How Caretaker fits in

[myselfeneye]

I've been doing a rewatch of the entire series, with everything that could possibly be construed as a crossover/tie-in included chronologically. In an earlier thread I explained the Evek/Nechayev/Maquis connection that runs all the way from TNG to Voyager, but now I've got more insight into how Caretaker fits in all by itself.

We know Evek's been the main man behind the Cardassian side of the DMZ, patrolling it and doing...whatever else he's been up to. But in Voyager his ship gets severely damaged for the second time (the first time we saw it damaged that badly was in Preemptive Strike). Now, in Caretaker he was especially daring, flying right into the Badlands after Chakotay and his crew. Evek either died or was taken out of commission for a while, we know that much. But guess what? We get confirmation.

Caretaker takes place between The Abandoned and Civil Defense. In Civil Defense, Dukat's automated system goes active when the station thinks the Bajoran workers are revolting. He shows up on the station, and guess what he says? He says he was patrolling the DMZ when he got a message from himself...etc. So why would Dukat be patrolling the DMZ? Only because Evek was taken out of action! Subtle, but they made it fit and they made it stick. Good times!

I know nobody's as excited about it as I am, but I had to share.

[DonIago]

...or there is more than one ship patrolling the DMZ at a time?

[MacLeod]

I'd go for Don's reason, there was more than one ship patrolling the the DMZ.

[Timo]

...Then there's this whole "Orders" thing in the Cardassian military. The Orders are a bit like Fleets, only it seems there's a hierarchy of sorts placing some Orders above and ahead of others. Dukat was associated with the 2nd Order, at least during the Occupation, while Evek was a 4th Order guy (until his demise, two years after which we heard of a Gul Trepar heading the 4th). But a couple of other Orders were also intimately involved with the Maquis hunt or with Bajor and DS9, and each supposedly had a Gul in command.

So... are Guls such bigwigs that there's only one per Order, with the individual ships being commanded by officers of lower rank? That would let us speculate that Dukat took over Evek's job. But we have seen a Gul every time we have seen a Cardassian starship up close - so is there a Gul on every ship, and some are more equal than others when it comes to leading Orders? That would make it sheer coincidence if Gul X patrolling the DMZ (but not explicitly being in charge of the entire job of patrolling that Zone) had actually taken over the job of Gul Y who happened to be in charge of patrolling the DMZ earlier on.

Timo Saloniemi

[myselfeneye]

I would be willing to go with the idea that there was more than one Gul patrolling the Zone at the time, except I know there was at least one writer on DS9 at the time who actually cared about continuity and made an effort to hint at it here and there. The way TNG and DS9 worked together so flawlessly to create the Maquis in the first place is evidence of that. Since Civil Defense is set immediately after Caretaker by its stardate and airdate, it seems that something like Dukat's line was deliberately done in an offhand manner to suggest without implicitly stating that Caretaker was being acknowledged. Yes, logic dictates that there could easily be more than one Gul patrolling the Zone. But from a writer's perspective, I'd say that line was thrown in to say "hint, hint".

As I understand it, the Zone isn't really that big. It has a lot of people in it who dropped out of Starfleet to fight Cardassians, but it's not exactly so big that it takes a small fleet to patrol it. It's possible that after Evek's second major failure in battle he was sent reinforcements instead of simply being replaced. Whatever the case, I'm fairly sure it was factored in to DS9 continuity.

[Tiberius]

What list are you using to get all the episodes in airdate order?

[Tiberius]

myselfeneye wrote:

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Caretaker takes place between The Abandoned and Civil Defense.

No it doesn't.

Caretaker was first aired January 16, 1995. The Abandoned first aired on October 31, 1994 and Civil Defense first aired on November 7, 1994.

You then had Meridian (November 14, 1994), Star Trek Generations (released on November 18, 1994), Defiant (November 21, 1994), Fascination (November 28, 1994) and Past Tense, parts one and two (January 8 and 15, 1995) before Caretaker was aired.

[IntrepidMan]

Evek died? When did that happen?

As for the OP, I seriously doubt the writers were intentionally hinting about the events in Caretaker. It is much more likely that having Dukat patrolling the Badlands was merely a coincidence. Star Trek writers have time and again proven themselves pretty ignorant when it comes to continuity.

And I thought Gul's were equivalent to Captain's, so there are probably a lot of them.

[Tiberius]

Evek supposedly died in Caretaker when his ship was hit by the plasma thingy in the badlands while chasing the Maquis ship at the beginning.

[Timo]

...Although the crazed Seven in "The Voyager Conspiracy" offers another theory, claiming Neelix as her witness for the appearance of a Cardassian ship (looking like Evek's) at the Caretaker's array some time before Janeway got there, thus probably also at the right time to match the events of the pilot episode's teaser. Later on, she claims that the Cardassian ship was returned to Alpha, and that the Maquis destroyed it there, supposedly ending Evek's career and perhaps life. How she would know about such things is left unclear, but supposedly this "information" would have been included in the data exchanged in "Message in a Bottle". We can't tell what parts (if any) of that rant are supposed to be true, as Seven is not only crazy, but is probably lying to everybody out of fear of all those conspiracies.

As for when the assorted episodes take place, stardates are as good a bet as any. "Caretaker" happens in SD 48315, while there's a spell of five stardate-free episodes in DS9 between the season opener "The Search" (SD 48213) and "Meridian" (SD 48423). The first three stardate-less episodes involve a main character or several traveling far away from DS9, and appear to take longer than the last two, making "Caretaker" probably fall somewhere closer to "Equilibrium" than "The Abandoned"...

Timo Saloniemi

[myselfeneye]

You guys called it with regard to airdate. I got my stardate info off of Wikipedia (I know, alright?). I tried to verify it via Startrek.com, but that site says "unknown" for some reason. It does verify the stardate offered for Caretaker, but that's it.

The stardates are also confirmed by Memory Alpha and Memory Beta.

I'm sticking to my story.

[Tiberius]

lol, but stardates are notoriously unreliable! After all, according to stardates, Tasha was still alive after Skin of Evil!

[Timo]

Apart from the cartoons, the first season of TNG is basically the only place where you run into trouble like that with stardates.

And oddly enough, all that trouble was specifically engineered into TNG S1 at the last minute. TrekCore features several penultimate scripts, which either have reasonable, sequential stardates or then omit stardates altogether; it's just the aired versions that are all screwy.

Elsewhere in TNG, and everywhere in DS9 and VOY, stardates were either intentionally written to indicate a sequence of events, or at least can be read that way without major problems. Which, in absence of other information, sometimes is great fun!

Timo Saloniemi

[Tiberius]

That may be true, but I tend to view that the airdate order is the way they were originally meant to be viewed.

[Timo]

Airdate is subject to various real-world problems and delays and reshufflings; if the writers had an idea about when an episode was supposed to take place in relation to other episodes or events, they will more probably place the cues in in-universe things such as the dialogue, stardates and the like.

Plus, TOS makes so much more sense if one ignores airdates. They're different from viewing location to viewing location, too...

Timo Saloniemi