Spoilers Coda Trilogy Discussion Thread
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Yeah that was weird.
Mirror Ezri Dax as captain of the mirror Defiant, though, I really liked. After losing her so early on, getting to see this version of her was really nice. Especially getting a chance for Kira to interact with any Ezri Dax.
Also she was the catalyst for Kira to go old school rampagey and that's always fun.
I also liked how Dax's death helped bring a lot of characters together in book 2. Might have preferred her to have survived through all the books though she's my favorite of the TV cast book characters.
Mirror Ezri Dax as captain of the mirror Defiant, though, I really liked. After losing her so early on, getting to see this version of her was really nice. Especially getting a chance for Kira to interact with any Ezri Dax.
Also she was the catalyst for Kira to go old school rampagey and that's always fun.
I also liked how Dax's death helped bring a lot of characters together in book 2. Might have preferred her to have survived through all the books though she's my favorite of the TV cast book characters.
I thought it was good overall, and I have nothing but respect to the writers for attempting it. I think bringing the timeline to an end was a solid idea, even if it's near-impossible to have a satisfying ending after that, and David Mack certainly made a valiant attempt with the closing chapters. And the Benny Russell bit was brilliant.
I think my biggest frustration was how the time was used in the novels. Rene being hyper-aged felt a little pointless. The resolution to the Riker story was interesting, but it was frustrating watching that story tread water for so long as it approached the conclusion.
I wish more of our time had been spent watching how the characters would react. How would those who weren't part of the mission react to their final days? What would they do knowing their universe might end in a few days, and for many of them it would be completely out of their control? We got a glimpse of that with the relationship of Worf and Mirror K'Ehleyr, and it made for some of the strongest character material in the books.
Rather than have the Starfleet conflict come out of paperwork and alternate Riker, why not have it arise from the natural doubts of whether they should destroy the universe? What if Sisko and the Deep Space Nine crew had come together to try to stop Picard and his crew? Anyone who didn't have an implicit trust in Wesley Crusher would've had legitimate qualms about Picard going back in time to wipe out all of existence, and starting by wiping out the Prophets and the wormhole. Seeing Sisko's brashness against Picard's determination could've been gripping, even if we were fairly confident Picard would win Sisko over by the end. And that's just one possibility (though I feel TNG vs DS9 is a very strong option). Would've loved to see non-mirror M'k'nzy of Calhoun sweeping in and being part of this. Heck, we could've had all of the major 24th century ships from the lit-verse facing up against each other. EDIT: Or even just Picard versus not-crazy Riker would've made for an interesting conflict.
And I'll admit I'm speaking from pure ignorance on this one not having read any of the Voyager relaunch past Full Circle, but it seems a shame not to tie in more of the Voyager characters.
That said, there may have been many reasons the writers didn't (or even couldn't) go in directions such as these, and I want to reiterate that I have nothing but respect for them for even attempting a tale like this.
I think my biggest frustration was how the time was used in the novels. Rene being hyper-aged felt a little pointless. The resolution to the Riker story was interesting, but it was frustrating watching that story tread water for so long as it approached the conclusion.
I wish more of our time had been spent watching how the characters would react. How would those who weren't part of the mission react to their final days? What would they do knowing their universe might end in a few days, and for many of them it would be completely out of their control? We got a glimpse of that with the relationship of Worf and Mirror K'Ehleyr, and it made for some of the strongest character material in the books.
Rather than have the Starfleet conflict come out of paperwork and alternate Riker, why not have it arise from the natural doubts of whether they should destroy the universe? What if Sisko and the Deep Space Nine crew had come together to try to stop Picard and his crew? Anyone who didn't have an implicit trust in Wesley Crusher would've had legitimate qualms about Picard going back in time to wipe out all of existence, and starting by wiping out the Prophets and the wormhole. Seeing Sisko's brashness against Picard's determination could've been gripping, even if we were fairly confident Picard would win Sisko over by the end. And that's just one possibility (though I feel TNG vs DS9 is a very strong option). Would've loved to see non-mirror M'k'nzy of Calhoun sweeping in and being part of this. Heck, we could've had all of the major 24th century ships from the lit-verse facing up against each other. EDIT: Or even just Picard versus not-crazy Riker would've made for an interesting conflict.
