ENT s4e22 “These are the Voyages” aka “Nope, didn’t happen and Trip lived happily ever after”
Scott Bakula: “The line I was suppose to say was, ‘Here’s to Star Trek The Animated Series.’ but I adlibbed it to shake things up a little.”
Here’s the thing. What we watched wasn’t the “real world” events of Star Trek, it was a holodeck recreation. So we’ve already got built-in plausible deniability of the accuracy of those events!
I like to imagine some weird historian who insisted on pen accidentally flipped the ‘9’ in ‘2191’, and that error just happened to end up in the Enterprise D’s historical database; the holodeck just went along with the error, and Riker was none the wiser, having gotten a C- in Early Federation History at the Academy and having frequently gone to the bathroom “for legitimate reasons” during his high school Earth history class. It was only in mid-2380 that he finally discovered his misconception.
Although it’d still be a bit dismal that trip only lived to 70.
