The reason Star Trek: Strange New Worlds changed the timeline is dumb

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds made a controversial decision to alter the timeline, but why?

If only Star Trek had one person, who was in charge of keeping canon organized, we wouldn’t have this problem. Star Trek:  Strange New Worlds’ episode, “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow” featured a young Khan Noonien Singh, in the early 2020s. This may not seem like a big deal, but considering Khan was a man when the Eugenics Wars started in the early 1990s and now he’s a child, it throws off the entire universes continuity.

Granted, it wasn’t Strange New Worlds’ fault, at least not completely, as Voyager went back in 1996 when the Eugenics War would’ve been raging, and instead, they had a silly ramp through time. So it wasn’t all on Strange New Worlds, but they did alter a lot, and almost needlessly at that.

So why did the show make such huge changes?

Well, speaking to Cinemablend, co-showrunner Akiva Goldsman revealed the reason why and it’s not a good one;

"This is a correction. Because otherwise, it’s silly, or Star Trek ceases to be in our universe…By the way, this happened in Season 1, so this is not a Season 2 [issue]. It’s a pilot issue. We want Star Trek to be an aspirational future. We want to be able to dream our way into the Federation as a Starfleet. I think that is the fun of it, in part. And so, in order to keep Star Trek in our timeline, we continue to push dates forward. At a certain point, we won’t be able to. But obviously, if you start saying that the Eugenics Wars were in the 90s, you’re kind of fucked for aspirational in terms of the real world."

Star Trek is not our future or our past, it’s pretend and creators need to realize that

So, Strange New Worlds screwed with continuity to be…aspirational? Goldsman and the writers know that Star Trek isn’t real, right? It’s pro wrestling. It’s Game of Thrones. It’s fiction. It’s not real. Its history and our history don’t have to be interwoven. Its future and our future don’t have to meet at a certain point.

It’s ok for the show to have its own history that isn’t accurate to the reality around us. No one is watching Star Trek for history lessons for today. We’re looking for interesting stories to entertain us and nothing else.

How is predicting a third world war an aspirational future? How is moving the event around somehow, and doing so poorly, going to make the future more aspirational? How is changing the past helping the future? This reeks of narcissism.

Star Trek isn’t real, stop messing around with the continuity because you’re trying to tie every single event to something from the present era. That’s stupid, and short-sighted and will only further cause these issues to multiply.