• Welcome! The TrekBBS is the number one place to chat about Star Trek with like-minded fans.
    If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Rodent's historical (in)significance in COTEOF

Status
Not open for further replies.
Push The Button

Push The Button

Commodore
Commodore
As a sort-of companion to this recent thread about Edith Keeler: http://www.trekbbs.com/threads/how-did-edith-delay-wwii.281565/

I would like to discuss the death of the character "Rodent" in The City on the Edge of Forever. As most of you know, Rodent accidently vaporises himself with Dr. McCoy's phaser, perhaps no more than a few days before Edith's demise in the pivotal traffic accident.

Assuming that there is one initial "correct" timeline that exists where Edith dies in a
"street accident" in 1930 without ever having encountered McCoy, Kirk or Spock (also assuming that their presence in 1930 was never "part of what was supposed to take place" like it was in Assignment: Earth), then Rodent would not have dematerialized himself in this original timeline. Yet he does disappear from the corrected timeline that otherwise still results in Starfleet and the Federation and our heroes serving on Enterprise, and everything else we know so well.

Are the events of Rodent's life so insignificant that it doesn't matter if he lives or dies beyond 1930? Is he supposed to be some kind of polar opposite to Edith?
 
Push The Button said:
Assuming that there is one initial "correct" timeline that exists where Edith dies in a
"street accident" in 1930 without ever having encountered McCoy, Kirk or Spock (also assuming that their presence in 1930 was never "part of what was supposed to take place" like it was in Assignment: Earth), then Rodent would not have dematerialized himself in this original timeline.
Click to expand...

There is actually no evidence that this was the case. For all we know, everything in this episode was part of what was supposed to happen (and did happen) all along. You can't prove it wasn't, anyway.
 
Possible that later that same night in the original timeline, he got a hold of some bad grain alcohol and died anyway.
 
We also have to remember that altering the past does not alter the present in the general case. Time in Trek is somehow self-healing, damping out all alterations but the most blatant ones. If not, the very fact of our time-traveling hero standing at the red lights would mean people around him would have to stand centimeters away from where they "would" have stood, meaning their children, grandchildren and so forth would be born different.

Timo Saloniemi
 
An article in one of the Best of Trek paperback collections suggested that Rodent's orphan son killed Officer Gene Roddenberry years later in LA, thus Star Trek was never created in that universe.
 
I wonder how the phaser vaporized itself. He must have found some setting similar to putting a phaser on overload, but without the messy explosion. And if there is a setting that says "Vaporize me and the weapon itself," that would essentially be a booby trap.
 
mb22 said:
An article in one of the Best of Trek paperback collections suggested that Rodent's orphan son killed Officer Gene Roddenberry years later in LA, thus Star Trek was never created in that universe.
Click to expand...
I recall that article. Orphaned son goes bad because of the unexplained absence of his father and kills a beat cop during a petty robbery. Beat cop never gets a chance to create Star Trek--so Trek TV show never happens in theTrek timeline.
 
I wonder how the phaser vaporized itself.
Click to expand...

I don't think there ought to be any trick to that.

Take a Klingon, brandishing a phaser (or disruptor, whatever). Shoot him dead. He gets vaporized - along with his weapon. There is no smoking pile of weapons, communicators and boots left where he stood. There's just empty air.

This shouldn't change even in the case of accidental suicide. The vaporization effect should again propagate from the person to his sidearm, regardless of the fact that the effect originated from a gun the person himself was holding.

Timo Saloniemi
 
The person is also in direct contact with the ground, so the whole planet should vaporize as well.

Kor
 
The person is also in direct contact with the ground, so the whole planet should vaporize as well.
Click to expand...

Not by the Trek rules. We know them pretty well, even if only empirically: a beam that hits flesh vaporizes adjoining clothing including dense leather stuff like belts and boots, and also the most common types of handheld objects including phasers, tricorders, communicators and on occasion knives and clubs. It doesn't vaporize adjoining air or floor/ground, even though it's perfectly capable of vaporizing floor/ground if that's where it hits. And a beam hitting a metal kettle doesn't vaporize the flesh (meat, dough, whatever) inside, as per ST6.

Presumably, the phasing effect can jump certain phase boundaries but not others, and one boundary it might be unable to jump is flesh to metal and vice versa. Perhaps phasers aren't made of metal, despite occasional appearances?

Timo Saloniemi
 
Can a phaser disintegrate itself?
This might provide some insight:
To view this content we will need your consent to set third party cookies.
For more detailed information, see our cookies page.

And what about some kind of disintegration-proof armor for security personnel?
See 0:30 here:
To view this content we will need your consent to set third party cookies.
For more detailed information, see our cookies page.

Kor
 
Last edited:
I read a fan article once that suggested that "Rodent" was Gene Roddenberry's father, and that his death meant that Gene never existed and explains the absence of the Star Trek TV show in the Star Trek timeline.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Sign up / Register


Back
Top