And I'll admit I'm speaking from pure ignorance on this one not having read any of the Voyager relaunch past Full Circle, but it seems a shame not to tie in more of the Voyager characters.
That said, there may have been many reasons the writers didn't (or even couldn't) go in directions such as these, and I want to reiterate that I have nothing but respect for them for even attempting a tale like this.
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I suppose one other arguable missed opportunity... A version of this universe continued for centuries, right? We see glimpses of the future in this and other books, including the older Wesleys coming back. (So I have to assume the Devidian threat originated in the future and came back closer to the origin of the divergence to feed, but I may be mixing up or misunderstanding some of the temporal mechanics established in the books.) Might've been nice to take the opportunity to truly give these characters "codas" and see glimpses of where their lives could've gone had the lit-verse continued.
To be fair, while I imagine this is extremely unlikely, they could still do some sort of "CODA: Epilogue" anthology where the lit-verse authors come back and revisit favorite characters in low-key slice-of-life stories showing what would've happened in the alternate-alternate timeline where the Devidian threat hadn't yet reached back to impact our heroes as shown in the trilogy.
To be fair, while I imagine this is extremely unlikely, they could still do some sort of "CODA: Epilogue" anthology where the lit-verse authors come back and revisit favorite characters in low-key slice-of-life stories showing what would've happened in the alternate-alternate timeline where the Devidian threat hadn't yet reached back to impact our heroes as shown in the trilogy.
I think the way it worked was that all those older Wesleys had been searching all across time for centuries in their own subjective time, finding out more and sending information back to younger versions of themselves apart from the subjective time that the Dividians were spending doing the evil. I think the destruction of a timeline happens at all points of time within the timeline at once so from another perspective then yes, I guess these characters lived out their lives since the universe existed both forwards and backwards, but when the Dividians started collapsing the timeline, our characters started fighting at the point that old Wesley came back which began the countdown to the end of time (subectively). Oh God, this makes sense in my head but I don't know how to describe it, lol. Like, that older Wesley could have gone back and found himself in 2400 instead of 2380-something, and the timetable of the adventure (countdown to the end) would be the exact same but in that year instead.
Yeah, I imagine something like that as the Devidians moving through some sort of second temporal dimension orthogonal to our own (imaginary time? hyper-time?) so it could have simultaneous impact throughout the timeline. Not sure if that completely makes sense, but I think it makes enough sense.
Though really I'm just looking for an excuse for them to do the concept from Peter David's final issue of his main run on Incredible Hulk where an alternate Rick Jones tells an interviewer all of the crazy stuff that would've happened if Peter David had kept writing the book the way he wanted. But I guess that's a lot easier when you have a single author rather than a shared lit-verse. Again, if Coda sells well enough it might be worth them considering an anthology of these types of tales from different authors who worked on the series (and given the branching timelines they could even contradict each other as alternate options of where the lit-verse would've gone), but I'd be very surprised if that sort of What If? actually happens.
The way it works in my head based on how various time travels have worked in other books is that before the Devidians came up with their scheme and started doing the evil, the First Splinter timeline was as is: forwards and backwards, from the beginning of time through all of our Star Trek, to the centuries beyond since all time exists simultaneously and we only perceive a single point of it. All our characters grow old and live their lives. Then after they start doing their nonsense, Old Wesley (a Wesley, who probably started his mission because of a previous Wesley putting him on the trail) travels back through time and appears in the First Splinter. At that point, this is where the First Splinter would normally diverge into a new timeline, or replace the current First Splinter timeline the way we normally see. So this new timeline plays out where Picard and company no longer get to grow old. Their old lives still exist in the original future until the new subjective present of Coda "plays out" and replaces the original future where they did not fight the Devidians. The only difference here is that Coda collapses the timeline before events can spread out and alter the timeline. I think this was a mechanic that was in one of the DTI books. So when the Devidians collapsed the timeline, its possible that the original, non-Coda future was still intact when it was wiped out since the events of Coda would not have had a chance to 'catch up' with the original future and replace it? Again, I don't think I explained what I am thinking correctly.
Hmm, I dunno. With one dimension of time, it makes no sense to say "the destruction happens at all points of time at once," because destruction, like any form of change, requires the passage of time, a version before the destruction and a version after it. As I always say, it's a contradiction in terms for a single moment in time to come after itself; if there are two different versions of a single moment, then by definition they are simultaneous, rather than one giving way to the other.
