In the Kelvin Timeline, the Beastie Boys' "Sabotage" exists. The Kelvin timeline deviates from the Prime timeline somewhere in the twenty-third century. Thus, society still exists in the Prime timeline in 1994, when the Beastie Boys released Ill Communication, two years after the supposed beginning of the Eugenics War, when the Beastie Boys would then reasonably have been sabotaging protein resequencers or something instead.
The Romulan agent said she had been stuck here thirty years since the war was supposed to have happened, but time kept making it happen anyway, like Terminator. This is because they keep making sequels in spite of the passage of time, like Terminator.
It is frankly not the most galling of historical revelations in this episode. The agent claimed that she had never lied to our heroes, which means that all of the conspiracy theories she produced were true, and aliens (her own people, the Romulans) were behind all the events she previously listed. As someone pointed out to me, this means that there was a second disruptor shot from the grassy knoll. The Romulans melted Chernobyl to keep us on fossil fuels, and they exploded a torpedo over Tunguska to keep us distracted with listicles about unexplained historical explosions.
This episode was going great until the heel turn. The scenes with Pelia were fantastic. I liked seeing the realization set in for La'an that the two things she knew about Pelia were that she was an engineer, and that she was an impulsive seeker of new experiences who had thrown herself into whole new life roles in the past, which meant maybe the first fact wasn't as presently useful as she'd hoped.
I haven't been this ambivalent, in the sense of being torn between extremes, about an episode of SNW before. What was good was really good, and then a specific moment passed after which the episode could not stop making mutually contradictory excuses for itself and ultimately disappeared in a puff of logic.
I think the reason for having a story about why you wouldn't really travel back in time and kill Hitler is because in real life there is no time travel and we can't change the past. I think stories that make a whole philosophical thing about it forget that, so I appreciate that La'an's motivations were more personal, that she decided that preserving the timeline was accepting her history. Personally I would go back in time to tell Andrew Probert he should make the navigational deflector also the ram scoop, because one magnetic funnel is as good as another and the Bussard collectors aren't used at warp anyway, plus it makes no sense to put them all the way out on the nacelles and then have to pipe the deuterium back to the secondary hull for storage. I haven't accepted history yet.
I nonetheless do think it's time to accept that retcons made in 1996 are a part of our collective history now and cannot be changed without changing what really makes us, us.
When someone delivers an improvised explosive to my house in an Amazon box and I receive my ultimate payback, the invoice inside the package will say "Khan".
