In Lifelines, there was a throwaway line by Admiral Hayes (who looked surprisingly vibrant for a dead guy - and come on, why Admiral Hayes? I'm pretty sure that Admiral Paris has taken Voyager under his jurisdiction by now, what with him assuming command of Pathfinder)
I remember that bugged me too. FC implies pretty heavily that the dude is dead, if you ask me.
that was "We have dispatched 2 Deep Space Vessels to rendezvous with you, with any luck they should meet you in the next 5-6 years...
And that was it, no one ever mentions it again, for example in Author Author when they establish contact with Earth, would it have been too out of the way for Janeway to contact those ships and...oh i don't know...thank them for their commitment to Voyager that they're willing to put their lives on hold for 3 decades to come and rescue the ship...
I know it was a throwaway line, but it seems so stupid that the writers were introducing this premise, only to discard it...
You know, I'd forgotten all about it until reading this thread. I haven't seen "Life Lines" in
ages, which is no doubt why, but it really is a shame that it was just dropped like that.
Its lines like that that leave openings for the novels!
No way. The editors and writers are too busy trying to wedge all three concurrent series into one big story. *yawn*
While it has worked well for those avidly reading the books (Destiny was excellent IMHO) I know at least 3 Trek fans who haven't read any of the new stuff and won't read it because they feel they are just too far behind. It's clearly jumping into the middle of a very long convoluted tale and some people aren't interested in doing that. I lent one of them the first Destiny book because I think the story of Erika Hernandez is fantastic and you don't need much if any context for it. She did enjoy it but she also called me from the train to yell "What is this crap, Janeway is DEAD???" and also called me a few other times about what the Titan and Picard things.. and was pretty much lost for a lot of it.
I'm wondering how much it might effect sales as far as getting new readers when a person picks up a book and sees it is part of a long story line. Another problem we have in this country is that most of the books are unavailable after they've been out for a while so to track down the whole series you have to go to ebay.
It all takes rather a lot of time and investment to follow Star Trek lit nowadays.
The availability issue is one I can't disagree with (I've encountered the same problem at times). But... lost? Everyone is different, I guess. Before reading anything else - and having not read a Trek book in AGES at the time - I read
Before Dishonor and then
Greater Than the Sum. Didn't feel the least bit lost. A friend of mine read only the latter, then went on to read Destiny, as well as
Losing the Peace. He hasn't read ANY other Trek books, period, and is fine.
Like I said, I guess everyone is different, but... it's a bit baffling to me, honestly. While reading these books, I have encountered only a VERY small number of gaps caused by not having read certain other books first that troubled me, and they were all filled in with a grand total of about thirty minutes on Memory Beta.
The dangling plot thread I always thought they should have picked up was from The Next Generation episode, "The Nth Degree". Especially once Reg Barkley was in contact with Voyager, he should have remembered to recommend that Voyager steer for the center of the galaxy to make contact with the Cytherians. The Federation was on good terms with them after the Enterprise's visit, so the Cytherians could have gotten Voyager home from their space in minutes. That would have cut 20-30 years off their trip...
At least! That's actually a really cool idea. Though I suppose it would be hard to do anything with it that wouldn't just get the ship home TOO fast, destroying the premise of the show, but making contact with them impossible for whatever reason until very late in the series could dodge that problem.
I think we have to assume that in the 7 years Voyager's been away there's been a lot of advancement in Warp technology (The Prometheus was rated for 9.99) and if they dispatched two Prometheus class ships: the way I had it explained to me was with a ship with 4 nacelles, they can cruise at much higher speeds, because they only use one pair of nacelles at a time and when one starts to overhear the other pair takes over...
Thing is, though, 9.99 was the rated
maximum. Even with 4 nacelles, I don't think a ship can just pick a direction, crank the warp drive to max, and then never slow down. Still, under a decade might be reasonable if the ship can maintain even 9.9 for long enough at a time, give how much distance toward home
Voyager had already covered by the time Hayes informs them of the two ships.
Also, they may not be Prometheus-class; Starfleet has been shown to be absurdly proficient at upgrading existing classes with new technologies, so it's possible that by s6, that swanky new warp drive had been outfitted on a couple other compatible classes. I prefer this option, since it removes the (incredibly stupid) Prometheus itself from the equation.
The Chakotay/Seska baby was a HUGE plot thread that I'm amazed they never followed up on. I just can't believe Chak would let his baby go like that.
teacake pointed out that it actually wasn't his anyway, but even if it
had been... every now and then, there's a plot thread that I am
glad was left dangling. If they had brought the baby back into the show, we would likely have had another Kazon episode after "Basics" to go with it!
Not worth it.
The return of Suspiria (the female caretaker) was also a pretty big dangling plot thread.
I consider this one of the biggest, most "how could you miss that?!" dropped balls EVER in Trek, simply because of the potential for using her in the series finale, instead of the damn Borg. It would have brought Voyager full circle (the concept, not the book
) by returning the series to its roots for the finale, the same way that TNG and DS9 did. Granted, we will never know what could have been, but my suspicion is that such a story would be at least a bit better, possibly WORLDS better, than the disaster that is "Endgame."
Dragon's Teeth, as mentioned- it was pretty odd when the whole point of that episode was unintended consequences and... there weren't any!
Yeah, this is another big dropped ball. I was looking forward to seeing more of these guys, but alas...
