“Relativity”
Written by Nick Sagan & Bryan Fuller & Michael Taylor
Directed by Allan Eastman
Season 5, Episode 24
Production episode 218
Original air date: May 12, 1999
Stardate: 52861.3
Captain’s log. Utopia Planitia, 2371, and Janeway is beaming onto Voyager for the first time, taken on a tour by Admiral Patterson (who was also one of Janeway’s Academy instructors). One of the many crewmembers milling about whom she encounters is an ensign in the sciences division who looks just like Seven, but fully human…
It turns out to be Seven, her Borg implants having been suppressed. She’s been sent back in time by Captain Braxton and the starship Relativity to try to find out how Voyager was destroyed. She uses a twenty-ninth-century tricorder to track the device to engineering—where she has a brief conversation with deputy chief engineer Joe Carey—and then finds it, but it’s out of phase. The device will be in this spot.
Carey detects a chroniton spike, and Janeway—who wants to get her hands dirty—traces it to the Jefferies Tube, which they isolate with force fields. Lieutenant Ducane on the Relativity beams Seven back to the future (ahem), but because of the force fields, he didn’t get a full lock, and Seven perishes in transport.
Because time travel is a thing, they try again, planning to once again pull Seven from her own time just before Voyager explodes.
In 2375, Seven is suffering from sensory aphasia, which turns out to be one of several people suffering from some manner of space sickness. They also discover some temporal anomalies, including Neelix calling for the EMH, but the EMH arriving before the emergency Neelix called him for.
Paris recruits Seven for a doubles ping-pong game against Torres and Kim. On what should be Paris’ winning shot, the ball freezes over the table—yet another temporal anomaly. Torres and Seven trace the source of the anomalies to the same Jefferies Tube Seven went to in 2371. With her ocular implant, she can see the device, which is good, because neither Torres’ eyes nor her tricorder can detect it.
Kim picks up a chroniton distortion that Janeway recognizes from when Voyager was in drydock. The captain orders all hands to abandon ship. Seven is kidnapped by two of Braxton’s people right before Voyager is destroyed.
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Braxton and Ducane welcome Seven to the Relatvity for the third time. They’re trying to find out why Voyager was destroyed, their interest specifically prompted by the temporal anomalies the ship suffered before its destruction. Braxton particularly warns Seven to avoid Janeway, as she’s a temporal menace. Braxton mentions that he’s had to clean up Janeway’s mess three times, one of which involved him being stuck on twentieth–century Earth for three decades.
After Ducane covers up her implants, they send her back to where they now think is when the device was places on Voyager: during a Kazon attack during the ship’s second year of its Delta Quadrant sojourn. Seven is skeptical that the Kazon were responsible, but Braxton and Ducane theorize that someone took advantage of Voyager’s shields being down during the attack.
They send Seven back to 2372. On the bridge, Kim detects a chroniton distortion, which Janeway (again) recognizes from when Voyager was in drydock. She orders force fields in the same vicinity as where the distortion was last time, which traps Seven in a corridor, unable to communicate with or be transported by Relativity, though the timeship can still hear Seven. Janeway and Tuvok confront Seven, who tries to obey the Temporal Prime Directive and not say anything beyond that she’s from the future, but when Tuvok detects her hidden Borg implants, Janeway goes into crisis mode. Seven throws caution to the wind and tells them the truth, to Braxton’s great annoyance.
Seven convinces Janeway to take her to the Jefferies Tube. They find an older Braxton placing the device in the tube, much to the surprise of the younger Braxton. Old Braxton has suffered a psychotic break, blaming Janeway for losing his rank and his sanity.
Old Braxton uses his tricorder to beam to 2371. Seven follows, but she is now starting to feel the effects of temporal psychosis, as too many time jumps are dangerous. Meanwhile, Ducane puts Young Braxton under arrest for crimes he will commit.
When Seven catches up to Old Braxton, he transports again, this time to 2375. Seven is barely conscious after this latest jump, but manages to shoot the tricorder out of Old Braxton’s hands, so now he’s trapped in 2375. Seven collapses in the mess hall where she urges her counterpart (who was playing ping-pong) to stop Old Braxton, as the fate of the ship depends on it. Relativity then beams the ill Seven back to the twenty-ninth century, while the “current” Seven captures Old Braxton. Relativity is then able to bring back, not just Old Braxton, but also Janeway.
Ducane explains to Janeway that Seven’s attempt to stop Old Braxton have resulted in several changes to the timeline that need to be fixed. Seven physically can’t make any more journeys through time, so they need Janeway to do it: stop Old Braxton before he can place the device. Old Braxton reluctantly informs them where and when he came on board, including tripping over an injured crewmember. Janeway goes back to 2372, has a brief conversation with Torres that she bluffs her way through (luckily Torres doesn’t notice that her hair is shorter), and then stops Old Braxton. This fixes things, with Ducane gratefully saying that there’s only an incursion of 0.0036 (probably the Torres conversation). Only Janeway and Seven will remember what happened, and Ducane urges them to keep it quiet. Meantime, the two Braxtons will be integrated, as will the two Sevens.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Ducane quizzes Seven on temporal theory, including the Pogo Paradox and the Dali Paradox. Seven describes the former as, “A causality loop in which interference to prevent an event actually triggers the same event,” which means it’s named for the famous line from the title character in Walt Kelly’s comic strip Pogo, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” The Dali one is based on Salvador Dali’s Persistence of Memory, the one with all the melting clocks, and is when a temporal fissue slows time down to a crawl.
There’s coffee in that nebula! Janeway’s first time on Voyager was in drydock, and she enjoys going on her first tour. Five years later, she is recruited for time-travel wackiness, and complains, as she always does, about how it gives her a headache. Meanwhile, her various time-travel experiences have been sufficiently traumatic to Braxton to cause him to go completely binky-bonkers.
Please state the nature of the medical emergency. Janeway and Patterson activate the EMH in drydock, and he’s a lot more snotty than he is before he mellowed over the course of five years. Though he’s still a little snotty, as he tells Seven that he has a better bedside manner than the medical database.
Resistance is futile. Seven’s ocular implants can see the out-of-phase temporal device, which makes her the right person to recruit for the mission. She also gets to play ping-pong for the first time, and for the winning team!
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. Amusingly, Paris and Torres play against each other in doubles ping-pong rather than on the same team…
Do it.
“The Borg once travelled back in time to stop Zefram Cochrane from breaking the warp barrier. They succeeded, but that in turn led the starship Enterprise to intervene. They assisted Cochrane with the flight the Borg was trying to prevent. Causal loop complete.”
“So, in a way, the Federation owes its existence to the Borg.”
“You’re welcome.”
–Seven summarizing the plot of First Contact, Ducane making a clever remark, and Seven being clever right back at him.
Welcome aboard. It’s Great Character Actor Theatre! First we have the return of Braxton from the “Future’s End” two-parter, this time played by the ever-brilliant Bruce McGill, who will probably always be best known as D-Day in Animal House. The regal Dakin Mathews plays Patterson. And then there’s our Robert Knepper moment, as I was stunned to see one of my favorite actors, Jay Karnes—probably best known for his role as Dutch on The Shield—playing Ducane.
In addition, Josh Clark is back for the first time since the first season’s “State of Flux” as Carey, albeit in flashback. Clark will next be seen, also in a flashback, in “Fury.”
Trivial matters: This episode has our first real view of the Utopia Planitia shipyards, previously only seen as a tiny picture in TNG’s “Parallels” and as a holodeck re-creation in TNG’s “Booby Trap.”
The 2371 portions take place prior to “Caretaker,” with Janeway first proposing the notion of recruiting Paris and with Tuvok having already infiltrated the Maquis. The 2372 portions were likely intended to be one of the attacks on Voyager by the Kazon just prior to “Alliances,” though the stardate puts it prior to “Maneuvers.”
Braxton also appears in the comic books Myriad Universes: The Last Generation by Andrew Steven Harris & Gordon Purcell and New Frontier: Double Time by Peter David & Mike Collins. Ducane also appears in Double Time as well as the Department of Temporal Investigations novel Watching the Clock by regular commenter Christopher L. Bennett, who gave him the first name Juel.
