A fairly thorough piece.
Whatever your view on whether it’s a pro or con for the ensemble and storytelling, SNW ‘Lost in Translation’ having covered off the ‘met him when he made fleet captain’ reference to Pike in TOS, there seems to be a great deal of flexibility for SNW to keep bringing Jim Kirk into its stories.
Here’s one unexpected take.
So what does that mean for Kirk? We have to wait until 2265 for him to take over as captain of the Enterprise, right? Well, maybe not. Canon is oddly vague on the handover from Pike to Kirk. In fact, only one episode of TOS actually takes place in 2265: “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” the second pilot. There’s also nothing that indicates Kirk didn’t serve on the Enterprise in another role before getting promoted. If, in theory, Pike were to step down and someone else became an interim captain, then nothing is stopping Kirk from serving on the Enterprise before 2265.
I think you’ll find the crossover of last week to be indicative that SNW is again in a different universe from TOS. Spock’s changes were notable to characters who studied his past.
The timeline is more robust than that. We’re not in the Marvel or DC comic or EEAAO infinitely branching universes concept of a multiverse.
There can be branching events like the one that established the Kelvin universe but they are rare and take something of the order of the Romulan Supernova to create.
This is the prime universe of TOS and the other shows. It’s the same wide river of time, but the layers of temporal incursions - both seen in shows and movies and reported by temporal agents - accumulate changes. Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow confirmed this.
The key events and their sequences do not change. The kind of differences that are discernible only by deep study are not sufficiently material to be necessary to protect against.