11:59

[Guy Gardener]

UM. Remember the episode. Her life was so shit hat her kids started, or she herself started inventing bullshit fantasies about a more fun life that they plastered over the top of what she lived.

It's like like when you find out that the real Santa Claus used to cut off the fingers of children and run away with them from the 16th century, and the real real Santa Claus was a marketing campaign from Coca Cola in the 1930s... How are you supposed to have faith in the fat bastard who brings kids presents on Christmas Eve?

Besides, Janeway said in Futures End that she had no idea what her relatives were up to in 20th century, who is to say why someone altered the timeline, starting to tell fake false lying stories about Shannon to some of Janeway's recent Ancestors if it wasn't Kathryn herself at some later date trying to build a better Janeway.

Although why make a perfect version of yourself if you're still going to be around to observe and view that perfection and feel second best after ever a limited amount of judging. Imagine an finite council of crosstime Janeways where "our" Janeway is the worst because she can't alter herself more so than keep creating alternates built from wiser choices... Until her inferiority complex thrashes like a raging bull and she starts making lesser Janeways, sub Janeways, deformed Janeways so she can fell better about herself.

 

[F. King Daniel]

How much will we really know about our ancestors in 400 years?

I'm reminded of Janeway dismissing Kirk's claim that he'd met Da Vinci... and this from the woman who rescued Emilia Earhart!

But seriously, people may well be reading their great-great-great grandmother's old blogs in 400 years' time. Or watching ancient YouTube videos of them at their wedding.

Barring the EMP's from WWIII wiping all the servers of course.

 

[exodus]

How much will we really know about our ancestors in 400 years?

I'm reminded of Janeway dismissing Kirk's claim that he'd met Da Vinci... and this from the woman who rescued Emilia Earhart!

But seriously, people may well be reading their great-great-great grandmother's old blogs in 400 years' time. Or watching ancient YouTube videos of them at their wedding.

Barring the EMP's from WWIII wiping all the servers of course.

Assuming that Blogs & Youtube will still be around and not upgraded into new formats in 400 years, just like all those folks that have home movies taped on VHS tapes. Just less than 25 years ago, many would have laughed at the idea of the iPhone. Not to mention nobody even now keeps a dead account on file more than a few years.

 

[kimc]

Not a bad idea. 11:59 is one of those "love it or hate it" sort of episodes, IMO. I love it, personally, so I think that might be kind of fun.

This seems like one of those years where I don't have huge plans for New Years anyway.

Well I have plans which may fly out the window if the expected blizzard materializes. Can't say I'd watch this episode even if sitting home though - it's one I usually skip when re-watching the series.

 

[Lord Manitou]

Must admit the writrers mastered all the intricities that might be Janeway or could be Janeway. It made the storyline look real and gave us a healthy aspect of the near future, even though it was just a high glossed story within a story.

 

[Guy Gardener]

Think it about it.

female ancestor anshemster.

she was tracking her janewayism, as much as her O'Donnelisticality.

Henry is more representative of her usual behaviour and indicative of her behaviour that episode.

Hir mindset is stodgy and wrong.

A cute girl explains that s/he is wrong.

Cute girl is then assimilated into hir family.

 

[Guy Gardener]

I'm hugging the international dateline.

It's twelve 27 am on jan 1st 2011 and I'm not... 2 of 10 are you planning on the episode finishing at midnight or starting? Well, I'm not watching 11:59.

Personally I've been watching a marathon of Wings.

 

[Saxman1]

I just watched this ep yesterday, because it was next up in my season 5 marathon (I managed to finish the season, too yesterday). This ep at heart had some good ideas and it was nice to see Kate play someone else for a change. However, agreed, Henry looked WAY too old for her, even though the actors are only 11 years apart in age. He looked more like her father or possibly grandfather.

Despite some good ideas at the center of the story, I found the pace glacial and I say this as a person who does NOT require non-stop action. It's funny, I found myself skipping quite a bit of season 5 on this go-around, something I don't do too much with this series....I would have been ok with skipping this ep, to be honest, definitely will the next go-round....

 

[BlobVanDam]

I saw the episode (along with all of the rest) for the first time only recently. To me it was one of the weaker episodes. I just never felt any reason to care about the new characters in the episode or what they were doing, even if one of them was Janeway's ancestor. And it didn't connect to the current timeline of the show in any way I felt was important.

 

[JanewayRulz!]