Braxton mentions three temporal incursions of Janeway’s that he had to fix. One is explicitly “Future’s End” (though Braxton said at the end of Part 2 that he had no memory of the events), and the other is a temporal incursion in the Takara Sector, which is likely a reference to “Timeless.” Not sure what the third one is, but there are lots of possibilities to choose from, including “Time and Again,” the “Year of Hell” two-parter, and upcoming episodes “Fury,” “Shattered,” and “Endgame.”
In 2371, Janeway mentions recruiting Paris specifically for his piloting skills to help them get through the Badlands. But he was stated in “Caretaker” as being recruited because he worked with Chakotay’s cell, plus he was explicitly forbidden from piloting Voyager until after Stadi was killed.
Seven replaces Chapman, who was Seven’s date in “Someone to Watch Over Me,” as Paris’ partner in the ping-pong doubles match.
When asked for an example of the Pogo Paradox, Seven mentions the events of the movie First Contact.
The EMH indicated that “Caretaker” was the first time he was activated, but he was apparently activated once before in drydock, though only for a few seconds. It’s also possible that the program was reset during the shakedown cruise.
A few days before receiving the script for this episode, Jeri Ryan did an online chat, where someone asked when Seven would wear a Starfleet uniform. She said, “Never, because Seven isn’t Starfleet.” And then this episode happened…
Set a course for home. “Tempus fugit.” There are some issues with this episode, notably the various discontinuities noted in the Trivial Matters section, but I’m willing to forgive them for several reasons.
One is that this episode has two of the finer actors of our time, Jay Karnes and Bruce McGill, both doing extremely well. Nothing against Allen G. Royal, who was fantastic as the crazy-pants homeless version of Braxton, but pretty nowhere as the “normal” version, but McGill is very effective here, both as the no-nonsense Young Braxton, and as the batshit Old Braxton. And while this hardly ranks among Karnes’ best roles (he was superb not only in his most famous role as Dutch on The Shield, but also in guest turns on both Sons of Anarchy and Burn Notice), he’s nicely solid.
Two is that it’s yet another good vehicle for Jeri Ryan. Seven has gotten a lot of attention since joining the cast, but she’s also earned it, as Ryan has continued to be superb.
Three is that it’s fantastic to watch Janeway (with the bun again!) touring her new command for the first time. Kate Mulgrew’s kid-on-Christmas-morning enthusiasm is infectious. And it was great seeing Carey again, though the fact that we haven’t seen him in the present since season one is frustrating (it was a great opportunity to show him in both timelines, too!). It’s only too bad they didn’t get Scott Jaeck or Alicia Coppola or one of the other crewmembers who died in “Caretaker” to show up, though that would require that the producers remember that there were crewmembers who died when they fell down the Caretaker’s rabbit hole, which they haven’t remembered since halfway through the pilot episode, so why start now? (Yes, I keep harping on this. No, I won’t stop.)
And four is that it’s a fun little time-travel story. Not overwhelmingly consequential, though I think it’s horrible that Ducane can imprison Braxton for a crime he hasn’t committed yet. I particularly like that it cops to some of the absurdities, that it acknowledges how the English language isn’t really geared for the fluid tenses of time travel (I especially love Braxton’s line, “I gave up trying to keep my tenses straight years ago”), and most particularly for giving us the Pogo Paradox and the Dali Paradox, which are just fucking brilliant.
Warp factor rating: 8
Keith R.A. DeCandido is also reviewing each new episode of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier as they’re released on this site.
Agreed! It’s an absolutely fun little time-travel story. Probably my favourite episode from Season 5. I would actually go so far as to give it a personal Warp factor rating of “10” under the same line of reasoning that “Bride of Chaotica!” was given a “10.” Because I just love this episode in spite of whatever problems it may have.
I’ve never been much of a fan of time travel stories in Trek, especially ones like this where we don’t really learn anything new and nothing has really changed by the end. If we are going to mess around with time, I’d much rather have something like “Past Tense,” where we at least learn something interesting about the events that are the “future” for us, but the “past” for the characters (plus it ties in well to Sisko’s characterization). Having a whole team devoted to keeping the timeline “correct” (what ever the heck that means) always raises more questions for me, and none of them have particularly satisfying answers (I give them a pass in “Trials and Tribble-ations” because they are basically just a framing device and we don’t dwell on them too much).
That said, it is a perfectly fine episode, and I understand why so many really like it, even if I’m not that thrilled about it.
Like Troi before her, I firmly believe Seven looks better in her uniform than she does in those weird catsuits that the Trek costume designers were obsessed with putting Jeri Ryan and Marina Sirtis in. I wish they had just put her in one from the jump and cut out all the male-gaze fanservice nonsense.
I grew up watching Bruce McGill as Jack Dalton on MacGyver. I still occasionally imitate Richard Dean Anderson’s exasperated “Jack…” whenever he turns up onscreen…
@2- I’ll agree that they should have got Seven out of the catsuits, but I don’t mind her not being in Starfleet Uniform. After all, if she’s no longer a member of the Borg Collective, she’s not necessarily in a hurry to *ahem* assimilate to a new culture in every way. And, for whatever reason, she doesn’t seem to have received one of the field commission into Starfleet that Janeway’s been handing out.
Troi probably should’ve been in uniform, though.
One of my favorite episodes of Voyager hands down! “Fun” succinctly sums it up but there are many things that add up to make the whole even greater than the parts. Carey not showing up in the present was because the producers forgot that it wasn’t Carey that died in “Basics, Part II” but Hogan. This would also have been a great opportunity for bringing Jennifer Lien back as Kes and not her botched return next season. Jeri Ryan looks great in a Starfleet uniform! Garrett Wang revealed in his Voyager podcast that Ryan was opposed to wearing a gold Starfleet uniform (in general, not specific to this episode) because as she was a blond, she didn’t think the gold uniform would look good on her. I’d give this episode a 9.
When Janeway sees the chroniton distortion right before Voyager blows up, shouldn’t she say she’s seen it twice before? Regardless, it was still fun. Considering I skipped the last two episodes, I needed something to get me back in.
This episode makes me want to develop a theory of time travel based on narrative continuity. Changes to the time line don’t happen until the part of the story where the time line is changed has happened.
Yep, I’m always a sucker for Back to the Future style time travel hijinks. Though I think a better title would’ve been “Seven and Seven.” ;-)
I’m not crazy about this one. Voyager‘s time travel episodes just got more and more nonsensical as the show went on, and this one is full of incoherent temporal logic as well as tons of continuity errors (to the point that I consider the Utopia Planitia parts to be an alternate timeline even aside from the alterations caused by Seven and Braxton’s presence).
Like Keith, I was deeply troubled by the bit about Braxton being arrested for crimes he might commit in the future. That’s straight-up fascism, and it offended me that the writers were so caught up in their timey-wimey cleverness (supposedly) that they failed to realize how appalling the idea was from a moral perspective. I addressed this in DTI: Watching the Clock by portraying the 29th-century Federation as having taken a dystopian, authoritarian turn, though one it would recover from by the 31st-century time frame of Enterprise‘s Temporal Agent Daniels.
The “Pogo Paradox” is basically another term for the “predestination paradox” mentioned by Lucsly & Dulmur in “Trials and Tribble-ations,” and as I may have pointed out in the rewatch thread for that episode, it’s not actually a paradox at all. We call a self-consistent causal loop a paradox because it conflicts with our common-sense expectation of linear causality, but it’s the opposite of a paradox in a strict logical or mathematical sense. A paradox is a situation that produces a self-contradictory, irresolvable outcome — for instance, the grandfather paradox, where you kill your grandfather so that you’re never born, but if you’re never born, you don’t kill your grandfather, so you are born, so you do kill your grandfather, and it just keeps looping around back and forth between two contradictory answers and can never settle on just one. (Also the “I am lying” paradox that Harry Mudd used to blow Norman’s mind.) But if you go back in time and cause the events that led to your existence and eventual travel back in time, that may be circular, but it isn’t self-contradictory. It gives a single, consistent outcome and therefore is not a paradox — not as far as physics is concerned, though philosophy might be a different matter.
