It's probably just as "locked" as any other time period, which is to say not at all. Recent SNW episodes have hammered home the idea that the present, past, and future are all somewhat malleable.
this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2024
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The existence of time travel and the idea of a Temporal Cold War suggests that any given future is just one of many possible futures. The events in Discovery are canon, insofar as they did happen, but whether future Star Trek properties will take the Discovery future as a given is a more open question. Discovery was written very deliberately to avoid being constrained by canon, but that also means that the events are narratively very removed from the rest of the franchise.
My guess is that whoever ends up in charge of making the next chapter of Star Trek will want to establish their own timeline going forward for the same reason that the Discovery creators did, and they’ll largely ignore the easily-ignorable Discovery events, at least as relates to the far future. The alternative is either to set the next series in an even more distant future, which comes with its own issues, or setting it before the 31st century and having to write around a whole bunch of barely-established future canon that only applies to Discovery. I could be wrong, but it seems like the path of least resistance.
We now know when, where, and how the burn happens. Therefore, it can be prevented.
We know, but no Star Trek character which live before the burn know about it. The Discovery should go back in time for that, and it'll always be too dangerous.
Never Say Never with Alex Kurtzman
They were destined to go to the future, learn about the burn, return and prevent it. The burn was never going to happen.
True, but that can be said of a lot of atrocities in Star Trek history. Some of which are necessary for the preservation of the Federation as we know it.
The Enterprise C incident, for example. The loss of the ship with all hands (presumably) helped prevent an escalation of the conflict between the Klingon Empire and the Federation.
We also know that the Burn didn't create issues wholesale. All it really did was exacerbate the existing dilithium shortage by dropping the number of ships, but the underlying problems were likely going to happen either way. The Chain had the advantage of the Courier network, while the Federation was still using warp-drive ships trundling along at low speeds.
The only notable thing that did happen is the loss of functioning ships, straining Federation resources further, and that N'var believed that their experimental stargate network caused the Burn, so they stopped developing it, but the former would have likely happened anyway, especially if the Federation was to get into conflict with the Chain.
Voyager Before and After pretty specifically tells us that whenever someone jumps in time, the fact that they have done so, and the actions that they take, affect the timeline. Any time time travel is involved, we are seeing only one possible timeline, not necessarily the timeline.
Of course, it’s easier to use that reasoning in an episode like Before and After, because the time travel involved is backwards, but I think it’s reasonable to assume it’s true the other way, too. After all, the Kelvinverse isn’t identical to the Prime timeline even before the Narada arrived.
But removing Discovery from the timeline seems to be consistent with the prime timeline post-Discovery season 2 (in TOS etc) - e.g. Spock not talking about his human adopted sister, no further use of spore drives, and so on. It's certainly explicitly the timeline of SNW (which makes multiple references to the events of Discovery s2) and therefore the timeline of Lower Decks.
That suggests the prime timeline as we know it is an altered timeline caused by Discovery's jump to the future.
Kelvinverse was different from the Prime timeline before the Narada arrived because people past that point might not travel backwards in time the same way they would have without intervention.
I just happened to be watching that episode of Voyager when I came across this post, so it was currently front-of-mind for me.
Did you edit the title in sync by any chance?
Just fixed that bug...
I did not (that I can remember). But I did post this using Sync, between hotfixes I think.
Thanks for the great app work. Rock on!
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How likely is it that Discovery went to a mutable future, just one of many, especially with the Temporal Cold War, Carl, Q, Trelane, Janeway, the HMS Bounty, and any number of other temporally active agents out there in time? How locked in is the 32nd Century?
About as locked in as any of the Time Travel in the 23rd and 24th centuries.
Star Trek time travel can be inconsistent, but usually, it tends to stick with there only being one timeline that alterations shift back and forward, something that isn't really helped by the Time War.
The only time that we've seen anything approaching an alternate timeline like that is with the creation of the Kelvin timeline from the Narada incursion, which resulted in bidirectional effects that separated it into a new, independent timeline, but events like that are more the exception than the rule.
Though, normally, Trek time travel rules would suggest that anything lasting longer than a season (or into the next episode) is usually here to stay, if it's not reverted at the end of a multi-parter. Data's head remained centuries older than his body, for example, and the crew of the Bozeman are still rattling about the 24th century, having jumped 70 years into the future.
It's just a future, and can be changed. I'm not aware of any objective in-universe measure of what is and isn't the prime timeline, it's really just what the writers choose to depict as such, which events are altered by time travelers and which ones stand. Since we've seen a full two seasons in this version of the 32nd century, it's more likely that future shows will try to keep consistent with it, but it's also possible they'll be "retconned" into an "alternate reality".