(Continued from post)

Kirk says he spent 6 months in a Denobulan prison with a Vulcan cellmate, and learned to make plomeek soup (TOS: “Amok Time”) in the toilet. Kirk was a terrible driver in the Prime timeline as well (TOS: “A Piece of the Action”). Kirk says his middle name, Tiberius, was his grandfather’s, same as in the Kelvin Timeline.

Kirk says that Sam is his brother’s middle name (George Samuel Kirk Jr.) and most people call him George. La’An scoffs and says nobody calls him George. In TOS: “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” the android duplicate of Kirk notes that only Kirk calls his brother Sam. Kirk mocks La’An’s name as “Noonien-Soong” who was, of course, Data and Lore’s creator (TNG: “Datalore”).

Kirk has never heard of the Noonien-Singh name, which is telling (we find out why later). While in TOS: “Space Seed” he didn’t recognize Khan by sight and he was briefed by Spock once it was apparent who Khan was, we don’t see anything in the episode to indicate he didn’t know the name.

Sera, the girl who helps them, is streaming it on an iPhone 14 Pro. The restaurant they talk in is the real-life Lakeview Restaurant. She believes the bridge was blown up by aliens who want Earth to remain disunited and to slow down human progress. One of the pictures she shows them is a TOS-era Romulan Bird of Prey which Kirk recognizes. La’An doesn’t, because it will be about 6 to 7 years before the Romulans emerge from their space with that ship (TOS: “Balance of Terror”). In Kirk’s timeline, a few days from now, a cold fusion reactor will destroy Toronto, a Romulan first strike.

Kirk says they need to find an engineer from the “stone ages” to help them build a cold fusion detector. In TOS: “The City on the Edge of Forever” Spock tries to build a mnemonic circuit from what he sarcastically calls “stone knives and bear skins.”

True to her story, Pelia’s bunker as the words “The Archeology Department” graffitied on the door. Pelia says she has a terrible memory for faces, which may explain why she doesn’t remember meeting La’An.

Kirk says someone at the Apple Store taught him to use DuckDuckGo, which is a search engine designed to maintain privacy of searches. La’An is being very cagey about her origins, perhaps to maintain the Temporal Prime Directive. Pelia claims she (in this time) is not an engineer and hasn’t taken a math class since Pythagoras made it up (about 1500 years prior to the present). Pythagoras is often called the father of mathematics.

Tritium does indeed make phosphor glow through beta decay, and has a limited half-life. Tritium based phosphor lighting lasts for about ten years. I’m not sure that this particular detection method with the watch would work, though.

La’An suggests Kirk can live in her timeline. In “Yesterday’s Enterprise” the alternate Tasha travels to the Prime Timeline and survives the erasure of her timeline to eventually birth Sela (TNG: “Redemption II”), so there is precedent for this.

The cold fusion reactor is housed in the Noonien-Singh Institute for Cultural Advancement and La’An’s DNA opens the door. Sera is from the future, and her people - the Romulans - have been slowing human progress, but she wants to go further and for once, a Kirk bluff doesn’t work the way he intended.

Sera’s target is the child Khan Noonien-Singh, and for the first time this firmly retcons the timeline of the Eugenics Wars and Khan’s era as being pushed up to the 21st Century instead of 1996. Sera says that she was told to do so because of a computer simulation, much like Ziggy from Quantum Leap calculated changes in history. If Khan dies, the Federation never forms - and that explains why Kirk doesn’t know the name.

Sera’s explanation that this was “supposed to happen in 1992” and time itself is pushing back against attempts to change it, events reinserting themselves, now provides an explicit mechanism as to why the chronology of the Eugenics Wars has changed. This also now implies that the Project: Khan file dated 1996 that was in Adam Soong’s hands (PIC: “Farewell”) may be related to this current Khan, or the product of another altered history.

As she is fatally wounded, Sera activates an implant and turns to dust. The light on the temporal device turns from red to green, perhaps indicating that the timeline has been restored. Older viewers like me will remember the time travel series Voyagers! from 1982, whose protagonists also used a handheld device called an Omni that had red/green light indicators to show if something was wrong with the timeline.

The child Khan, appearing about 8-10 years of age, seems to be of South Asian heritage as the actual Khan would be. He is part of a cohort of at least 6 other children of various ethnicities, likely all genetically engineered.

A lingering question is what happens to the alternate Kirk’s body. If we take the idea that a person out of time is protected from timeline changes like the alternate Tasha was, then alt-Kirk’s body would still exist, a mysterious John Doe. For what it’s worth, La’An is still wearing the now anachronistic diver’s watch.

Agent Ymalay from the DTI introduces herself, and confirms the stranger was a DTI agent, cautioning her against discussing what she just experienced lest she undo the timeline.

La’An calls Prime Kirk, who is at this point still a lieutenant and confirms his birthplace as Riverside, Iowa. In reality, Roddenberry never established where in Iowa Kirk was born, so the town of Riverside just claimed it as his future birthplace. This is the first time it’s been established on screen.

“Kirk claims never to have been to Earth at all, having been born in space on the USS Iowa. His counterparts were born in Iowa, USA, in the Prime Universe 2333 and on the USS Kelvin in the Kelvin Timeline.“

Alt-Kirk’s ship is identified as the UEFS Enterprise when La’an first enters the bridge, but I also heard his place of birth as being the USS Iowa.

Does that imply that humanity has multiple military space fleets? Or maybe that unification of Earther’s governments didn’t happen until after Kirk’s birth in this timeline?

In TNG: “The Defector”, Picard performs Henry V, and Data and he do the same in “Emergence”. Picard uses the excuse of the away team being actors performing A Midsummer Night’s Dream in “Time’s Arrow”. In DS9: “Improbable Cause”, Garak and Bashir debate Julius Caesar. In ENT: “In a Mirror, Darkly” the similarities between Shakespeare’s plays between the Prime and Mirror Universe are mentioned. Various bits of Shakespeare are quoted as well, notably General Chang, a Shakespeare aficionado in ST VI and Spock quoting Hamlet in DIS: “Perpetual Infinity”.

No love for Picard reciting a sonnet in TNG: “Ménage à Troi”? :) Or were you just specifically listing references to Shakespeare plays?