The authoritarian bent of the 29th century time cops shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise. We already saw something of that in Braxton in his earlier episodes. When they’re not crazy, these guys sound an awful lot like Joe Friday on a low Monday.
I agree with Krad and CLB in that I was also and always disturbed by the notion of arresting someone for crimes they hadn’t yet committed. I believe that was also the premise of Minority Report.
I’m sure the writers were aware of how absurd and non-sensical all of the temporal mechanics of this story were and so Janeway served as the viewpoint character of the audience and how it’s headache inducing. In fact, I loved her saying as much when she’s recruited to restore the timeline and then the smash cut to the Kazon attack on Voyager. Great humorous moment there.
I think a Star Trek spin-off set on a time ship like Relatvity has some good potential.
“All right. Let’s get started before my headache gets any worse.”
I kind of wish I like this one more than I do. It’s probably good fun if you can shut your brain off and just enjoy the pretty pictures, but attempting to work out the actual logic of the plot either requires a lot of generosity and hard work or results in a nervous breakdown. It’s full of things that aren’t properly explained, right back to the opening of Seven finding the weapon on the just-constructed Voyager but “out of phase”. The way that multiple copies of a person from different timelines years apart can be “reintegrated” is just handwaved. (I seem to recall CLB in the aforementioned DTI books tied it in with the “beaming someone into their past self” deux ex machine from “Tomorrow is Yesterday”, which, as linking together two plot devices that don’t make a lot of sense goes, is more sensible than most of this episode.) Janeway capturing Braxton as soon as he comes aboard Voyager is treated as a magic wand that solves all the temporal paradoxes and rewrites of the show’s history throughout the episode.
I recall defending some of the episode’s perceived continuity errors as listed on Memory Alpha several rewatches back but I’ll reiterate here. The Captain Braxton we meet here remembers the events of “Future’s End” even though the one Voyager encountered at the end of that episode didn’t. Still, Star Trek often portrays refugees from erased timelines as surviving, so it’s possible at some point Starfleet retrieved the elderly Braxton from 1996 and reintegrated him with the one they already had. Janeway activating the Doctor in Utopia Planetia has been cited as an attempt to resolve an error in “Projections” when the stardate given for the Doctor’s first activation is before “Caretaker”: If so, it missed the rest of that episode, where the Doctor refers to the aftermath of the trip to the Delta Quadrant as his first activation and the holographic supposedly-“Caretaker”-era Janeway doesn’t recognise him. And their claim (repeated here) that 2371 Janeway wants Paris for his piloting skills rather than as a guide doesn’t 100% match what is said: She actually makes the more ambiguous statement “I’ve heard about a pilot who might make the job easier.” (Which could easily mean by advising them on a safe route rather than pushing the buttons himself.)
Still, even if some of those aren’t problems, the episode is full of them. Braxton claiming Janeway refused to help him once is a somewhat myopic version of events that ignores the fact his request for help amounted to “Stand still while I kill you and your crew”, although at least it’s in-character. Relativity announce they’re going to retrieve Seven a split-second before the explosion, then have two conspicuous crewmembers beam aboard Voyager several minutes before it’s destroyed and wander around looking for her. 2372 Torres somehow fails to notice that the Janeway she encounters has shorter hair than the one she knows. We’ve apparently meant to cheer when Ducane arrests Braxton for the actions of his future self, but it feels rather harsh when he’s been trying to save Voyager. Most of the dates given more or less fit in with each other, but the Kazon attack is said to be two years after Voyager’s launch when it should have been one at most. And it takes a long time to get going: I’d forgotten that the initial Utopia Planetia sequence was followed by a lengthy section in the present day pretty much killing time until the episode gets back to where it started.
And yes, that biggy which has come up a couple of times before: The episode retcons “Caretaker” portraying Janeway as the established captain of Voyager by turning that into her first mission. As has been said before, this does at least make her lack of grief at the deaths of Cavit, Stadi et al more understandable if she’d only known them a few days, rather than them being the long-term colleagues they appeared to be in the pilot. But it throws up a lot of oddities, including the fact that instead of being Voyager’s existing chief of security, Tuvok apparently never set foot on the ship until after it was marooned in the Delta Quadrant.
Positives? Well, the ping pong tournament is quite good from a character point of view, with Paris getting a not-too-reluctant Seven to partner him and Neelix casually adding a point after the ball unfreezes. And at least we have a hero in Janeway, who clearly thinks it’s all nonsense as well.
Some commentators took Carey introducing himself to Seven as evidence something horrible happened to him before she came aboard (and @5/garreth suggests some people still aren’t letting that one go): They apparently missed the detail that she was undercover and had good reason to pretend not to know him, and “Friendship One” proves the idea completely wrong. That’s not only the first time we’ve seen Carey since Season 1, but the first time he’s even been mentioned since Season 3. (When he was indicated to still be alive in the present day, so when are they meant to have forgotten he wasn’t dead, @5/garreth?) I completely forgot the Kazon turned up in this episode (well, we see their ships and a picture of one). Seven apparently liked her Starfleet-uniform-and-no-implants look, because she tries it out again in “Human Error”. I think I mainly remember Bruce McGill from the first and last episodes of Quantum Leap.
(10)
An ironic fate for Braxton, since the moment we first met the character in “Future’s End” he tried to destroy Voyager for something they hadn’t done yet. Arresting is one thing; being judge, jury, and executioner is quite another.
Typo alert for KRAD: Has Braxton had a “psychic break” or a “psychotic break?”
I’ll remember McGill more at this point for Quantum Leap and Rizzoli and Isles.
This episode is one of my favourites. It is just a fun episode.
Seven looks so much better and more professional in a uniform. Just like Troi should always have been in her Starfleet uniform, same for T’Pol in Enterprise.
I really like the Relativity and would love to see a return to this era perhaps in short treks.
This episode could have been improved by having some of the original crew appear, it also bugs me that they forget their colleagues that were killed in Caretaker.
I would have liked to have maybe seen Janeway in the next gen uniform while at Utopia Planitia like we saw Sisko in that uniform when on Earth.
@13: Updated!
@11/cap-mjb: I just recall reading that the writers had forgotten at some point that Carey wasn’t dead and were confusing him with Hogan who was killed back in the third season. Thus, Carey post-first season would only show up in flashbacks until it was remembered he was alive in the present and was brought back for the seventh season. The writers seem to forget a lot of things on this show which accounts for the lack of internal consistency.
I always enjoyed this episode. It’s a fun adventure story, not taking itself too serious, and I always enjoy those. Plus, the guest cast is, as you mentioned, superb.
Bobby
@11/cap-mjb: “Utopia Planetia”
Planitia. Latin for “Plains.” Nothing to do with planets.
As a child growing up on 80s and 90s action movies, I’ll always remember Bruce McGill in another time travel movie—Timecop with Jean-Claude Van Damme. It was funny to see him show up on Voyager in another time travel story.
@11
While this does create some weirdness (as you pointed out), I always thought it made Janeway’s somewhat… inconsistent characterization make more sense. Instead of being a seasoned Captain who just happens to swing widely between actions for no apparent reason (other than the writers having conflicting visions for her character), I think she makes a lot more sense as someone recently in command of her own vessel for the first time, and being in way over her head. She mentions in “Shattered” how weird her first command is going to turn out to be, so at least after this they remembered to keep that somewhat consistent.
Your point about Tuvok is a good one, though. I suppose it is possible that he could have already had a follow-on assignment, and maybe his mission with the Maquis was supposed to end shortly after they went missing, but yea, it is weird.
@16/garreth: Unless it came from someone actually connected with the show, I’m guessing that’s a fan theory, which you seem to continually trot out as fact every time someone wonders where Carey is, even though it doesn’t entirely match the evidence: Carey vanished midway through season one, long before Hogan was introduced, and then there was a rogue reference to him being alive late in season three, after Hogan was killed, with a reference to Hogan being dead a couple of episodes later. So either at some point after season three, someone went “Hey, why don’t we have Carey in this episode?” and someone else went “Nah, he got eaten by a giant lizard”, then at some point prior to season seven, someone went “Oh, no, that was Hogan!”…or it’s a myth.
@18/CLB: Okay, I’ll try and remember that.
