I get what you're saying. There's a difference between "Is this good?" and "Do I like this?" Both are subjective, yes, but they're still different things and it's unfair to conflate one with the other.
Exactly.
Sci said:
I would suggest that the fact that there were many arcs from the First Splinter Timeline novels that Coda was unable to follow up on would be an indication that being the emotionally satisfying completion of a twenty-year long group of dozens of story arcs and character arcs was not one of Coda's creative goals. (Indeed, I think no novel trilogy could reasonably accomplish such a goal.)
I can’t imagine how it’s not clear to anyone who was following the lead up to the trilogy that that was THE express goal from the beginning.
I think asking
Coda to be an emotionally satisfying conclusion to what must surely be something in the area of a hundred or more novels across twenty years and at least nine or ten different series is just setting yourself up for disappointment. That's too big a burden for a trilogy to bear.
I think it's more reasonable to expect it to be an emotionally satisfying completion of the TNG Relaunch, the DS9 Relaunch, and TTN.
If it didn’t satisfy in that regard that can’t really be taken as evidence that there was a different goal in mind. How could that not be the goal, given the situation?
I mean, consider the title. "Coda." A coda in fiction is
not the climax of the story; it comes
after the climax.
In my initial review I did evaluate it in terms of the writing. I did not like Coda for many of the reasons I cited. But in my initial reviews I did say it wasn't because the writing itself was poor. I thought the authors did fine as far as the technicalities of it all (for lack of a better word). But no I did not like the story.
If that's what you're saying, I can respect that. As I said before -- I recognize that
Mad Men is an incredibly well-written, well-acted, well-produced show; I just don't like it. If that's how
Coda is for you, I can get that. It's the conflation of "I don't like it" and "It is poor quality" that frustrates me.
I do think that choosing the Devidians as villains is a major flaw of Coda, though. They’re an absolutely bonkers choice, lower middle tier villains from a lower middle tier two parter. Who in the world was hoping for a return by them,
I mean, I personally would not have chosen the Devidians, but that sort of thing is extremely subjective. Hell, the novels have made really amazing characters out of really forgettable characters or aliens more than once; the Devidians as they appeared in "Time's Arrow" really isn't the issue.
For narrative purposes, does it really matter if the antagonist is, "Group of aliens who feel no empathy for us because they evolved as parasites to feed on humanoid life" or if the antagonist is, "Group of aliens who feel no empathy for us because they are obsessed with nationalism and want to re-write history to genocide other cultures (i.e., the Krenim)"? Either way, you're dealing with an antagonist that's going to try to genocide the protagonists and their culture.
The relevant question is not "Devidian or Krenim?" The relevant question is, "How well was the choice executed?"
Personally, I think the basic idea behind the Devidians was sound, but that we needed to see more political complexity to their culture to make them feel more psychologically realistic and therefore to ground them in the sort of nihilistic behavior we can see in actual people in real life. So while I think a hell of a lot of
Coda works well, I think the execution of the Devidians wasn't quite as good as it could have been. And none of that has anything to do with the quality of the episode they were from, or fan expectations about which aliens to reuse.
There’s also the old canard that Star Trek shouldn’t have villains, it should have antagonists.
I think this is a more reasonable criticism, and I think it broadly ties into my critique of the execution of the Devidians. While I think ST can have individual villains, culturally no alien race (except maybe the Borg) should be "villainous" as a culture. The Devidians would have been a stronger dramatic presence if we had a sense that they're a complex society full of complex people that have allowed themselves as a culture to go completely off the rails and indulge in this violent nihilism, rather than portraying them as uniformly parasitic and destructive; it would have made them feel more plausible as a threat.
Which, again, is a critique of the execution of the choice, not a critique of the fundamental choice.
If you don't think Coda was fatalistic, then that illuminates why you're arguing so strenuously here. We must have read different books.
Or, we have fundamentally different conceptions of what it means to be fatalistic.
Basically, I'm arguing that we are all going to die, and that in consequence we have a choice between two broad ways to react to this fact: We can choose to become nihilists who deny that life means anything, who deny that anything matters, and who act only according to our own appetites until we die. Nihilism being, of course, a form of fatalism. Or, we can become existentialists: We can insist that we imbue life with meaning, that morality matters, and that our appetites must be tempered.
Coda is fundamentally about the conflict between nihilism and existentialism. The Devidians are nihilists -- in their view, nobody has any rights, nothing is right or wrong, and they will act to satisfy their appetites even if the cost of this is untold horror. Picard and company are existentialists -- in their view, even people they will never have any capacity to meet or be known by matter and have rights and must be protected, right and wrong are essential, and they will act to sacrifice of themselves to protect others. The act of being willing to sacrifice in fact imbues their lives with meaning, entirely apart from anyone else even knowing about it.
Not technically nameless, no. Just a cipher. I've read the books from The Fall leading up to Coda, and I never got any clear impression of the politics or personality of Zh'Tarash, nor did one emerge in the pages of Coda.