I did establish a second and even potentially a third dimension of time in Watching the Clock, because it was the only way to rationalize a time loop of the sort seen in "We'll Always Have Paris" or "Cause and Effect." (Imaginary time is something else, a purely mathematical construct without physical meaning.) But there's simply no way it could lead to any given timeline "never having existed." That's a logical contradiction. If an event occurs, it occurs. It might be on some side branch of the network of timelines, but that branch is still part of the overall tapestry, even if it's cut off and has no effect going forward.
As Dr. T'Viss explained it in WTC, in order to think about the shape of the timeline, you have to step back from habits of thought based on the assumption of time passing, e.g. thinking in terms of things being changed, destroyed, erased, etc. All those things are processes that happen within time, that span time, so you have to set them aside, to redefine them simply as segments of the worldlines that exist within the overall tapestry of time. You have to step outside of time and look at it as a single timeless whole where all timelines exist at once like branches on a tree, and, where every event and every change that ever happened or will happen anywhere in the multiverse is simply a point on one of the branches. It's all there. Everything that happens, happens. It might be forgotten afterward that it had happened, its timeline might be collapsed after it happened so that it seemed like it never happened, but it did happen, so it's a contradiction in terms to say the timeline was collapsed before it happened. Any change before it happened must simply branch off a different timeline.
I wrote this whole 2-paragraph restatement of how I explained the process in DTI, and then I thought more carefully about what you were saying, and I realized you're probably right. Basically, if you go back from, say, 2500 to 2400 and change things, then from 2400 onward you have the original and altered timelines coexisting side-by-side, and when you reach the moment of the time travel in 2500, the mutual entanglement causes the original to collapse into the altered one, leaving only the altered one from then on. But what you're saying is that if the altered one is collapsed at an earlier point in the timeline, if it doesn't continue past, say, 2420, then there's nothing there for the original one to be subsumed into once 2500 arrives, and thus the original timeline would survive. I think that actually is consistent with my model.
@Christopher, would you be willing to try to explain the events of the creation and destruction of the “First Splinter” timeline through the lens of the temporal mechanical model you developed for Watching the Clock?
I haven't actually read books 2-3 yet; all I know is what I see in this thread. And I don't know if it would be my place to try to assert a "definitive" model that might differ from what the authors of the trilogy had in mind.
Besides, trying to make rational sense of Trek time travel is a very cumbersome exercise, and nobody's paying me for it this time.
Well. That was epic, suspenseful, occasionally exciting, sometimes devastating, and it certainly ended the Litverse. But it's not the ending I would have liked to see.
I've been reading Star Trek novels since I got Mission to Horatius back around Christmas of 1971. (Good grief, that was fifty years ago.) The Litverse, especially when the DS9 relaunch and Vanguard etc were all squeaky clean and new, was one of the peak experiences of all those decades of Trek books. So I would have liked a celebration of what the Litverse did and was. Something that brought a sense of completion rather than destruction. Maybe something with some kind of time-altering event that would have made clear that the Litverse splintered off from the Prime timeline somewhere, but its characters would continue to live their lives and have adventures. We wouldn't see them again, but we'd know they were out there somewhere, the families that won't happen in the Prime timeline, the characters we've come to know but won't see on TV.
I could have used something a bit more cheerful. The last three years have been pretty hard. But after I read Coda I read Brent Spiner's book, which at times made me laugh out loud, so there's that, at least.
I've been reading Star Trek novels since I got Mission to Horatius back around Christmas of 1971. (Good grief, that was fifty years ago.) The Litverse, especially when the DS9 relaunch and Vanguard etc were all squeaky clean and new, was one of the peak experiences of all those decades of Trek books. So I would have liked a celebration of what the Litverse did and was. Something that brought a sense of completion rather than destruction. Maybe something with some kind of time-altering event that would have made clear that the Litverse splintered off from the Prime timeline somewhere, but its characters would continue to live their lives and have adventures. We wouldn't see them again, but we'd know they were out there somewhere, the families that won't happen in the Prime timeline, the characters we've come to know but won't see on TV.
I could have used something a bit more cheerful. The last three years have been pretty hard. But after I read Coda I read Brent Spiner's book, which at times made me laugh out loud, so there's that, at least.