On my wall are scores of photographs of my family, the oldest dating back to approx 1860.

Sometimes it helps to know where you came from, when you are wondering where you are going.

Shannon O'Donnell was a "has been"... until she met Henry Janeway and reinvented her life.

Her children didn't "make up" her influence on them, they just told it like it was. She was a matriach that guided them and their children for years.

The centuries that passed between then and now caused her family to lose the facts of her life, and instead a fiction grew in its place.

Kathryn's inspiration, however, was "real to her", to misquote B'Elanna from another ep. Did it matter that Shannon wasn't a Mars Astronaut? Does it matter whether or not George Washington couldn't tell a lie. Did he really confess to chopping down that darned cherry tree?

I liked Chakotay's take on her loss of faith in Shannon.

JANEWAY: She married him and changed her name, but she certainly never changed history.
CHAKOTAY: Don't be too hard on her. She may not have known she was supposed to live up to your expectations.
JANEWAY: Oh, I'll get over it. But the question is, when we get back to Earth, how will I break the news to Aunt Martha?

Kathryn is too close to the story, too wrapped up in the sexiness of its original framework to realize Shannon MOST DEFINATELY changed history.

She changed it by NOT giving up, when she was so USED to giving up before she met Henry. She changed it by producing heirs upon heirs upon heirs... who eventually produced Kathryn's Father, ADMIRAL Janeway.... who himself contributed in producing CAPTAIN Kathryn Janeway of the Star Ship Voyager.

What I really liked about this ep, was that when you sit it next to "Living Witness", you realize that in 1 season, the Voyager's stories traversed a thousand years. 300 into Kathryn's past, and 700 into the EMH's future.

 

[SonicRanger]

The main problem is that the Millennium Gate obviously doesn't exist in our universe, nor did the writers have reason to suspect it would. That places Trek outside our universe and, thus, makes it much less interesting or relevant to us as viewers.

 

[Guy Gardener]

So, what were these people doing during the Eugenics war?

Khan controlled quater of the planet through some very bloodthirsty means while Henry was counting his pennies in his dinky dusty little bookshop.

But then I suppose plenty of people own bookshops right now while America is playing war in a couple countries. War just doesn't seem to turn every ones life on it's ass like it used to.

 

[froot]

The main problem is that the Millennium Gate obviously doesn't exist in our universe, nor did the writers have reason to suspect it would. That places Trek outside our universe and, thus, makes it much less interesting or relevant to us as viewers.

The Eugenics Wars already set Trek outside "our" universe, even though VOY kind of ignored 'em. So did the events of Future's End. I doubt WWIII is going to work exactly as described in First Contact/TNG, either.

Just because it isn't exactly our future (maybe ours will be similar, after all ) doesn't make Trek less relevant. And 11:59 did reference the very real overblown 2000 hype.

 

[tomalak301]

Just because it isn't exactly our future (maybe ours will be similar, after all ) doesn't make Trek less relevant. And 11:59 did reference the very real overblown 2000 hype.

This is why I love that episode. I just felt it captured the spirit of the emotions at the time very well, even though the MG isn't exactly in our universe.

 

[Guy Gardener]

The main problem is that the Millennium Gate obviously doesn't exist in our universe, nor did the writers have reason to suspect it would. That places Trek outside our universe and, thus, makes it much less interesting or relevant to us as viewers.

The Eugenics Wars already set Trek outside "our" universe, even though VOY kind of ignored 'em. So did the events of Future's End. I doubt WWIII is going to work exactly as described in First Contact/TNG, either.

Just because it isn't exactly our future (maybe ours will be similar, after all ) doesn't make Trek less relevant. And 11:59 did reference the very real overblown 2000 hype.

Are you forgetting the Sleeper Ship model in Rain Robinson's Office, which almost said to the audience "Go fuck your self and your whipped obsession to canon and continuity, we know and we don't care."

 

[SonicRanger]

The main problem is that the Millennium Gate obviously doesn't exist in our universe, nor did the writers have reason to suspect it would. That places Trek outside our universe and, thus, makes it much less interesting or relevant to us as viewers.

The Eugenics Wars already set Trek outside "our" universe, even though VOY kind of ignored 'em. So did the events of Future's End. I doubt WWIII is going to work exactly as described in First Contact/TNG, either.

Just because it isn't exactly our future (maybe ours will be similar, after all ) doesn't make Trek less relevant. And 11:59 did reference the very real overblown 2000 hype.

