It’s an interesting insight into Pike’s character - the fact that he had to remember not to beat the crap out of Zac implies that innately he’s not a pacifist or a nice guy; that dark side is something he’s learned to keep in check.
Batel’s promotion was nixed by Judge Advocate Pasalk because of her conduct during Una’s trial in “Ad Astra Per Aspera”.
M’Benga mentions that the reason he and La’An were along was because Pike needed people who could fight without phasers (as per “The Broken Circle” and “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow”).
Zac didn’t intend for Starfleet to notice the delta. He was content to just stay on Rigel VII as High Lord Zacarias, thinking that Starfleet would never return to the planet because of the debris field and the radiation. But then the Kalar used the delta as a symbol and it got spotted.
PIKE: Zac. We saw your message, the, um… the Delta in the garden. It’s why we came. Isn’t that why you did it?
ZAC: The people here adopted it as my symbol. I should have known better. It’s all getting torn out tomorrow.
It’s Cayuga, as per the closed captioning, and it’s likely no coincidence. As I noted in my annotations, the Cayuga first appeared in “A Quality of Mercy”, which shares a title with a 1961 Twilight Zone episode starring Leonard Nimoy. And TZ was produced by Serling’s production company, Cayuga Productions.
They handled that subtly - I was wondering why they didn't raise shields against the radiation, but the shimmering impact of the debris field seen when Ortegas was in her quarters showed that shields were indeed up, so that mean the radiation could get through shields. Then it was mentioned that Spock tweaked the shield harmonics at the end - I guess he didn't earlier because he was already affected.
The dialogue could easily have come from the mouths of the TOS cast, and the situation on the planet reminiscent of officers violating the Prime Directive like in TOS: “The Omega Glory” or “Bread and Circuses”. Even Mount's delivery when on the planet was Shatner-esque.
I can readily imagine Kirk, McCoy and a random redshirt or Chekov on the planet in Pike, M’Benga and La’An’s place, and Sulu pulling it together like Ortegas.
Also, those guys in the Mongol-looking fur coats are the same race as the brute Pike fought to defend “Princess” Vina in the Talosian hallucination of Rigel during “The Cage”. So we’re finally getting the backstory to that disastrous mission.
That wasn’t the Prime timeline, though, or it never really got the chance to be for very long - that we the timeline when Pike decided to write to the kids and avoid his fate. So while a butterfly effect may have ended up having Una still incarcerated, that wasn’t what we wound up with, not at the end of the episode, and not in “Balance of Terror”.
Having Una have temporal shivers from a timeline that no longer exists would be a neat idea, regardless.
If we take the chronology in “Mirror Darkly” as still valid, then Green started the war in 2026.
2026: Earth’s World War Three begins, over the issue of genetic manipulation and human genome enhancement. Colonel Phillip Green leads a faction of ultra-violent eco-terrorists resulting in 37 million deaths.
It can still kind of work. Montalban was about 45 when he was Khan, so let’s say Khan was around that age when he was exiled. The young Khan we see seems to be about 10 years old, maybe a bit younger.
So say baby Khan was born in 2012 if we want to take Sera’s 30 years literally rather than as an approximation. World War III (according to ENT: “In a Mirror Darkly” but the years may have slipped) starts in 2026 and lasts until 2053 (ST: FC, SNW: “Strange New Worlds”). Khan could easily have fought in the war and took power in the end days of the war - he’d only be 41 in 2053.
Even in the old timeline Khan only ruled one quarter of Earth for about 4-5 years between 1992 and 1996. So it’s not implausible that the Eugenics Wars happen around 2048-2053 (Khan would be in his mid-thirties, and augmented) and Khan escaped after his reign was toppled during the Last Day in 2053 on a non-warp powered sleeper ship, because Cochrane only managed warp 10 years later.
In fact, having the Eugenics Wars take place around 2050 works better because Archer said his great-grandfather fought in them (in North Africa). Since ENT takes place in the 2150s, that only makes about a century between their births, which is certainly reasonable, whereas if Archer-great-grand-pére fought in the 1990s then it’d be stretching his longevity just a tad.
The way Illyrians were segregated into Illyrian and non-Illyrian cities except for people who could pass echoes the Jim Crow era of US history, with black people being segregated and some of them trying to pass for white.
The refusal of service to those who were found to be Illyrian is like antisemitic attitudes in pre-war Nazi Germany, or the refusal of service to homosexuals. Most of what happened can be compared to any persecuted minority, racial or sexual.
That’s the beauty of a good metaphor. And the ugly universality of bigotry.