I don't think novelverse die-hards could ever be happy with "just" a trilogy. With so many locations and characters, we ended up with situations where series leads or characters with 20 years of history were dying Quentin Tarantino movie deaths, and due to the universe being either destroyed or undone in the next 40 minutes, everyone runs past and keeps going.
If we could have had something on the scale of "A Time To..." everyone could have had their proper wrap-up in their own corner of Trek. But harsh realities being what they are, we got a trilogy to cover everything.
I loved it. I did wonder at times and especially at the end if it would have been more "Trek" to have something more akin to Picard's quiet and personal ending sequence expanded to a whole novel rather than the wholesale massacre of all time and space. The end where Benny Russel finishes the novelverse and writes the first lines of Una McCormack's Last Best Hope was inspired.
There's something truly harrowing about our heroes fighting and dying for a best-case-scenario where they never existed. As others have pointed out in this and the review thread, going back for anyone seems like a joke when you're 40 minutes away from one of two scenarios where everyone dies. But when those people are the reason you've kept going for the past 20 years, the reason you get up every morning it becomes a brain vs heart situation. Imagine living your last hour knowing you left the most important part of your universe behind. You're definitely going to die soon, don't you want it to be a death you can (for lack of a better term) live with? Hence a lot of the illogical choices being made, and them IMHO being in-character in these ultra-extreme circumstances.
I need to catch up with my Mirror Universe novels. I know they had advanced jaunt drive ships, but their technology (especially on the outriders) explictly descibes Discovery season 3 tech that should be 800 years ahead. But I guess when you can peek into any reality and copy anything you see, being WAY ahead of the curve makes sense.
I was disappointed only by Spock's inclusion. I kept waiting for there to be a big reason for him to be there, but no. His role to wow the mirror universe denizens by reminding them of their Spock could have been achieved by a lifesize holo.
The First Splinter timeline officially starts at the future portion of First Contact, but since the novelverse goes thousands of years ahead and it's present explictly depends on events centuries in the past, I think it's a fair interpretation that novels pre-First Contact could be considered part of that world. I'm sure Paramount+ will do their own version of the Romulan War one day, for example, or a Young Picard flashback to the Stargazer. And the ENT books or Stargazer series are future-proofed in a fashion by being part of that continuity (at least for people who care about such things.)
I wish I made notes as I was reading, I'll probably be popping in with tons of observations and thoughts as I'm reminded of them.
Top stuff, authors. Thank you for everything.
If we could have had something on the scale of "A Time To..." everyone could have had their proper wrap-up in their own corner of Trek. But harsh realities being what they are, we got a trilogy to cover everything.
I loved it. I did wonder at times and especially at the end if it would have been more "Trek" to have something more akin to Picard's quiet and personal ending sequence expanded to a whole novel rather than the wholesale massacre of all time and space. The end where Benny Russel finishes the novelverse and writes the first lines of Una McCormack's Last Best Hope was inspired.
There's something truly harrowing about our heroes fighting and dying for a best-case-scenario where they never existed. As others have pointed out in this and the review thread, going back for anyone seems like a joke when you're 40 minutes away from one of two scenarios where everyone dies. But when those people are the reason you've kept going for the past 20 years, the reason you get up every morning it becomes a brain vs heart situation. Imagine living your last hour knowing you left the most important part of your universe behind. You're definitely going to die soon, don't you want it to be a death you can (for lack of a better term) live with? Hence a lot of the illogical choices being made, and them IMHO being in-character in these ultra-extreme circumstances.
I need to catch up with my Mirror Universe novels. I know they had advanced jaunt drive ships, but their technology (especially on the outriders) explictly descibes Discovery season 3 tech that should be 800 years ahead. But I guess when you can peek into any reality and copy anything you see, being WAY ahead of the curve makes sense.
I was disappointed only by Spock's inclusion. I kept waiting for there to be a big reason for him to be there, but no. His role to wow the mirror universe denizens by reminding them of their Spock could have been achieved by a lifesize holo.
The First Splinter timeline officially starts at the future portion of First Contact, but since the novelverse goes thousands of years ahead and it's present explictly depends on events centuries in the past, I think it's a fair interpretation that novels pre-First Contact could be considered part of that world. I'm sure Paramount+ will do their own version of the Romulan War one day, for example, or a Young Picard flashback to the Stargazer. And the ENT books or Stargazer series are future-proofed in a fashion by being part of that continuity (at least for people who care about such things.)