@20/wildfyre: “Shattered” may be guilty of the stupid mistake of claiming Voyager was Janeway’s first command (contradicting “Revulsion”‘s explicit statement that her first command ended nine years earlier), but “Relativity” doesn’t commit that error. It only claims that Janeway is new to Voyager, not to starship command. If anything, the admiral’s line that it’s not a Galaxy-class ship implies that Janeway may have previously commanded one (or at least served on one).
You would think shows like this would keep a “series bible” that the writers can update and refer to when writing new episodes. Sometimes, it just feels like they make up stuff as they go along. It’s especially strange to see in a Trek show, as they know there is a large and obsessive fanbase watching it.
I enjoy this episode, it’s one of my favourites in season 5. Like others above, the idea of arresting someone for crimes they’re going to commit is probably the biggest thing which mars it for me. It makes me feel better to think Ducane was joking and had relived Braxton of duty prior to getting him some psychological help, but that’s probably not what the writers intended. Plus the Relativity looks like a cool ship, with a very non-standard (asymmetrical) bridge design (assuming that was the bridge, and not just some sort of temporal operations centre).
@23/Austin: There was a bible, of course, but a bible is more just a general overview of the show’s basic premise and concepts for the benefit of freelancers. It isn’t meant to be so detailed that it restricts creativity or scares people off from pitching. It’s the responsibility of the show’s regular staff to ensure that whatever ideas the writers come up with are brought into line with continuity. However, when a show’s staff changes over time, the later staffers might not remember every detail that the original staffers kept track of.
@21/cap-mjb: Reading past comments on this forum, I’m not the only one to “continually trot out” the circumstances of Carey’s appearances or lack thereof, probably because we all read it from the same source, a production source, not a fan theory. If I can find that then I’ll post it. Besides, as it’s also been pointed out countless times on this forum as well, the writers are inconsistent from episode to episode on just about everything whether it be the crew compliment or Tuvok’s age, or as in this episode, why Paris was being recruited to Voyager. There’s a lack of internal research to the series so that could easily extend to Carey and forgetting where he is by the writers room from season to season.
Keith, in regards to my earlier comment of knowing Bruce McGill from Timecop, I looked that movie up as I hadn’t thought about it in years. I read that it was based on a Dark Horse comic series. Shouldn’t Timecop have been included in your superhero rewatch? Or is that too much of a stretch to fit in that category? There are other, dubious entries on there, though…
Very good episode. Love those time travel ones that are well done.
It may not be a very consequential episode in terms of time paradoxes, but it’s delightful to see the downfall of Braxton. Even back on Future’s End, you could see the potential in unraveling a Temporal Agent like him. Still, writing a recap for a story like this one has to cause a headache. Reading it gave me one.
Given this one was a committee writing effort from three writers on the back end of an exhausting 26 episode season, this could have easily gone wrong. Parts of it feel somewhat reminiscent of TNG’s classic Cause and Effect, but once the plot really kicks in, the comparisons cease and we join Seven and Janeway on some very fun sequences. That the episode works at all is a credit to the character work throughout, especially the smart choice of putting Seven through events in the early seasons.
As for the somewhat totalitarian choice of punishing Braxton for a crime he’s yet to commit, I wonder if this plot was the inspiration for Brannon Braga coming up with the Temporal Cold War arc on Enterprise. Had that particular plot thread been written with more cohesion across seasons, I wonder if that show could have addressed the Orwellian implications of the Temporal Investigations initiative.
@29/Eduardo: Pretty much every TV episode is a committee writing effort, regardless of the onscreen credits. The entire writing staff collaborates in breaking the story (working out the plot outline), then it’s assigned to one or more scriptwriters, but everyone on staff has input into the revision process, and the showrunner always writes the final draft.
In this case, I’d guess the script was assigned to three writers because it was so complex; maybe each one covered a different time frame. But then everyone would’ve had a hand in the rewrites.
As for the “Precrime” arrest of Braxton influencing the TCW, I doubt it, since ENT portrayed the Federation Temporal Agents as pretty benevolent. (As I said, my DTI novel portrayed the Federation recovering from its authoritarian downturn by Daniels’s time.) As I understand it, the TCW idea was pretty much pushed on Berman & Braga by UPN, which was uncomfortable with going backward in the timeline and thus insisted on an element connecting to Trek’s future. B&B didn’t really want to do it at all, which was why it was so slapdash and eventually just fizzled out.
@8 Regarding: ‘(Also the “I am lying” paradox that Harry Mudd used to blow Norman’s mind.)’
I always had a problem with the fact that this paradox did blow Norman’s mind. Actually, I should revise that. After reading “What Is The Name of This Book” by Raymond Smullyan, I had a problem with it.
The issue here is that the statement “I am lying” is meaningless, just as is the statement “I am telling the truth.” The problem is in trying to understand what the speaker is lying or telling the truth about. The truth or falsehood of the statement and the meaning of the statement are dependent on each other.
Compare this to the paradox (one of several actually, since that is a major subject of the book) that Smullyan lays out, in which there are two sign makers Bellini and Cellini. Bellini always makes signs with true statements and Cellini always makes signs with false statements. Now consider a sign that says “This sign was made by Cellini.” This is by contrast a meaningful paradox as it makes a historical statement that we can know what it means to be true or false, as opposed to a sign that says “The statement on this sign is false”. You would have to conclude if you ran across “This sign was made by Cellini” that either there was at least one other sign maker or the author (Smullyan) is trying to put one over on you by lying about the kinds of statements Bellini and Cellini wrote on their signs. (This actually appears slightly differently in the book than I described and I’ve simplified it for space but the principle is as Smullyan laid it out.)
With this in mind Norman should simply have said to Mudd, “Your claim that you are lying is meaningless”.
Another interesting book for those who are attracted to logical paradoxes and don’t mind skipping over technical details is “Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid” by Douglas R. Hofstadter.
@31/richf: “The problem is in trying to understand what the speaker is lying or telling the truth about.”
Ah, but the paradox accounts for that by making the initial assertion that everything Harry says is a lie.
“With this in mind Norman should simply have said to Mudd, “Your claim that you are lying is meaningless”.”
Let’s face it, Mudd’s androids weren’t that bright.
And I’m a big fan of Godel, Escher, Bach.
@30/Christopher: I recall Enterprise having a lot of friction between Berman/Braga and the network over a number of issues, including the notion that season 1 was originally supposed to take place mostly on Earth. So, I guess the Temporal Cold War was really an external point of contention rather than a natural outgrowth of Trek’s own time travel mythology.
@30/Christopher: Wow, okay, that explains a lot! I watched “Enterprise” wanting to see everything pre-Kirk, which is why I did like episodes such as “Terra Prime,” “Dear Doctor” and the Babel One arc (minus what I felt was a rather stupidly ahead-of-its-time camouflaging drone ship.) One reason I didn’t like Enterprise overall was for episodes such as those from the TCW — something futuristic in a show which was supposed to be about the past. But now I understand it wasn’t as much the producers’ fault as I thought it was.
We’ve veered off into a discussion of Enterprise but while we’re on that subject, Berman and Braga pushed back on things the network wanted that would have made the series even more notorious. In particular (and it always gives me delight in just imagining how it would have been realized on the series), the network wanted Enterprise to have each week a different musical artist that would have been popular at that time the show was produced to perform on the ship. This is something I know some TV series would do regularly or occasionally but those were contemporary era dramas or sitcoms. It’s hilarious to imagine a band like Nickelback performing for the Enterprise crew in the mess hall and to somehow explain that away (or perhaps they wouldn’t even bother). It actually would have been pretty funny in a jaw-dropping, “I can’t believe they actually did that” kind of way.
@22/CLB: I would not read that line that way at all. If Janeway’s previously commanded a Galaxy class, then being put in command of a much smaller ship feels like something of a demotion. (There are other explanations, such as Voyager being more likely to get the kind of mission she’s interested in, but that’s scrabbling for an explanation for an inconsistency that doesn’t exist.) She’s probably familiar with the Galaxy class, may have served on one, but the line could equally just mean that they’re still the top-of-the-line capital ship that other vessels are compared to.
