I believe Trent's point is that instead of "These Are The Voyages" asking us to swallow the fact that the ENT crew was not promoted in six years, we now have The Good That Men Do asking us to swallow that every single record from 2155 to 2161 was altered to make it look like no one was promoted for six years and that Trip was still alive the entire time. One of them is stupid but simple, while one of them is implausibly complicated.
Yes, thank you; I have a hard time wrapping my mind around the scope at which this conspiracy would need to operate, and as such a hard time framing my discussions of it. (And of course, it would have to extend beyond 2161: if everybody from one day to the next gets kicked up a rank grade or two, it's too obvious.) Do I roll my eyes at the idea that none of the senior staff got promoted, killed or transfered off the ship in the space of six years? Yes. But there's precedent in the other series, and ultimately it's a simple sin of omission. The implausibility of there being no promotions is dwarfed by the incomprehensibility of the conspiracy required to rewrite six years of history to make one person seem alive and active when believed dead (though actually alive but elsewhere), now extended to his crewmates' ranks and--what else? There's leeway in terms of personality since that's something that we need to be reconstructed from records and memoirs, but there still can't be radical changes to the characters without them falling under the conspiracy's purview. This is treating a papercut by amputating the hand.
Life is complicated, and while I accept the notion of the implausibility of the conspiracy, there is no one alive in the 2360s to contradict it. History is written by the victors and a lot can happen in two hundred years.
Which actually raises a good point: when was history changed, and why? Ideally, it would have to be outside or at the end of living memory, otherwise there is too great a risk that someone who knew Tucker, or knew the person or persons who replaced him as chief engineer during those six years, or were involved in with crewmembers who had their rank changed, or any of the other incalculable contacts on and off a highly-documented and historically pre-eminent ship of just under a hundred people, discovering the change. And if Archer's lifespan is any indication, that's almost a century's worth of time. But even setting aside living memory, I can't believe such major astropolitical events as the founding of the Coalition and the Romulan War would not draw the attention of historians and political scientists (and if the academia of 22nd century is anything like our modern institutions, a few years if not less after they occured). One engineer in the fleet probably won't be expected to draw much attention by himself, but Archer and the Enterprise played a major role in founding the alliance, and as the most advanced ship in Earth's fleet at the beginning of the war (after the loss of the Columbia), will also be expected to be a spearhead during at least the early years of the conflict (being invited to speak at the founding of the Federation also indicates that Archer was still a prominent figure by 2161 - and don't tell me that's the wrong speech, because I refuse to believe that anyone, even 31, could fuck with the records of something that would have been as massively documented and received as much media coverage as that), so Tucker can be expected to have been noted, or not noted after 2155, even if only tangentially--and of course who was on Archer's crew and what their ranks were, ditto. This is the kind of stuff historical enthusiasts, let alone professionals, just love. That means that in addition to the plethora of primary sources that would have to be modified, deleted and created to perpetrate this conspiracy, all secondary writings on and about these events would have to likewise be modified, which raises the new challenge of how to effectuate such a change without the people actually working on these subjects noticing that their data--and possibly the works they have, themselves, previously published--had been modified. And the founding of a government and the major conflict related to it seems like a subject unlikely to fall out of favour and study, particularly in a civilization the size of the Federation which must have a spawling academy numbering in the millions across all member worlds. So even waiting after all those involved were dead before making the change had it's challenges, but it also raises the question of why one would make such a change at such a late date. I found the reasons for faking Tucker's death in TGTMD, in the immediacy of events, thoroughly unconvincing; I can't imagine why anybody would go through all that effort to change the date of events merely to make it harder to discover that his death was faked (which, in and of itself, is preposterous: the massive historical contradictions that arise from such sweeping change makes it more likely, not less, that someone will take interest), a century or more after the events. What's being protected when all those involved have died? Maybe there's something still to come in the novel line, but at the moment there's no call for it at all.
Man, I have a headache.
Fictitiously yours, Trent Roman
[The Worlds of DS9 that you contributed to also made my top 5].
