In a tweet sent on August 12, 2022, Kate Mulgrew vowed not to cause any temporal anomalies when she visits Bloomington, Indiana, this October. But can the actor who portrayed Star Trek: Voyager’s Captain Kathryn Janeway follow through with the promise not to violate the Temporal Prime Directive, or will she find herself going against her word, like so many Starfleet commanders before her?
The tweet was sent in response to a letter to the editor in an Indiana newsletter, a picture of which was included alongside Mulgrew’s vow. In the letter, written by Meghan Danzig of Bloomington, concerns were raised about the possibility that the erection of the Janeway monument would result in a temporal anomaly. This is because, according to Trek canon, Janeway herself was born in Bloomington in the year 2344 (the reason the location was selected for the statue, to begin with).
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In her tweet, Mulgrew offered assurances that the Janeway Collective, the organization responsible for the statue in Bloomington, would safeguard against the possibility of Temporal Prime Directive violations. However, it’s possible that the solution that resolves this possible time paradox has already been offered by Trek canon.
Assignment: Earth
Paramount
According to a second season episode of Star Trek: The Original Series, “Assignment: Earth,” knowledge of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is somewhat hazy in the twenty-third centuries. In “Assignment: Earth,” the Enterprise is ordered to travel back in time via the gravitational slingshot method. The crew’s destination is the year 1968, and according to the Captain’s Log of Captain James T. Kirk (William Shatner), their mission is “historical research.” They’ve been ordered to monitor “Earth communications to find out how our planet survived desperate problems in the year 1968.”
Given that such general historical information about human history from around this time period is obscured in the 23rd Century, it’s easy to imagine that information about a television show conveyed by a single statue would also be lost to time. The reason that so much history has been lost to time? One major contributing factor is the third world war.
According to Trek lore, humanity enters a third world war beginning in the mid-21st Century, which wipes out a significant amount of the population. This fact serves as a major plot element in the first episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, as well as in the 1996 movie Star Trek: First Contact, the bulk of which takes place in the time period immediately following this nuclear holocaust.