@26/garreth: Apologies if I’ve conflated you with others, it just feels like every time Carey gets mentioned, someone pops up with this story about him getting mixed up with Hogan as though it’s some incontrovertible fact, when it sounds more like a joke that doesn’t stand up to close scrutiny. And as I mentioned above, there isn’t actually any inconsistency with why Paris was recruited here: Both episodes state that Janeway wanted him on board to guide them through the Badlands and this one never actually states that she wants him as a pilot, just that he is one. If there is a source for it, rather than it just being some kind of chinese whisper that no-one knows who started, then I’ll apologise.
I’d watch ST Relativity
@36/cap-mjb: “If Janeway’s previously commanded a Galaxy class, then being put in command of a much smaller ship feels like something of a demotion.”
I think that anyone so insecure and egotistical as to be upset at losing a ship-measuring contest should never be entrusted with the responsibility of command in the first place, and I’m sure Starfleet knows that. A worthy commander would understand that ships of all sizes and missions of all types have value, and that personal aggrandizement is not the point of service. And there are only so many Galaxy-class ships in the fleet, and there’s nowhere bigger to go from there anyway, except a starbase or Starfleet Command.
But I didn’t seriously intend to propose that Janeway had captained a Galaxy. I’m just saying I disagree that the line as written implies that Voyager was her first command — if anything, the phrasing can easily be taken to imply the opposite.
I don’t think “Shattered” made a “mistake,” I think it is perfectly consistent. The line in “Revulsion” could just as easily have referred to her being in temporary command during a combat situation, as Geordi LeForge was in “The Arsenal of Freedom,” which is how plenty of people in the comments interpreted it. Which would mean that her timeline meant she was in command on missions or temporarily (like Geordi, Wesley, Mayweather, and Worf all do at various points), then in Command of her first ship, Voyager. I think the line about the Galaxy-class ships was just that, Patterson pointing out that Janeway wasn’t in the big leagues yet, but that Voyager had a lot to offer and was a good fit for her at this point in her career, just like the Stargazer was for Picard. I guess you could go with the interpretation that the writers just fumbled it (and they for sure didn’t have much care for details or timelines), but there is also a perfectly serviceable explanation for the timeline as it is presented to us.
And yes, getting such a smaller ship would be a demotion- no one would think someone going from commanding an aircraft carrier to a frigate would be a promotion, and it has nothing to do with pride or ego- it has to do with allocation of resources. If someone was seasoned enough to successfully command a Galaxy-class ship, then moving them to an Intrepid-class ship would be something that they were over-qualified for and not a good use of their talents, and it would be taking away an opportunity for a less-experienced captain to get a command that would allow them to learn and progress. Now, as cap-mjb said, maybe Janeway was just so exited by the invention of the bioneural gel packs that she was willing to take that step back for her own edification, but it would certainly be a step back.
@39/wildfyre: “I don’t think “Shattered” made a “mistake,” I think it is perfectly consistent. The line in “Revulsion” could just as easily have referred to her being in temporary command during a combat situation, as Geordi LeForge was in “The Arsenal of Freedom,” which is how plenty of people in the comments interpreted it.”
Jeri Taylor’s Mosaic established explicitly that it was nothing of the kind, that it was an actual starship command at captain’s rank (specifically a 6-month exploration mission in the Beta Quadrant). And that novel was considered canonical while Taylor was showrunner. Taylor’s successors chose to ignore and contradict her intention.
And I insist that that contradicts how her character was portrayed in the first several seasons of the show. There was never the slightest hint that she was new to command. It makes no sense to think they would have intended that. The character faced an uphill battle as the first female Trek lead, meeting with a vicious misogynistic backlash from many so-called “fans.” Making her less experienced than her male predecessors, making her in any way untested or unsure of herself, would’ve diminished her in a way that played into sexist preconceptions. So of course that wasn’t the intent. Janeway was presented from the start as a veteran commander who was utterly confident in her abilities and accustomed to doing things a certain way (see the “crunch time” conversation with Kim). That should never have been changed.
This was a fun episode, even if I feel that Voyager goes a bit overboard with some of the temporal stuff. It can be a bit nonsensical sometimes, but I remember being intrigued from the jump as a kid seeing Seven with no Borg implants and wearing a Starfleet uniform.
Seeing Seven in the Starfleet uniform was really cool. I wish they could have found an in-between; Seven isn’t a part of Starfleet, but they could have given here a similar-style outfit with no rank insignia, and maybe gave it a non-standard cut or made it a bit more form fitting if they really wanted to show her off. Not that I mind looking at the catsuit, but by all accounts it was incredible uncomfortable and it really does just look out-of-place. Even more so in situations where Seven is given authority.
@32 Not to nitpick this to death, but the statement that everything Mudd says is a lie was never actually made by Mudd. It was made by Kirk. So it neither adds to nor detracts from the paradox of Mudd saying “I am lying.” (Meaning at this very moment.) Even if Mudd had declared that everything he says is a lie, that would not be a paradox. Two conclusions could be drawn from it. (1) He has made (or will make) at least one true statement in his life and (2) That statement is not one of them. Norman had no reason to include “everything you say is a lie” in his rambling. This was script writing carelessness.
I agree that Mudd’s androids weren’t bright. They weren’t even really Mudd’s; he found them. He probably negatively affected their programming just by his presence. I think the advanced civilization that first created them had to have made them smarter than that.
@42/richf: “I think the advanced civilization that first created them had to have made them smarter than that.”
I don’t think that’s necessarily the case. If they were only made to be menial servants, they wouldn’t have needed high intelligence, and indeed, low intelligence might have been preferable to keep them subservient. Indeed, the individual androids were nothing more than drone bodies, puppets remote-controlled by a single central computer. They literally only had one brain among them.
Also, of course, TOS-era writers had low expectations about the nature of artificial intelligence. The general tendency in TOS is to portray AIs as rigidly programmed and inflexible, prone to break down when pushed outside the limits of their programmed patterns. The “paradox blow-up” was a recurring pattern — see also Landru and Nomad — and “I, Mudd” was taking a humorous tack by having the paradox in question be one of the simplest, most cliched logical paradoxes out there.
The one real exception in TOS was Rayna Kapec, and even she broke down and died when she experienced a full emotional awakening beyond what her computer circuits could handle. She was also felled by an irresolvable paradox, though it was the emotional paradox of loving both Flint and Kirk.
@38-40: Attempting to unpick this…I agree that Janeway’s portrayal in the early seasons doesn’t match the later presentation of her as a new captain. I agree that “Revulsion”’s reference to a “first command” doesn’t necessarily mean another captaincy, since the same terminology was applied to Spock in “The Galileo Seven” and the context suggests it was a single mission rather than a permanent position. I agree that nothing in this episode means that this was Janeway’s first day as a captain. And I haven’t seen “Shattered” in ages so I’ll wait until we get there to discuss that rather than checking the transcript.
As for Jeri Taylor’s intentions, well, unless it’s actually written in a script and on-screen, that’s no more valid than anyone else’s interpretation. If she’s going to leave Janeway’s early career a mostly blank slate and tell people to buy this tie-in novel she wrote if they want to know more, then that leaves it open for future writers to fill in the gap she’s left with their own ideas and interpretations. We’ve discussed in the past that writers are perfectly entitled to challenge assumptions while sticking to the letter of what’s been established. That’s true even if someone else’s interpretation has seen print in a secondary source, hence why Gene Rodenberry’s description of Earth society in the novelisation of The Motion Picture has been ignored by just about everyone else.
And yes, the lack of career progression for Starfleet captains has always been a bit of a problem, hence why becoming captain of the Enterprise was pretty much treated as a career plateau for both Kirk and Picard, with them basically stuck in the same job unpromoted for decades (give or take the odd case of Kirk being made an admiral and then itching to get his old captain’s chair back). If nothing else, Star Trek:Picard managed to break that cycle.
@44/cap-mjb: “As for Jeri Taylor’s intentions, well, unless it’s actually written in a script and on-screen, that’s no more valid than anyone else’s interpretation.”
