Headscratchers / Star Trek: Strange New Worlds S2E03 "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow"

• Does Pelia remember meeting La'an and Jim in the past, or has it all run together for her at this point?
  • They don't address it directly but she certainly seems to recognize the clothes La'an was wearing when they met in Vermont.
• Prime!Jim is remarkably casual about La'An making a call to a different ship for a question she could have just walked to Sam's quarters to ask. Is he really that incurious?
• Is La'an's actions what got Pelia into taking up engineering? Is La'an's trip therefore a Stable Time Loop?
  • Based on the commentary offered by the Temporal Officer at the end, it would seem so. La'an was never meant to know of these events, but by the nature of time loops she must now live with all of it.
• The episode’s explanation of why the Eugenics Wars didn’t happen in the 1990s was very creative, but it doesn’t explain why, in Space Seed and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, they said it happened in the 1990s.
  • Those episodes happened *before* (for lack of a better term), the temporal cold war happened and the past was meddled with enough to push them back to the 2020s or whenever.
• La'an appears to leave the gun behind her in the room with the young Khan, a rather strange choice for a security officer.
  • Possibly explainable by the fact that security was en route to Khan's room, so she knew that the boy wouldn't be able to cause or come to any harm in the few seconds he was alone.
  • She knew that it was destiny for him to become a mass-murderer, and she gave him the means, so that the timeline would be preserved.
  • For the same reason the Romulans thought they were gonna happen in the 90s and sent Sera there.
  • Further, she also activates the time machine while in full-view of Khan. That said, she had just been through a fairly traumatic experience, witnessing the death of Jim Kirk soon after falling for him, fighting Sera to the death, and coming face to face with the most hated man in her history, still an innocent child. It's possible that it just slipped her mind in the moment when she heard the security guards coming.
    • On that point, Khan's already seen one woman vanish in a flash of light (Sera), so seeing another a this point isn't gonna exactly change much.
• A continuity mishap: the weather display on the giant screen in Yonge-Dundas Square lists the day as Tuesday; the next day, the weather display still lists the day as Tuesday.
• Who gets a street hot dog with nothing on it? Even worse, what self-respecting street vendor would sell one without giving you a really weird look? Just sayin’.
  • "The customer is always right in matters of taste." As long as they paid, they can put -or not put- whatever they want on the dog.
  • A guy from 200 years later where nuclear war has destroyed all hot dog carts, everywhere.
  • And Jim probably did get a weird look. He usually does when he time travels.
  • It's also a running gag that this Jim Kirk has no familiarity with Earth, as can be seen by the awkward way he eats said hotdog. We also see the counter is set up so the customer puts the toppings. So Kirk bought 2 hot dogs, then walked away not putting anything on it. What was the vendor gonna do? Chase him down? Probably just assumed his customer's got weird tastes. Kirk meanwhile probably knows nothing of hot dogs to realize he forgot to put toppings on.
  • ...people who prefer plain hot dogs, which is a kind of person that exists?
• Why would the time agent need La'an at all. He belongs to an organization that has pocket-sized transporter that travel through time and space. A door wouldn't foil him not matter how fancy the handprint scanner. Never mind that he has no reason to open the door since his goal is to stop someone else from doing just that so providing that person with an extra key seems stupid. And surely while bleeding going back to his organization's HQ is easier than having to track La'an through time and space.
  • Perhaps for the same reason that Khan was a target: a computer simulation said so. On the other hand, it seems as if the time agents and the institution itself have gotten complacent and arrogant. Leaving La'an with orders not to discuss what happened with anyone and not even providing a therapist to help her deal with her trauma could also change the timeline. It's little wonder that time travel technology was outlawed after the time wars; everyone was either abusing it or didn't care as long as the changes were minimal.
  • Read Star Trek: Department of Temporal Investigations for a full rundown of the intricacies of time travel, but here's the short version. What a lot of people fail to realize is that it's not enough just to have the technology to travel anywhere in time and space. You have to know where to look. Space is big. Space+time is really big. Based on the DTI agent's dying words ("get to the bridge"), he only knew the approximate point of divergence, otherwise he would have said something like "save Khan" or "protect the reactor". He was likely investigating a suspected incursion for more information but was shot by Sera or one of her confederates before he discovered all the facts. Also, we don't know exactly how reliable or flexible his temporal transporter really is. The DTI of the 24th century doesn't engage in time travel except as a very last resort (since the Federation's knowledge of temporal engineering is shaky at best), so these guys are probably from further in the future, but they can't be too advanced since the DTI is eventually supplanted by the Temporal Integrity Commission (seen on Voyager) whose technology was also limited. That the device was programed to activate only under certain conditionals suggests to me that it's not meant to be used repeatedly for one reason or another. Maybe its power capacity is limited. Maybe its itinerary needs to be preprogrammed in advance to work properly. Maybe it's not Federation technology and the DTI doesn't want to trust it more than they need to for this emergency. That, at least, would explain why the device doesn't have a self-destruct failsafe, which an organization as conscious of adulterating the timeline as the DTI would definitely install if they had the choice, in case their technology becomes lost in an anachronistic period. They had to send another agent to retrieve it, instead.

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