The Sound of Her Voice

[Drizzt]

OK, so I just got done watching "The Sound of Her Voice" from Season 6 for the 177th time tonight. And, a question occurred to me.
When the crew gets to the L-Class planet, and discovers that Captain Cusak has been dead for 3 years, Chief O'Brien hypothesizes that her comm signal was time-shifted forwards in time by the neutron radiation in the area, and that likewise their return comm signal went backwards in time, thus allowing them to communicate with her.

When they discover the body, all communication with her ceases, and they decide to give the body a proper burial.

But, why did communication with her cease? I would assume that once they went back to the ship and got away from the planet, they would still be able to communicate with her, since she is still alive there in the past. I know that when they stopped talking to her via the comm signals, she was on the verge of dying due to running out of the "Tri Ox" drug that she needed to breathe, but, shouldn't she have still been there, since she was in the past? I don't see why them discovering her remains in the 'here and now', made it so that they couldn't talk to her any more.

Anywho, I've seen this episode a ton of times, and that never occurred to me before. I always get a headache with this type of thing. I guess I should take Captain Janeway's advice: "When it comes to understanding temporal anomalies, the best advice is, don't even try."

If anyone has any info that will make my head stop hurting, I would appreciate it.

 

[Timo]

Well, just before our heroes went down to the surface, Dr. Bashir had this to say:

"Captain Cusak just lost consciousness. She's in the last stages of CO2 poisoning. If she's got any chance at all, we have to get her to Sickbay in the next 45 minutes."

It doesn't sound as if there would have been anybody left to talk to when our heroes got back to orbit, then. From the viewpoint of the heroes, Cusak died while they were in the process of discovering her body.

Which is quite a coincidence, I guess. But not a gigantic one. She only stayed alive for, what, five days? Our heroes, or some other starship within listening range, might have arrived a day earlier or a day sooner. Perhaps two. But they happened to arrive about an hour too late (plus the three years due to the time anomaly, of course!), and would have been more than a day too late if they hadn't told Cusak to adjust her triox dosage to meet the projected rescue date.

A bigger coincidence IMHO is that the sole survivor of the Olympia was her captain. Why not some other crew member who had a shorter trip to the lifepods and wasn't going to stay at her or his post to the very last?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Destructor]

It was a pretty poor episode, all told. If they'd just removed the twist it would have been just as tragic, surely.

 

[Jono]

A bigger coincidence IMHO is that the sole survivor of the Olympia was her captain. Why not some other crew member who had a shorter trip to the lifepods and wasn't going to stay at her or his post to the very last?

Timo Saloniemi

Cusak was the only survivor to contact anyone. The quicker evacuees might have avoiding falling down to the surface of the planet and that would mean their distress calls would remain in their present (2371) and also would mean they wouldn't be able to contact Cusak if they realised she was alive and transmitting as they wouldn't be able to connect since their signals would time shift as well. So she might not be the only survivor but since getting from the bridge (especially as she would have had to be carried) to a pod would have taken longer doomed her pod to be the only one to crash to the surface or the only one to survive the impact. Plus the fact she was unconscious could have helped her during the impact in that she was completely limp or that someone was looking after her and "shielded" her in some way from the worst of it.

 

[Timo]

Good ideas there!

One wonders what would have happened to the other survivors, though. Apparently, somebody picking up their signals was always a distinct possibility, as the Defiant did so on a convoy escort mission, not during a push into remote or hostile space. At that stage of the war, the convoys wouldn't have been operated in formerly hostile regions; if anything, it was the enemy who was operating in formerly UFP-controlled space at that time.

It was a pretty poor episode, all told. If they'd just removed the twist it would have been just as tragic, surely.

I'd say there would have been no point in telling the story without this twist. Failing to save Cusak's life by the narrowest of margins would have been tragic, yes - but also utterly and painfully cliched and unrealistic. Failing by a greater margin would have been realistic but unsatisfactory, and would have cast our heroes in a bad light. Succeeding would have been un-tragic and un-dramatic, and would have presented the complication of what to do with this new and superfluous character that nevertheless played a major role in the lives of our heroes now. But sorta-succeeding, yet fantastically-failing... Well, that was both tragic, dramatic and interesting enough to warrant telling this story in the scifi context.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Tiberius]

It was a pretty poor episode, all told. If they'd just removed the twist it would have been just as tragic, surely.

+1.

 

[jamestyler]

There's one line in this that I love. When it's all over and Cusak's played therapist for everyone, O'Brien gives a big speech with something like "One of us might not be here"

Not an exact quote, but as soon as he says it, we get a close up on Dax. Coincidental? Probably, but still some good hintng, even if accidental

 

[Admiral James Kirk]

Good hinting? It was painfully obvious who was gonna bite it. They could have hung a sign around Jadzia's neck reading "Dead Meat" and it would have been more subtle.

 

[Kirby]

I still don't know why nobody bothered to check on Captain Cusack in the Starfleet database. That would have been a pretty easy Dominion ploy to suck in an enemy ship.

 

[DanCPA]

I still don't know why nobody bothered to check on Captain Cusack in the Starfleet database. That would have been a pretty easy Dominion ploy to suck in an enemy ship.

I would imagine that its improper for anyone other than Sisko (as either the C.O. or as someone with the rank of Captain) to examine the service file of a Captain. And we saw that Ben's worries were elsewhere.