I expect predictions of TOS of future decades, made 40+ years ago, to be wrong, especially since no one expected the show would still be watched decades later.

The VOY writers, though, were dealing with something that was supposedly going to be built starting in two years and would have been in the planning stages already when the episode aired... and they knew the show would be in syndication in a few years.

Entirely different situations.

Besides, Greg Cox did an admirable job fitting the Eugenics Wars into our history in his novels. But there is no Millennium Gate under construction.

 

[henbane]

The main problem is that the Millennium Gate obviously doesn't exist in our universe, nor did the writers have reason to suspect it would. That places Trek outside our universe and, thus, makes it much less interesting or relevant to us as viewers.

The Eugenics Wars already set Trek outside "our" universe, even though VOY kind of ignored 'em. So did the events of Future's End. I doubt WWIII is going to work exactly as described in First Contact/TNG, either.

Just because it isn't exactly our future (maybe ours will be similar, after all ) doesn't make Trek less relevant. And 11:59 did reference the very real overblown 2000 hype.

I expect predictions of TOS of future decades, made 40+ years ago, to be wrong, especially since no one expected the show would still be watched decades later.

The VOY writers, though, were dealing with something that was supposedly going to be built starting in two years and would have been in the planning stages already when the episode aired... and they knew the show would be in syndication in a few years.

Entirely different situations.

Besides, Greg Cox did an admirable job fitting the Eugenics Wars into our history in his novels. But there is no Millennium Gate under construction.

I disagree.

History shows us that most authors/writers/artistic creators hope their works will survive and be appreciated for a long time and Roddenberry would have been no different in that respect. In additon, with his vision for the future, I doubt very much that he wrote Star Trek TOS without considering what they future maybe like decades later. Granted, many would not have predicted the success and longevity of Star Trek, but I dont think you can say that TOS was written and conceived without the future in mind (yet Voyager was written with the future in mind).

More importantly, to declare one series more relevant to us than another is perhaps forgetting that this is Science Fiction
TV Show. Sure, while it maybe nice to see some of the predictions made in fiction come true, it doesn't really matter because after all, it's fiction.

 

[SonicRanger]

^^^

No, I'm saying that predicting 30 or 40 years into the future (especially in an era before home video, DVD, on-demand TV, syndication, TV Land, internet streaming, etc) is much different than predicting something just a year down the road (especially when the previously mentioned technologies exist).

Even when "11:59" aired originally, you knew that this wasn't your universe because you'd have heard of such a thing on the news. On the other hand, in the late 1960s, everyone probably thought that there was another world war only a few decades off, so that didn't rip them out of the show the same way that the Millennium Gate does now.

 

[AuntKate]

The main problem is that the Millennium Gate obviously doesn't exist in our universe, nor did the writers have reason to suspect it would. That places Trek outside our universe and, thus, makes it much less interesting or relevant to us as viewers.

I am guessing that you dislike "The City on the Edge of Forever" because Helen Keeler "doesn't exist in our universe" either, and you don't like "The Wrath of Kahn" because Kahn "doesn't exist in our universe." And the "Little Green Men," if they existed, probably weren't Ferengi, etc. Disliking a Star Trek episode because the writers take liberties with current history is just a bit too precious for me. Fact is, Star Trek doesn't "really" exist in our universe, either, except, of course, as the figment of some very fertile imaginations.

Just sayin'.

 

[SonicRanger]

I am guessing that you dislike "The City on the Edge of Forever" because Helen Keeler "doesn't exist in our universe" either, and you don't like "The Wrath of Kahn" because Kahn "doesn't exist in our universe." And the "Little Green Men," if they existed, probably weren't Ferengi, etc. Disliking a Star Trek episode because the writers take liberties with current history is just a bit too precious for me. Fact is, Star Trek doesn't "really" exist in our universe, either, except, of course, as the figment of some very fertile imaginations.

Would you know if a person named Edith Keeler lived in New York City during the 1930s Great Depression? No.

Would you know if the supposed Roswell aliens had big ears, loved profit, and accidentally travelled back in time? No.

And as I pointed out, Greg Cox came up with a clever way to rationalize the Eugenics Wars with our history. And there were plenty of wars in the Eastern Hemisphere during the 1990s, most of which the average American has no idea occurred:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_1990–2002

And as I've said repeatedly, TOS was predicting 30 years into the future, so you have to cut them more slack than VOY centering an episode on a huge tower in Indiana that should be standing now.