I agree zh'Tarash wasn't as well-defined as Bacco, but I don't think she was nearly as lacking in definition as you're implying here. Remember, as a zhen in an exclusive relationship with only one other partner, zh'Tarash is basically the Andorian equivalent of a politician in a same-sex marriage in modern America; that gives you a sense of her bravery, to expose herself to that kind of public attack from long before she was as prominent as she became. She was the leader of the Modern Progressive Party and held onto her belief in those principles and in union with the Federation even during after finding out the UFP hid info that could save the Andorians, even after the Federation President acted to prevent the Andorian people from getting the help they needed, and even after a wave of nationalism and xenophobia overcame Andor. And she acted decisively to bring Section 31 to justice, even when doing so could have politically hurt her administration.
But, she was also not as trustful of Picard as she should have been. She had, essentially, the reaction you said you wanted to see more people have: the reaction of, "Surely we can fix this without doing THAT!" She had the kind of skepticism you wanted out of characters.
(Nan Bacco, now, she had a clear sense of identity. I kinda wish it had been possible to tell this story with Nan Bacco still presiding over the Federation.)
I live in hope that a version of Bacco will be introduced as Federation President in one of the 24th Century shows in production these days. She wouldn't really fit in PIC's depiction of a regressive movement coming to power in the UFP in after the Mars Attack, but I'd like to think that she's the one who got the synth ban lifted after PIC S1.
I think that's what bothered me the most. I get it, they sacrificed their universe to stop the Devidians. But they not only sacrificed their universe...it was much worse, that universe now never existed. They completely unraveled that timeline (along with the Mirror Universe novels).
I would suggest that that's getting hung up on a plot device. To say that they were "erased" might be meaningful as a technical description of events, but for both practical and moral purposes, it's just another version of dying.
It just left me with a bad taste and a feeling of hopelessness (to be clear not from a clinical standpoint of course--it is just a fictional story after all, but from the perspective within the story). Like what was the point of stopping the Borg once and for all, what was the point of Riker and Troi having Tasha, or Picard and Crusher having Rene, or of bringing down Section 31 once and for all, or all the rest of it,
I mean, that's kind of the point, though. All of those characters were always going to die one way or the other, but still those actions were important and meaningful even in spite of the inevitability of death. Even if the Temporal Apocalypse had not occurred, death would still have come for everyone -- but the point is that you
keep doing the right thing, you keep imbuing life with meaning in spite of its temporary nature. You chose existentialism over nihilism.
I'm going to make a personal comparison here, because the events of this novel spoke to me and spoke to my experience. Ten years ago tomorrow, my mother suffered a stroke just before her 51st birthday. The stroke left her disabled. I had to scramble to find a second job to support her while she waited to get on Disability, and fast, because she had no savings. I ended up working myself to the bone for months on end while she waited to be approved, paying her rent and mine. And then once she was approved, I still had to send her a significant portion of my income every month, because our country's idea of an adequate safety net for disabled people is loose pocket change and spare bread crumbs. I got sucked into the poverty trap, I lost friendships, and I ended up stuck in a bad situation for a long time until I met my now-fiancee, who helped me get out of that hole. I sacrificed
a lot for my mom.
And then at the start of August last year, she was admitted to the hospital. There was a blockage of blood to her colon; it was half-dead. She had to have two surgeries to remove the necrotic tissue and restore blood flow to the remaining parts of her colony. She survived another nine days; she was improving and the doctors thought she could be discharged. But then she had a heart attack as a result of the stress of the surgeries and she died.
It was a very painful thing. And there are times I get resentful that I sacrificed so much but only got to have another nine years with her.
But those were the choices I made, and I would not change them just because my mother only had another nine years after her stroke. The sacrifices I made were not in vain just because my mother was still going to die. I did what I had to do to live up to my principles. Life still had meaning and those choices still have meaning, because I imbue them with meaning, in spite of the inevitability of my mother's death. Because she was alive
then.
And that's why I don't think the eventual demise of the First Splinter Timeline robs any of those prior stories of their meaning. Life does not lose meaning because it ends, and sacrifices do not lose meaning because they can't purchase immortality.
because within the story now, none of that happened. It's not like the litverse universe just ended. Based on what I read, it never happened.
But it
did happen. Being "erased from time" within the fictional narrative does not mean that that timeline did not at one point exist, just like erasing writing from a page does not mean that that writing was never there. And within the fictional narrative, someone
will always know and remember the denizens of the First Splinter -- the Prophets.
And, had all those prior sacrifices not been made, the Devidians would have destroyed every other timeline, including the canonical timeline of
Star Trek: Lower Decks,
Star Trek: Prodigy, and
Star Trek: Picard. Every time you see Mariner palling around with Boimler, or Rok-Tahk saving Dal, or Picard embracing Soji, it is because of the sacrifices of the heroes of the First Splinter Timeline that they can do that. And the Prophets know that, and will remember. (And probably the Q, too.)
If Picard had been a better show....IMO....then I might have felt a little differently about Coda.
I would suggest that
Coda should be evaluated on its own terms as a narrative, not as "thing that enables
Picard." Also, LD and PROD are part of the canonical 2380s as well.
