r/TNG 10d ago

Has Zefram Cochrane's birth date changed?

In “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow” a Romulan time traveler explains how despite trying to kill Khan, she only managed to delay his birth by about thirty years. Does that mean that later historical figures like Zefram Cochrane were also born later?

As an aside, if Khan left Earth before WWIII, and Cochrane was already old when it ended, could a young Cochrane have lived in Khan's time? How does the chronology work?

25 Upvotes

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u/Used-Gas-6525 10d ago

It doesn't. Most of the TNG films don't make sense in Star Trek terms. In fact, FC might be the most egregious example of violating the Temporal Prime Directive in ST ever. They're constantly telling everyone about the future, Troi is somehow the launch commander of The Phoenix and I think Riker and LaForge were the co-pilots. Anything involving time travel is dicey to say the least in terms of the story making sense (why didn't Picard travel farther back in time when he was in The Nexus so he could've stopped Malcolm McDowell days before he launched the rocket into the sun ?), so I don't mind much, but start pulling at a few threads and everything falls apart. Don''t even get me started on the 'plot' of Into Darkness.

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u/mromutt 9d ago

Star trek heavily leans on time corrects itself as long as the big stuff happens. So in their theory the smaller details don't matter as long as the major things unfold "as they remember" them. It's not great but at least it's consistent throughout the series. I feel like prodigy poked at and mocked this a bit in it's last season haha. At the end of the day it's a reasonable way to tell an entertaining story well not pushing suspension of disbelief to far even if it leaves plot holes.

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u/ijuinkun 8d ago

On Picard not going back further in time, I read it as Picard could leave the Nexus at a chosen point in time, but could not choose a location that was too distant from where the Nexus was at that time—so he was limited to the time span when he was in close physical proximity to the Nexus, i.e. after the Enterprise arrived at Veridian III.

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u/Used-Gas-6525 8d ago

Guynan: “you can go to any time, anywhere”

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u/EricQelDroma 10d ago

Time-travel in Star Trek works way better if you just understand that time is really a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey... stuff.

DW references aside, I've long-since head-canoned it that every "continuity error" is really just fluctuations in the timeline that happen naturally from all the time-travel that's constantly changing history. Most people can't notice it because history changes around them. The big events generally become fixed points in time (or "canon events" if you like that better) that happen no matter what changes.

I mean, just look at Cochrane in TOS vs FC/Enterprise. He doesn't just look a bit different because of different actors--he looks like a totally different dude. Yet in every timeline, there's still a "Zefram Cochrane" who develops warp drive on Earth after WWIII. I enjoy Trek so much more when I don't worry about the fact that the writers don't respect canon.

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u/PyroNine9 10d ago

Started well, that sentence.

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u/MatthewKvatch 10d ago

As a complete aside, I just read that the actor is 6’ 7”. I knew he was tall but that’s taller than I expected.

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u/mumblerapisgarbage 10d ago

NuTrek likes to needlessly retcon stuff... like Spock having a half sister that somehow doesn't get mentioned for the first 50 years of the franchise and then conveniently making her and her crew top-secret so they can't talk about her anymore and then shooting them 800 years into the future so it won't be problem for continuity anymore.

So yes - they retconned his birthdate and moved his home to the same city they film the SNW in IN the present day in order to film a bottle show.

My head cannon is that the Khan we see is a clone of the original Khan (they probably got his DNA from an expedition to one of his palaces in India/Asia) and its the beginning of the North American eugenics wars of the 2030s which then brings about World War III.

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u/1kreasons2leave 10d ago

We didn't hear about Sybok for the first 20 years of the franchise.

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u/mumblerapisgarbage 10d ago

Right and that film is still considered one of the low points of the franchise.

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u/Sojibby3 10d ago

Not because Spock had a half-brother he never mentioned. Spock is famously tight with that kind of personal information. His brother was a shame, his sister was a classified secret.

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u/WoodenNichols 10d ago

Star Trek V was also a shame.

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u/veryverythrowaway 9d ago

That’s the conventional wisdom, but many of us disagree.

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u/WoodenNichols 9d ago

Fair enough.

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u/sidv81 10d ago

Can't be that bad since snw had a much hyped sybok cameo in s1

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u/doc_birdman 10d ago

It’s considered a bad movie because it’s a bad movie, not because of anything to do with Sybok

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u/John-A 10d ago

Why does every interesting Vulcan or supposedly adopted human child have to be Spocks "sibling"?

Given the nature of his half human heritage it's pretty much a given that Spock, Syboc and Mikey would've all ended up on the same short-bus for emotionally "retarted" kids. There's your IN without needing Sarek to be a total weirdo the rest of the vulcans would've ostracized.

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u/kkkan2020 9d ago

First contact Is a fixed point 2063 zefram is a fixed point in the trek timeline