My increasingly-untenable theory is that -- in the style of the Caesar or Napoleon creating new calendars -- Khan created a new calendar when he took over a big chunk of Earth. This calendar offered some improvement over our current calendar (and/or pegged Year 0 to something less archaic than the birth of a religious figure) and went into common use. The Eugenics Wars happened in the 1990s of this new calendar (perhaps Khan planned on achieving total victory by that calendar's Year 2000) and anything post-Eugenics Wars in the Star Trek timeline also uses Khan's dating.
The big hole in this theory is why Starfleet time travelers never refer to this dating discrepancy, or even refer to the real-world 1960s or 1990s by their real-world dates. Although this hole is arguably smaller than the "why did the 1990s happen without Eugenics Wars?" hole, there are still some plausible explanations. Maybe pre-Khan dates are still used for pre-Khan events to avoid the problem of having to re-date all of history up to that point. Maybe, when people travel back to pre-Khan times, their computers handle this dating changeover seamlessly. Maybe the changeover is so common and uninteresting by the 23rd- or 24th-century that it's not worth much discussion (or maybe 23rd- or 24th-century people have such limited knowledge about the period that it's not something that would occur to them).
honestly star trek is so hard to reconcile with contemporary culture that i wouldn't mind if they introduced some enforced cultural amnesia into the timeline. i think trek is better when they don't mention the modern world, with the major exception of Voyage Home. I heard Discovery had some Elon Musk dick sucking, which is part of the reason i never bothered to watch it.
It was one throwaway line IIRC, but still shitty. But yeah, Discovery isn't good for about a dozen other reasons, too. It has some moments, don't get me wrong, but I've been re-watching some TNG lately and it isn't even comparable.
yeah, I mean the number one reason i wasn't interested was it was the third consecutive prequel in the franchise. i dunno, i feel like star trek as a concept is kind of a product of it's time and not really something that could work today.
The prequel bit didn't bother me too much; prequels can be really cool when done well. And it wasn't supposed to be a direct prequel -- it didn't start out as a "Young Kirk" story or anything -- which was also promising.
If I had to pick only one issue with it, I'd say it tried to do too much too quickly. The plot of Season 1 could have been stretched out over 2-3 20+ episode seasons (and would have benefited from that), but it was crammed into 15 episodes. Everything had to move at breakneck speed, you didn't see much development of the cast as an ensemble (one of the strongest parts of earlier shows), and there were very few one-off "problem of the week" episodes (which have often been some of the best of the whole universe).
i feel like star trek as a concept is kind of a product of it’s time and not really something that could work today.
I've heard a lot of Star Trek fans who really like The Orville as a Trek-esque show that works pretty well today. I think the concept of utopian space adventure is still workable; it just needs a good amount of distance from the ~50 years of established history, similar to how TNG and that era of shows was set a century after the original series. Apparently Discovery Season 3 jumped several centuries into the future, so fuck it, maybe it'll work, but I'm not holding out too much hope for this particular installment. Probably the best case scenario is a decade from now we get a show set in the 25th or 26th century that can be largely separate from everything we've seen so far.
My increasingly-untenable theory is that -- in the style of the Caesar or Napoleon creating new calendars -- Khan created a new calendar when he took over a big chunk of Earth. This calendar offered some improvement over our current calendar (and/or pegged Year 0 to something less archaic than the birth of a religious figure) and went into common use. The Eugenics Wars happened in the 1990s of this new calendar (perhaps Khan planned on achieving total victory by that calendar's Year 2000) and anything post-Eugenics Wars in the Star Trek timeline also uses Khan's dating.
The big hole in this theory is why Starfleet time travelers never refer to this dating discrepancy, or even refer to the real-world 1960s or 1990s by their real-world dates. Although this hole is arguably smaller than the "why did the 1990s happen without Eugenics Wars?" hole, there are still some plausible explanations. Maybe pre-Khan dates are still used for pre-Khan events to avoid the problem of having to re-date all of history up to that point. Maybe, when people travel back to pre-Khan times, their computers handle this dating changeover seamlessly. Maybe the changeover is so common and uninteresting by the 23rd- or 24th-century that it's not worth much discussion (or maybe 23rd- or 24th-century people have such limited knowledge about the period that it's not something that would occur to them).
Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
honestly star trek is so hard to reconcile with contemporary culture that i wouldn't mind if they introduced some enforced cultural amnesia into the timeline. i think trek is better when they don't mention the modern world, with the major exception of Voyage Home. I heard Discovery had some Elon Musk dick sucking, which is part of the reason i never bothered to watch it.
It was one throwaway line IIRC, but still shitty. But yeah, Discovery isn't good for about a dozen other reasons, too. It has some moments, don't get me wrong, but I've been re-watching some TNG lately and it isn't even comparable.
yeah, I mean the number one reason i wasn't interested was it was the third consecutive prequel in the franchise. i dunno, i feel like star trek as a concept is kind of a product of it's time and not really something that could work today.
The prequel bit didn't bother me too much; prequels can be really cool when done well. And it wasn't supposed to be a direct prequel -- it didn't start out as a "Young Kirk" story or anything -- which was also promising.
If I had to pick only one issue with it, I'd say it tried to do too much too quickly. The plot of Season 1 could have been stretched out over 2-3 20+ episode seasons (and would have benefited from that), but it was crammed into 15 episodes. Everything had to move at breakneck speed, you didn't see much development of the cast as an ensemble (one of the strongest parts of earlier shows), and there were very few one-off "problem of the week" episodes (which have often been some of the best of the whole universe).
I've heard a lot of Star Trek fans who really like The Orville as a Trek-esque show that works pretty well today. I think the concept of utopian space adventure is still workable; it just needs a good amount of distance from the ~50 years of established history, similar to how TNG and that era of shows was set a century after the original series. Apparently Discovery Season 3 jumped several centuries into the future, so fuck it, maybe it'll work, but I'm not holding out too much hope for this particular installment. Probably the best case scenario is a decade from now we get a show set in the 25th or 26th century that can be largely separate from everything we've seen so far.