I wish I made notes as I was reading, I'll probably be popping in with tons of observations and thoughts as I'm reminded of them.
Top stuff, authors. Thank you for everything.
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Spock made an important contribution by helping stabilize Worf's mind in The Ashes of Tomorrow. The meta reason to include him is his massive importance to Star Trek as a whole. As you stated, Mirror Spock played a pivotal role in the history of the Mirror Universe, so it seems fitting that the Spock we are most familiar with should be there at the end, even if he did not achieve all of his aims there in obtaining help from the Commonwealth government.
I haven’t read it, just heard about it recently.
I don’t really know what to say, except I suppose it’s better than the way legends ended(though I’m conflicted about that).
Personally my headcanon involved the novel verse timeline going on for centuries to come. I guess though one’s head canon doesn’t always line up with what one gets though.
I don’t really know what to say, except I suppose it’s better than the way legends ended(though I’m conflicted about that).
Personally my headcanon involved the novel verse timeline going on for centuries to come. I guess though one’s head canon doesn’t always line up with what one gets though.
Post-Coda, I've gone back to the "A Time To..." books and a chapter opens with Geordi and it just occurred to me...
He dies, shot in the back by... hell, I can't remember if it's the Devidians or the Borg, now. But I had a weird moment of reading him going about his day with no idea he only had a few years left. Everyone in the universe only has a few years left. It's weird.
Yeah, when you look at it like that, it’s pretty heartbreaking and unsatisfying.
As much as it worked for me in the moment, and as much as I think the authors succeeded at what they set out to do, and bearing in mind that I don't know to what degree the studio mandates influenced the larger shape of the narrative, I think in the years to come I'm going to keep coming back to Coda as an example of what not to do. It's a rare opportunity to be able to craft an ending to an ongoing epic of modern myth (not unheard of, but rare), and doing a "rocks fall, everyone dies" ending really requires a unity of narrative purpose that simply can't exist under that circumstance. I think for this to really work, you have to know on some level that that's where you're going from day one. There'd need to be an undercurrent going back to Avatar, or ATT, or whatever, that everyone was living on borrowed time, that tomorrow is promised to no one, and sometimes heroism falls short. And that happens, sometimes, you've got your Wildfires and your Storming Heavens, but it would need to be everywhere. Even when people aren't dying, when plans do work out, when you get the big win-win, it still needs to be in the air that the narrative universe is running on fatalism. Like the dim, oily stars of the Mirror Universe, it has to always be there in the background.
Stories teach you how to understand them as they unfold. Like, a fair number of people expected the new Battlestar Galactica to have a grim, nihilistic ending, but I never did. Right from the beginning, there were a bunch of small moments that told you what kind of story it was. Adama's instinct being to fight to the death well beyond the point where it could be productive, but being won over not be Roslin's argument that the only kind of victory they could have would be to find someplace far away and start having babies, but by seeing two people awkwardly flirting even there, at the end of the world. And then, Roslin's joy at being able to revise her population whiteboard up by one.
Or, another Ron Moore joint that's been in my mind, well, since I heard the anecdote earlier this year, but especially in light of Coda, was with regard to the second season finale of For All Mankind. A pair of characters die in the episode, and in interviews, the process in the writers' room was described. They were both going into a very dangerous situation, so it seemed cheap and ridiculous if neither of them died. There were pros and cons to either character being the one to die or the one to live, and finally someone suggested, "What if they both die?" And everyone was all, "No, no, that's too much, we can't lose both of them. Except, maybe...?" So they kept orbiting around that idea, and all the ways it was dramatically better than the other three alternatives, and finally, the winning argument was, "Can anyone think of a better end for either of their stories than them both going out together in this situation?" And I feel like that should be the ultimate test for any character death; is there a better ending (not necessarily a better death) possible if not here and now, or is this conclusion they've been working towards? Is this the shape of their life?
Stories teach you how to understand them as they unfold. Like, a fair number of people expected the new Battlestar Galactica to have a grim, nihilistic ending, but I never did. Right from the beginning, there were a bunch of small moments that told you what kind of story it was. Adama's instinct being to fight to the death well beyond the point where it could be productive, but being won over not be Roslin's argument that the only kind of victory they could have would be to find someplace far away and start having babies, but by seeing two people awkwardly flirting even there, at the end of the world. And then, Roslin's joy at being able to revise her population whiteboard up by one.