It is entirely valid in terms of discussing Voyager as a created work of fiction that exists as a cultural construct in the real world. The level of “Did this actually happen in-universe” is not the only meaningful level of analysis; it is only the most superficial and trivial level, by far the least meaningful, because it’s about nothing more than cataloguing facts and statistics rather than exploring what stories are about and the underlying ideas and goals that shape them. I am talking about the show as a created work, and the differing interpretations and intentions of the different people creating it are absolutely worth discussing, especially as it pertains to how fiction copes with gender and other social issues.
I say again: Kathryn Janeway was a groundbreaking female lead who faced intense sexist backlash to her acceptance. It was important, in real-world terms, that she was an experienced, accomplished, confident authority figure. So the fact that later, all-male producers stripped that away from her, thereby diminishing her as a character relative to her male predecessors, is objectionable on a level far deeper and more important than mere continuity nitpicks. So to say it’s not worth discussing just because it isn’t contradicted by what’s onscreen is getting it backward. What happens on the surface level of the story is supposed to be the start of the conversation, not the end.
“We’ve discussed in the past that writers are perfectly entitled to challenge assumptions while sticking to the letter of what’s been established.”
Of course they are, but some changes are good and others are bad. The issue isn’t whether any change is okay; the issue is that this specific change is objectionable. It is a logical fallacy to mistake specific argument for general argument.
Probably there’s a lot about time travel that you only find out when you do it, so it can make sense to hold a person responsible for their future actions even while preventing them. The Relativity people are in the business, we’re not. Like, if you go back in time and kill Hitler before he did all the stuff… did he deserve that, and, how?
Religious morality can be similarly confusing. I don’t want to start an argument, just to say that it’s hard to understand. Like in Christianity, everyone is doomed today because 6000 years ago a couple of people stole fruit. Or the story of Bathsheba and the king, who gets her pregnant while her husband is away, so God punishes… the kid. Kills the little brat. Or the couple who didn’t give ALL their money to St Peter, so they both mysteriously dropped dead. He says. I am not making these up, it just shows justice is weird.
@46 It wasn’t the fact they didn’t give all their money, it was the fact they said they did.
@46/Robert Carnegie: “Probably there’s a lot about time travel that you only find out when you do it, so it can make sense to hold a person responsible for their future actions even while preventing them.”
It doesn’t make sense at all, not from a legal or ethical standpoint. It’s not just contradictory, but downright vindictive to prevent the future crime yet still punish the person for something they’ll never actually do.
There are many ways in which we prevent crimes, after all. We put locks and alarms on things to deter people from stealing. We impose fines and penalties to deter people from speeding or being a public nuisance or whatever. And thus we stop people from doing things they might otherwise have done. But because they didn’t actually do it, we don’t punish them for just thinking about doing it. The point of punishment is supposed to be to deter future crimes, after all, so if the deterrent already worked the first time, punishment is redundant, not to mention gratuitous.
“Like, if you go back in time and kill Hitler before he did all the stuff… did he deserve that, and, how?”
I think that’s a separate question. The question here is, if you took art student Hitler out of the timeline before he committed any atrocities, would it be ethical to put him on trial for the crimes he was prevented from committing? Assassination is a brute-force method of prevention; the whole point of laws and judicial systems, in principle, is to offer a less violent, fairer alternative to such things. And if a legal system is willing to tolerate punishing someone for nonexistent crimes as a result of time travel, that opens the door for it to tolerate punishing people for other things they never did. For laws to be ethical, they have to apply equally to everyone. So exceptions can be dangerous. That’s why even the worst criminals are entitled to the same legal protections and rights as the most innocent defendants, even if it means they sometimes get away with it. Because any attempt to single them out by making exceptions will inevitably lead to systemic injustice against innocents.
(Anyway, I’m of the school of thought that instead of killing baby Hitler, it would be better to take him to be raised by a kinder family in a different part of the world. He was a product of nurture as well as nature. Although he wasn’t unique. If he hadn’t filled that niche in history at that time, someone else would have, and they might have been more competent and even more dangerous. One would have to change the entire society to make a real difference, not just kill one child.)
“Like in Christianity, everyone is doomed today because 6000 years ago a couple of people stole fruit.”
Rather, because they succumbed to temptation and the knowledge of good and evil. It’s a metaphor — since we have knowledge like that of God, rather than living in blissful oblivion like animals, that burdens us with suffering and struggle and sin. We can’t have paradise because we’re conscious enough to be aware of evil and pain.
It’s similar to the Greek Prometheus myth and how Zeus punished humans for gaining the knowledge of fire that Prometheus stole from the gods — although that version is even more misogynistic, since it says that Zeus punished man by creating woman (specifically Pandora) to plague and bewitch us. But I think they’re basically attempts to address the question: If we are elevated above the animals in having knowledge like unto the gods, then why does life still suck? Answer: because gaining that godlike knowledge comes with a curse.
“Pogo paradox” is a brilliant phrase. One of my favorite shows, which used to be on Netflix but can no longer be seen in North America (okay, Google tells me it’s on Sling now), is El Ministerio del Tiempo (The Ministry of Time), a Spanish show that NBC ripped off to make the much inferior Timeless. The first season (vague spoiler) has the mother of all Pogo paradoxes.
@45/CLB: Ah, okay, I get where you’re coming from: It’s not a “mistake” in the sense that it contradicts Episode X, it’s a “mistake” in the sense that you feel later reinterpretations of Janeway’s history were to the character’s detriment. It’s a fair point and I wasn’t happy with it myself as I indicated above, but it’s not really any different to how most of the male leads were portrayed. Kirk is often assumed to be a new captain although it’s never actually stated (except in the Abramsverse!): At the very least, he’s meant to be young (and implicitly inexperienced) for a captain and we never hear of any prior commands. Sisko wasn’t even a captain in rank for three seasons and the first episode clearly established DS9 as his first command. Archer didn’t really have anything to captain prior to the series and is in deep space for the first time. Only Picard is allowed a long history as a captain. I think it has less to do with gender perception and more to do with the modern need to experience a character’s story from day one, hence every series since TNG having to show the characters meeting up and having their first mission together, and this episode feeling the need to retcon away Janeway’s previously implied pre-series period as Voyager’s captain.
@50/cap-mjb: “Kirk is often assumed to be a new captain although it’s never actually stated (except in the Abramsverse!)”
Because the Kelvin films begin nearly a decade before TOS. They’re an origin story for the characters we see in their more mature form in the original series, like Young Sherlock Holmes or Batman Begins. I’m amazed how often people ignore that distinction.
“At the very least, he’s meant to be young (and implicitly inexperienced) for a captain”
This is incorrect. The TOS series bible explicitly says “Our Captain is a veteran of hundreds of planet landings and space emergencies. He has a broad and highly mature perspective on command, fellow crewman [sic], and even on alien life customs…”.
While Kirk was presumed to be the youngest starship captain (to justify casting the mid-30s William Shatner in a role that would more typically be filled by a man in his 40s or 50s), he was absolutely not meant to be inexperienced. The idea was that he earned his first command at an exceptionally early age, so he therefore has a typical amount of command experience under his belt despite his youth.
“and we never hear of any prior commands.”
Yes, we do, in the second pilot. Elizabeth Dehner said that Kirk asked for Gary Mitchell aboard his first command. And The Making of Star Trek (which used to be considered the authoritative text on Star Trek, before the modern gatekeeping of “If it’s not onscreen it doesn’t count” took hold) stated that Kirk’s first command was a “destroyer-equivalent” ship.
“Archer didn’t really have anything to captain prior to the series and is in deep space for the first time.”
That’s not accurate. Earth didn’t have any high-warp ships prior to NX-01, but it had had low-warp ships for nearly a century and had well-established space lanes to nearby worlds, as well as ships patrolling local space. It had a whole subculture of humans who’d been born and raised on long-haul interstellar vessels, the Space Boomers, like Travis Mayweather. So yes, of course they had plenty of ships to captain.
After all, “First Flight” established that Archer was one of the three finalists for command of NX-01 and was chosen over the other two, including one (Gardner) who was promoted to admiral by a couple of years later. It’s unlikely that would’ve happened if he hadn’t already been an experienced commander. As with Kirk or Picard, it makes no sense to assume Starfleet would give command of their most important starship (or at least one of their most important class of starships, in Kirk’s case) to an officer with zero command experience.
