Daystrom Institute

How likely is it that Discovery went to a mutable future, just one of many, especially with the Temporal Cold War, Carl, Q, Trelane, Janeway, the HMS Bounty, and any number of other temporally active agents out there in time? How locked in is the 32nd Century?

About as locked in as any of the Time Travel in the 23rd and 24th centuries.

Star Trek time travel can be inconsistent, but usually, it tends to stick with there only being one timeline that alterations shift back and forward, something that isn't really helped by the Time War.

The only time that we've seen anything approaching an alternate timeline like that is with the creation of the Kelvin timeline from the Narada incursion, which resulted in bidirectional effects that separated it into a new, independent timeline, but events like that are more the exception than the rule.

Though, normally, Trek time travel rules would suggest that anything lasting longer than a season (or into the next episode) is usually here to stay, if it's not reverted at the end of a multi-parter. Data's head remained centuries older than his body, for example, and the crew of the Bozeman are still rattling about the 24th century, having jumped 70 years into the future.

Did you edit the title in sync by any chance?

Just fixed that bug...

Voyager Before and After pretty specifically tells us that whenever someone jumps in time, the fact that they have done so, and the actions that they take, affect the timeline. Any time time travel is involved, we are seeing only one possible timeline, not necessarily the timeline.

Of course, it’s easier to use that reasoning in an episode like Before and After, because the time travel involved is backwards, but I think it’s reasonable to assume it’s true the other way, too. After all, the Kelvinverse isn’t identical to the Prime timeline even before the Narada arrived.

The existence of time travel and the idea of a Temporal Cold War suggests that any given future is just one of many possible futures. The events in Discovery are canon, insofar as they did happen, but whether future Star Trek properties will take the Discovery future as a given is a more open question. Discovery was written very deliberately to avoid being constrained by canon, but that also means that the events are narratively very removed from the rest of the franchise.

My guess is that whoever ends up in charge of making the next chapter of Star Trek will want to establish their own timeline going forward for the same reason that the Discovery creators did, and they’ll largely ignore the easily-ignorable Discovery events, at least as relates to the far future. The alternative is either to set the next series in an even more distant future, which comes with its own issues, or setting it before the 31st century and having to write around a whole bunch of barely-established future canon that only applies to Discovery. I could be wrong, but it seems like the path of least resistance.

We now know when, where, and how the burn happens. Therefore, it can be prevented.

It's probably just as "locked" as any other time period, which is to say not at all. Recent SNW episodes have hammered home the idea that the present, past, and future are all somewhat malleable.