Or, another Ron Moore joint that's been in my mind, well, since I heard the anecdote earlier this year, but especially in light of Coda, was with regard to the second season finale of For All Mankind. A pair of characters die in the episode, and in interviews, the process in the writers' room was described. They were both going into a very dangerous situation, so it seemed cheap and ridiculous if neither of them died. There were pros and cons to either character being the one to die or the one to live, and finally someone suggested, "What if they both die?" And everyone was all, "No, no, that's too much, we can't lose both of them. Except, maybe...?" So they kept orbiting around that idea, and all the ways it was dramatically better than the other three alternatives, and finally, the winning argument was, "Can anyone think of a better end for either of their stories than them both going out together in this situation?" And I feel like that should be the ultimate test for any character death; is there a better ending (not necessarily a better death) possible if not here and now, or is this conclusion they've been working towards? Is this the shape of their life?
Heartbreaking, maybe. But I don't think unsatisfying is the word. If anything, knowing these characters' final fates gives what they go through in the years leading up to it more meaning.
I think I disagree.
If these were real people, and not simulacra, it would be different. A fictional character does not do anything; nothing it does can have any value outside of the perceptions of those who experience their stories.
With Bashir in Book 3, I got a sense of his losses and triumphs over the last several years. As a consumer, I appreciated his reflections on his life. That was good writing.
But after that, after he died and everything he ever did was erased from history, it made all the sacrifices and judgments he made have never happened. And that cheapens it for me. What was the point of solving the Andorian reproductive crisis if all Andorians would be gone in just a few years? If Bashir were a real person, I could fall back on how you live your life is ultimately the only meaning anyone has. But I am aware Julian Subatoi Bashir never existed in the first place. His sacrifices are not sacrifices that anyone actually made. There was no actual courage needed, except for the artist(s) presenting aspects of themselves up for public scrutiny. So in weighing the meaning of Julian Bashir's "life", knowing both that he does not actually exist, and that his adventures both didn't happen and yet did because I can pick up an earlier book and read them if I want, pulls me far out of the narrative, and at least for me, it necessarily devalues them.
Think about it in the opposite. Comics especially have this notoriety for bringing characters back from the dead. I wasn't a reader when Jean Grey/the Phoenix killed herself in 1980 in Uncanny X-Men #137, but I've read the story. I can see the value of that story in isolation; Jean knew she couldn't control her power and was a threat, so she sacrificed herself for the love of her friends and the entire universe. I also wasn't a reader when Jean Grey returned around X-Factor #1 in 1986. The explanation for Jean was that the real Jean Grey had been been in a cocoon, replaced some time before, and that the Phoenix, a space energy bird thing, had replaced her and copied her memories, and so, had acted (when not filled with cosmic power madness) as Jean would have. It definitely cheapens the sacrifice of Jean Grey to know Jean Grey didn't actually die. I can say this because I did not mourn a real Jean Grey. Nobody died. I don't really have to deal with the trauma of having thought someone I love died and came back from the dead. It makes death have a lack of permanence and consequence in that simulated world, and necessarily cheapens it.
And maybe that's why it's unsatisfactory. It makes me hyper-aware than none of it is real, and when I experience a story, I am trying to experience something beyond reality. I know others feel differently, and love the idea of the creators' hands behind everything, but I rarely can appreciate such things. So, going back and reading Bashir's tribulations would probably feel unsatisfactory. I either have to treat Coda's events as apocryphal, or somehow ignore my knowledge of his (and everything else's) fate and think about the value his actions have to him. This is why I consider Coda 'headapocrypha'. Sure, it 'happened', but in the same way anything happens in fiction. It didn't. And so who cares if I decide to mentally discard something unsatisfactory to give greater value to what came before? Who cares what I think? (I write as I spend excessive amounts of time thinking and typing this...)
So I’ve only read a few Litverse books and I’d like to read more. I read the first Coda book and I’m conflicted about reading the remaining two. I worry I won’t want to go back and read any of the previous books, because the grim end of Coda will put too much of a damper on things. Any advice? Should I put down Coda and go back to Destiny, for instance?