“I think it has less to do with gender perception and more to do with the modern need to experience a character’s story from day one”
The fact that prejudices and microaggressions are often unrecognized and unintended does not make them better; indeed, it’s the root of the problem, that failure to recognize when something is a bad or hurtful idea because you fail to consider it from perspectives outside your own. If you step on somebody’s foot without realizing it, that doesn’t mean they aren’t in pain. What matters is the impact, not the intention.
“and this episode feeling the need to retcon away Janeway’s previously implied pre-series period as Voyager’s captain.”
Which, once again, is a separate question from whether she’d been any ship’s captain before. It’s a strange logic leap to presume one implies the other.
@43, CLB, re.: Rayna Kapec. Having to decide Right Now and Forever between your First Love and your Mentor Father figure would blow the mind of a flesh and blood woman. I’m not at all surprised it fused Rayna’s circuits.
@51 – The TOS bible, like those of other series, makes for interesting reading but is simply a starting point for the characters. Things from the bible are contradicted almost for the word go. That doesn’t mean that everything else is rock solid background. It means that any part of it can and will be contradicted at the drop of a hat.
And there is nothing, not a darn thing, about Kirk’s career past the rank of Lieutenant until we get to Captain. It’s entirely possible that Kirk was never a Lt. Commander or a Commander and, like his Kelvinverse counterpart, made a jump sraight to Captain for some reason. According to Gary Muchell, Kirk as at the academy when he was a Lieutenant so it’s entirely possible that things played out similarly in both universes. That is that Kirk, while at the academy, took part in a mission that resulted in his jump from Lieutenant to Captain in one fell swoop.
The series bibles and books like TMoST have zero basis as proof of something happening in the fictional universe.
@48 It occurs to me that people used to time travel might think it far more vindictive to imprison people for crimes they have already committed. That suffering is certainly not going to stop the crime from being committed, after all. The moral intuitions of time travellers might be quite different from our own, precisely because causality works so differently for them.
I suppose so many stories end with something unpleasant happening to the bad guy precisely because the audience is assumed to be vindictive, and therefore pleased with such endings.
@54/ad: “It occurs to me that people used to time travel might think it far more vindictive to imprison people for crimes they have already committed.”
That’s not how law works. If there is no crime, there is no basis for imprisonment. To get a conviction, you have to prove that the crime was committed, that the defendant committed it, and that they had mens rea, the intention to commit it. Erasing those elements erases the standard for proof beyond a reasonable doubt. It’s not about the vindictiveness of the punishment, it’s about whether a conviction can be justly reached in the first place. If you can convict someone for a crime there’s no evidence for, then the system is unjust, essentially “guilty until proven innocent,” and there is no way that won’t be oppressive and tyrannical.
As I said, law needs to be universal. It needs to be equally fair for everyone. So there shouldn’t be exemptions made for time travelers. It’s not about the mechanics of time travel. It’s about the ethical problems that remain when you factor out the time travel element and are left with the fundamental legal question of the standard for proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
@CLB, Agreed that’s not how our law works, and punishment before crime violates our sense of justice but the reverse would be a darn interesting pov to explore!
@53/kkozoriz: Here’s what we do know: Kirk was at the Academy fifteen years prior to “Shore Leave”. As a Lieutenant he surveyed his first planet thirteen years prior to “A Private Little War”. His first deep-space assignment on the Farragut took place eleven years prior to “Obsession”. If I’m not mistaken there is nothing, not a darn thing, about the ten years after that. Plenty of time to have a proper, boring career.
“The series bibles and books like TMoST have zero basis as proof of something happening in the fictional universe.”
Not proof but evidence. They highlight how people imagined Starfleet careers back when these things were still supposed to make sense.
It is nonsensical to talk about “proof” when discussing a make-believe story. What cap-mjb asserted was that Kirk was “meant to be young (and implicitly inexperienced) for a captain.” Meant to be. The topic is the intention of the creators. The series bible demonstrates that the intention of the creators was that Kirk was highly experienced.
Well, I don’t know anything about time travel or the laws of this and that, but I must say Robert Duncan McNeil’s ability to bounce a ping pong ball while walking and acting a scene was damn impressive.
@51/CLB: “Elizabeth Dehner said that Kirk asked for Gary Mitchell on his first command.”
Is there any reason to assume she’s not just talking about the Enterprise?
@60/cap-mjb: “Is there any reason to assume she’s not just talking about the Enterprise?”
Only the obvious one that it would be a very strange and labored way to refer to the ship they’re currently on. Surely in that case she would’ve said “you asked for him aboard the Enterprise” or something like that. If it were his first command, that would be utterly irrelevant to the point she was making and thus she’d have no reason to bring it up. The only reason she’d have to use that phrasing is if she’s specifying a different one of Kirk’s commands — his first as opposed to his current one.
Well, plus another thing that should be even more obvious, that it’s nonsensical to expect Starfleet to give command of one of its biggest, most important ship classes to an inexperienced commander.
Plus, of course, The Making of Star Trek explicitly referenced his first command. I don’t care about modern fandom’s kneejerk contempt for printed material; TMoST was written while the show was in production, by an author with extensive firsthand interactions with the production staff, and it was co-written by Roddenberry himself. We know that it represents the authentic intentions of the show’s makers. So we know that the line in the pilot was not meant to refer to the Enterprise, and it’s disingenuous to try to rewrite history and pretend it wasn’t.
Indeed, TMoST is the source of many assumptions that fans have always taken for granted about the Trek universe but were never actually stated in TOS proper, such as the 23rd-century setting (actually James Blish posited that first, TMoST second), the idea of Kirk as the youngest captain, the idea of a Klingon-Romulan alliance, the idea that the Enterprise‘s forward dish is a navigational deflector, and the idea that the standard term for Vulcan telepathic contact is “mind-meld” (a term only used twice in TOS alongside “mind touch,” “mind link,” “mind probe,” and “mind fusion,” and never used in TAS at all, but standardized in every later production because it was the preferred term in TMoST). All of this was assumed for decades to be canonical and most of it was eventually made screen-canonical in later productions.
The idea of Kirk’s earlier, destroyer-equivalent command has similarly been taken for granted for a long time. There are multiple tie-in works that portray it under various names. DC Comics’ first Trek annual by Mike W. Barr called it the Saladin; Vonda McIntyre’s Enterprise: The First Adventure called it the Lydia Sutherland; DC’s “Star-Crossed” storyline by Howard Weinstein called it the Oxford; David A. Goodman’s The Autobiography of James T. Kirk called it the Hotspur; and my own The Captain’s Oath, the most extensive depiction of Kirk’s first command, called it the Sacagawea. Really, Kelvin aside, the only version I can think of that did paint the Enterprise as Kirk’s first captaincy was the brief Kirk-bio filler story in the first volume of Gold Key’s The Enterprise Logs comics compilations.
@61 – “it’s nonsensical to expect Starfleet to give command of one of its biggest, most important ship classes to an inexperienced commander.”
Did you even watch Star Trek ‘-09? Because that is EXACTLY what happened. And if one universe can do it, so can another. It’s canon that it can happen. It was written as happening in precisely that manner. And it’s the only depiction of Kirk’s first command that we’ve seen outside of tie-ins.
So, when it comes down to a book written over 50 years ago, a bunch of comics and novels written over the decades or something that actually appeared on screen, I’m going with the on screen appearance as to what is possible within the fictional world.
You may not agree with it but it’s an established fact that Starfleet does indeed “give command of one of its biggest, most important ship classes to an inexperienced commander.”. Just like that same person gives the position of Chef Engineer of that same vessel to an 18 year old navigator over everyone else in the engineering department.
@61/CLB: “Only the obvious one that it would be a very strange and labored way to refer to the ship they’re currently on.”
Well, the line’s strained and laboured whichever way you look at it, given that Mitchell is on the ship they’re currently on, so if she was referring to a different ship then that makes at least two ships that he’s served under Kirk on. She’s making the point that as soon as Kirk was given a crew he asked for Mitchell to be part of it. If he’s supposed to have asked for Mitchell on another ship, and then asked for him again on the Enterprise, you’d expect her to say something like “You’ve asked for him to be in your crew more than once.”
