The story on the tapes jumps ahead to five years after McGivers’ death, around 2273. The exile started in late 2267, 4 months pass bringing us into 2268, McGivers becomes pregnant, dies, Kali is born late 2268, five years later brings us to 2273.
Lear refers to tapes CA5-47-31M, CA5-49-2P and CA5-39-17U. How the naming convention is organised is not clear, although the “5” could indicate the year of exile.
Lear notes that Kali’s maturity and intelligence at 5 were consistent with a child twice her age. Advanced development in children in science fiction is a common trope (see Alexander Rozhenko), but at least her Augmented heritage accounts for some of it.
In CA5-53-12K, Khan encourages Kali to quote from Kubla Khan (“The shadow of the dome of pleasure / Floated midway on the waves”) while Kali wants to read more Shakespeare, showing good taste for a child her age.
CA5-61-3P says that Paolo, Kamora, Joachim and Delmonda were selected for the rescue mission. It was established in the last episode that the ship could only hold four people.
Tuvok searches the entries from Day 1800-1900 and plays the last entry, which would be approximately 5.2 years into the exile. Khan quotes from William Butler Yates’s 1919 poem The Second Coming: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world” and references the last two lines of the poem: “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” Yeats was contemplating the aftermath of World War I, the start of the Irish War of Independence and the flu pandemic of 1918-1919, which explains the poem’s apocalyptic imagery and its sense of the end of one era of history and the instability that accompanies the birth of another.
Ursula and Madot have broken up due to the death of their unborn child in the previous episode.
Kali packs a copy of the Complete Works of William Shakespeare. In the cargo pod Chekov encounters in ST II, there is no copy of the Complete Works seen, but there is a copy of King Lear, Shakespeare’s play of a king’s descent into madness.
Kali references the sinking of Sea Venture as her inspiration for naming the rescue ship Venture. Sea Venture’s was part of a supply fleet to Jamestown in Virginia in 1609. It got separated from the fleet and was wrecked on the then-uninhabited island of Bermuda. It is believed to have inspired Shakespeare’s The Tempest. That play in turn also inspired the 1956 science fiction film Forbidden Planet, which also influenced Star Trek.
Khan corrects Kali, who believes the wreck also inspired As You Like It, by pointing out that the play was written in 1599. There is a bigger problem here, though, as while several of Shakespeare’s plays have shipwrecks, As You Like It is not among them. Kali may be thinking of The Comedy of Errors (1592) or even Twelfth Night (1601-1602), if we’re sticking to comedies, although those also predate the wreck of Sea Venture.
Once the ship leaves, the caves will collapse and be uninhabitable, which explains why Khan and his Augments were living in the cargo pod in ST II. The ship uses a “spatial compression drive”, which sounds similar to the coaxial warp drive that could fold space in VOY: “Vis à Vis” or the spatial trajector of VOY: “Prime Factors”.
Khan alludes to Starfleet not checking back on them in the five years since the exile, a question that is as yet unanswered in this series.
The question of what destroyed Ceti Alpha VI, however, is resolved. Delmonda explains that when the power that allows the drive to bend space and time was about to lose containment, he chose to vent the energy out of the Elborean ship’s forward ports, and that destroyed Ceti Alpha VI.
This actually connects to one risk of the Alcubierre drive (which also bends spacetime), which is that everything that is caught at the leading edge of the Alcubierre “warp bubble” gets accumulated and carried along. Once the bubble stops at its destination and collapses, all that accumulated energy/debris would be released with devastating effect. I emphasise as I have always done that Star Trek warp drive is not the Alcubierre drive.
Delmonda’s replies to Khan as the latter offers to part as friends, “I have been and always shall be yours.” This is, of course, what Spock says to Kirk in his room in ST II and then paraphrases of when he dies at the end of the movie.
Tuvok dates the crash of the rescue ship at 21 years prior. Give my sums above, this would place the time of the framing sequence in 2294, although the first episode started in 2293. The dates are a bit fuzzy here because Lear and Tuvok are on the surface of Ceti Alpha V twenty-six years after the exile, which would be consistent with the 2293 date but not 2294. Possibly Excelsior was in orbit for several months after that, which might explain Sulu’s impatience.