cara Gee for the show.

She’s her own person now. Strong and closed like Drummer but from a very different context.

Many of us who are fans of both Trek and The Expanse have wished Trek had some of the complex strong women along the lines of the Expanse. I can’t criticize the EPs for wanting to bring that into the franchise. Now all I want is a Trek version of Avrasala.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Copied and pasted from my comment on the original thread that is still in my profile (I'd noticed something was up with the previous post but figured it would clear up with time)

Nice character episode with a simple premise and a good amount of Pelia!

I’ve always thought Trek is at its worst or riskiest when doing time travel stuff, but the tone and focus of this episode being on La’an and her relationship to her heritage really centered the episode. In a way it was a subtle, but strong, IMO, character driven plot point to have her struggle with finding for once a real intimate connection with someone destined to be lost and “forgotten”.

Having Kahn appear as a child was low-key wonderful.

What’s up with the watch? Is there more to Pelia than meets the eye? Seems she’s conveniently forced herself and her myriad belongings onto the ship for this particular time period while also (and I forget what Trek’s take on time travel is here) knowing about that watch being on board at this point … ?!

Anyone else feeling a certain lack of Pike in the first 3 episodes? Not against it, it just seems somewhat conspicuous given that I imagine the character is half of the reason the show exists.

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