And I’m sorry, but there are plenty of times when fans are happy to ignore the makers’ intent, including the blatant misogyny of “Turnabout Intruder”. And, like I said earlier, Rodenberry’s treatise on future humans in his novelisation of The Motion Picture. I think I also mentioned when this came up before that the My Brother’s Keeper trilogy presents the Enterprise as Kirk’s first command and him and Mitchell as transferring over from the USS Constitution together.
In later life, Gene Rodenberry’s intent was that starships like the Enterprise were the only vessels that Starfleet had (certainly we never see anything other than a Constitution-class in TOS), so if someone’s going to get a first command, that’s the only type of ship available. Even he doesn’t seem to have seen the idea of a prior “destroyer-class analogue” command as set in stone.
@62/kk: “Did you even watch Star Trek ‘-09? Because that is EXACTLY what happened.”
And I stand by the statement that it’s nonsensical. It’s one of the most widely criticized plot points in that movie, and for very good reason. The sequel even acknowledged what a bad idea it had been to give command to such an inexperienced officer.
Again, what we’re talking about here is the intention of the creators of a work of fiction. Gene Roddenberry was a combat veteran creating what he wanted to be a grounded, credible adult drama about a plausibly portrayed future military. He was not a blockbuster filmmaker pandering to decades of Trekkie nostalgia and the 21st-century obsession with origin stories at the expense of basic common sense. So he would not have made the same choice that his successors unwisely did.
(I still say the biggest flaw in the film could’ve been fixed by putting a 4-year jump after the Academy portion and having the newly-promoted Lieutenant Commander Kirk assigned to the Enterprise just before the attack on Vulcan. That would’ve given him a reasonable amount of experience as well as correcting Chekov’s age.)
@64/cap-mjb: “Well, the line’s strained and laboured whichever way you look at it, given that Mitchell is on the ship they’re currently on, so if she was referring to a different ship then that makes at least two ships that he’s served under Kirk on.”
Uhh… yes, that is exactly the point of the line. The whole idea is to point out that Kirk and Mitchell go back a long way, that they’ve been together for most of their careers. It’s not labored at all.
“And I’m sorry, but there are plenty of times when fans are happy to ignore the makers’ intent, including the blatant misogyny of “Turnabout Intruder”.”
That’s changing the subject. What you said, verbatim, was, “At the very least, he’s meant to be young (and implicitly inexperienced) for a captain.” That is an allegation of fact about the intentions of the creators, which is a separate question altogether from whether we should respect that intention or not. You claimed that Roddenberry intended Kirk to be inexperienced, and that is objectively untrue, as proven by the documentation.
“In later life, Gene Rodenberry’s intent was that starships like the Enterprise were the only vessels that Starfleet had”
When the hell did he say that?
Boys, it’s time to pack up your toys and go home. This argument has gone on too long with nobody getting their opinions changed. Can we please get back to discussing Voyager? Thanks.
Now seems like a good time to advocate for agreeing to disagree and moving on, since the tone of the conversation seems to be getting less civil/more heated.
Exhibit A for why Seven of Nine should have been in uniform, with no rank, like the EMH. Clearly, the producers did not learn their lesson from Deanna Troi.
A fun episode, if you don’t think too much about it. Great to see Utopia Planitia, and be with Janeway as she sees Voyager for the first time. How could would it have been, if they had called Jennifer Lien to come back for this episode instead of the god-awful “Fury” next season? We could have had Kes and Seven of Nine teamed up to save Voyager.
Still, it was nice to see Joe Carey again. (Remember Joe Carey? He’s back, in flashback form). I agree it would been great to see some of Voyager’s original senior staff, particularly Alicia Coppola as Lieutenant Stadi, brimming with character potential, but killed off to make way for Paris. Even a little bit of characterization for Stadi could make up for her plot-needed death.
But I still had a good time with this one (see what I did there? I’ll show myself out).
See, if someone commits a crime, but you go back in time and prevent it, but then you don’t judge them for committing the crime, then they can go back in time and prevent you from preventing it. In fact, if you don’t put them in time jail before the time they were going to commit the crime, and then something else happens to stop you preventing the crime – then they commit the crime after all UNLESS they are in time jail.
In fact maybe put everyone in jail anyway, that will prevent any crimes bring committed. I do see drawbacks… so, putting people in jail who committed a crime and then it was prevented, is a compromise.
@62, KK, that is exactly why I gave Star Trek ’09 a miss. I was sorry to do because I thought they did a fine job of casting and modernizing the original Series aesthetic but the teenybopper’s in charge plotline exceeded by ability to suspend disbelief.
@70: Except ironically even that doesn’t seem to work, because even after they’ve arrested and locked up Younger Braxton for something he hasn’t done yet, Older Braxton is still free to commit the crime and they have to stop him the old-fashioned way.
@65 – “And I stand by the statement that it’s nonsensical. It’s one of the most widely criticized plot points in that movie, and for very good reason. The sequel even acknowledged what a bad idea it had been to give command to such an inexperienced officer.”
Yes they acknowledged it, for about five minutes. Kirk is demoted. Pike finds Kirk in a bar. Kirk and Pike go to meeting. Pike is killed. Kirk reinstated.
I’m sure he matured a lot in that afternoon.
But Starfleet’s promotion standards have never made any sense, so ’09 fits the pattern. For example, Crusher, who was a commander, being promoted to head Starfleet Medical for a year when there must be Medical Admirals in large numbers who would make more sense. She didn’t even change her rank. Just put in charge of an entire department of Starfleet.
Or Kirk similarly, going from Captain to Admiral in charge of Starfleet Operations.
The smash cut from Mulgrew’s pained delivery of the line “Let’s get started before my headache gets any worse,” to the frenetic outer-space battle… that might be the funniest laugh-out-loud moment in all of Voyager. It’s rare to see that sort of wry humor in the edit on this show.
Very belated response to Austin: I must confess to having totally forgotten about Timecop. It does actually fit the remit for “4-Color to 35-Millimeter.” Wish I’d seen this comment before June, I would’ve included it with WW84 and The Snyder Mulligan. There’s no way it’ll fit into the crowded December 2021 group, but maybe in mid-2022 I can lump it in the way I did Faust last year.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@76 – Oooh, interesting! Look forward to it, though I must confess that I haven’t seen it since sometime in the 90s.
Excellent interview with Bruce McGill by Will Harris of AV Club:
Part One: https://willharris.substack.com/p/interview-bruce-mcgill-pt-1
Part Two: https://willharris.substack.com/p/interview-bruce-mcgill-pt-2
It seems to me Captain Braxton was unfairly charged for his future actions by his First Officer. Even his attempt to capture his future self was dismissed or un-noted for his help to prevent his future actions. I mean, this guy went through rehabilitation because he was stranded in the 2000s on Earth for 30 years in “Future’s End.” Even after the Voyager prevented Henry Starling from entering the artificial temporal riff and causing time to collapse, they never went back for Braxton. The fact that Captain Braxton was arrested on his ship precipitated his future actions. I mean, his arrest is like pre-crimes in Minority Report. If he hadn’t been derailed by an overzealous and possible fanatical First Officer, he would never have committed his future crime.
I love how even pre-psychosis Braxton is rewriting history in his mind to justify his grudge against Janeway and Voyager. He told Seven that in ‘Future’s End’ he asked for Janeway’s help and she refused,kinda omitting the fact that the help he wanted was for them to do nothing while he destroyed them.
Good time travel stories make you think. Bad time travel stories make you want to turn your brain off. This is the latter. But at least it’s a lot of fun.
When Janeway first came aboard Voyager the Admiral quizzed her and then said he wanted to make sure she hadn’t lost anything with the new pip. I took that to mean she’d just made Captain rank. I also took it to mean that she captained an earlier ship with the rank of Commander and that Voyager was her first command at Captains rank. So she could be a new Captain and still be an experienced captain. If you see what I mean.
Just watched this episode and was curious what other folks thought about it. I enjoyed it quite a bit, even though I haven’t seen it listed in any of the “best of Voyager” lists I’ve started making my way through, after discovering there were in fact good episodes. It was quite the fun ride. My question was how they were able to transport Seven back to her normal time at the end, after previously stating she couldn’t be transported again without basically dying.