DS9 Millennium
- Thread starter Smellincoffee
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I enjoyed it my last time through, though about my one complaint was that it felt like it was pointing a flashing neon light at Jadzia about her upcoming death. It was like being hit by the anvil of foreshadowing.
Actually that was the main problem I had with it. I don't think there needed to be an explanation for why the Cardassians didn't blow up the station. I mean, when Sisko and Starfleet had to abandon the station at the end of season 5, they didn't blow it up either -- because they intended to take it back eventually. I think Dukat would've certainly felt the same way -- that ceding Terok Nor to Bajor was a temporary setback. So he would've had his people smash up the place to make it less valuable to its new occupiers, but leave it intact for when it fell back into his hands, as he always wanted it to.
Except the trilogy was published after the series ended (indeed, the frame story situates it as essentially a post-finale story), so it wasn't really foreshadowing, it was following up. It was meant to be read and reacted to with the full awareness of what had come after its events.
And I did like the poetic symmetry that, in a sense,
it let Jadzia avenge her death by being the one to bring down the alternate Dukat.
I really like the Ds9 Millenium books and have the omnibus I read the books again last year the story holds up really well. I likehow the ds9 characters are written in this series by the Reeves-Stevens at one time I thought the ds9 Millniumn was also going to include a Startrek ds9 video game that was canceled.I remember reading somewhere the Grigarri were created for the videogame.
The game wasn't cancelled. It was called "Deep Space Nine: The Fallen" and it did have Grigari in it.
Here's what the Grigari looked like:
Not what I imagined when I read the novels.
Not what I imagined when I read the novels.
I don't buy the idea that following your exact trajectory when slingshotting around the sun again is the difference between returing to your original future or the one altered by your actions in the past - the "Feynmen curve" or whatever it was called.
BIG SPOILERS:
Also, the mission of the USS Phoenix seemed to be fundamentally flawed. An alternate reality is an alternate reality. Go back, make changes and create a new future. So going back, making changes (planting bombs), hiding them and setting them to detonate only after the timeship's point of departure is wishful thinking. Just because the changes can't be seen doesn't mean they weren't made. The Phoenix should have simply vanished and whatever they did in the past affect some other timeline, not the one they left. Like the 23rd century Klingon war fleets sent to Earth's past, or like Spock and Nero in "Countdown"/ST'09.
BIG SPOILERS:
Also, the mission of the USS Phoenix seemed to be fundamentally flawed. An alternate reality is an alternate reality. Go back, make changes and create a new future. So going back, making changes (planting bombs), hiding them and setting them to detonate only after the timeship's point of departure is wishful thinking. Just because the changes can't be seen doesn't mean they weren't made. The Phoenix should have simply vanished and whatever they did in the past affect some other timeline, not the one they left. Like the 23rd century Klingon war fleets sent to Earth's past, or like Spock and Nero in "Countdown"/ST'09.
Okay, 'anvil of foreshadowing' may not have been the correct term, but I still felt like on a few occasions the narrative went over the top in establishing the idea that Jadzia was going to die in the near future. I don't necessarily argue against the moment you bring up on the symmetry side, but along with the other moments, it felt like too much.
If the trilogy were taken on its own, apart from the show itself, I'd enjoy the subversion of the 'make a character happiest, kill them soon after' trope, but with the greater tapestry of the DS9 story, it felt like too much for me. I still enjoy the trilogy, it was just a few points against.
Here's what the Grigari looked like:
Not what I imagined when I read the novels.
That may be only one possible permutation of what a Grigari can look like. I always imagined them as being rather Borg-like, in that Grigari technology takes over other life forms and eventually makes them completely machinelike. Kind of like Adrik Thorsen in Federation. So depending on what the 'root' individual looks like, it could be anything.
It's just a clay shed. Nothing to boast about.
So far the preponderance of evidence seems to be in favor of time travel altering the original timeline, rather than creating a separate one. We've seen it time and time again, in "City on the Edge of Forever" and "Yesterday's Enterprise" and "Year of Hell" and First Contact and others.
Star Trek '09 is the only canonical example I can think of with time travel creating branches instead of looping back on itself. There may be others, but "one timeline with alterations" is far more common.
"Yesteryear" pretty much assumes that the Spock timeline and the Thelin timeline are coexisting parallels. When Spock goes back to restore his own past, he wishes Thelin long life and prosperity in his own world, implying he expects that world to survive. (And Kirk describes the Guardian in his log as "the focus of all the timelines of our galaxy.")
And I explained in Watching the Clock how there's really no contradiction between the two models -- changing the past does create a separate timeline, and has to, because by definition two versions of the same moment in time coexist simultaneously. It's nonsense to say one version of today comes before another version of today, because they're both at the same time. The "change" comes at the moment of the original time travel, when the two timelines that coexisted from the moment of the branching reconverge back into one, with only the events of the altered timeline being remembered. So "altering the original timeline" is really just a special case of "creating branching timelines," one where the branches eventually reconverge.
And I explained in Watching the Clock how there's really no contradiction between the two models -- changing the past does create a separate timeline, and has to, because by definition two versions of the same moment in time coexist simultaneously. It's nonsense to say one version of today comes before another version of today, because they're both at the same time. The "change" comes at the moment of the original time travel, when the two timelines that coexisted from the moment of the branching reconverge back into one, with only the events of the altered timeline being remembered. So "altering the original timeline" is really just a special case of "creating branching timelines," one where the branches eventually reconverge.
I always sorta figured that there was a little more method to time travel than has been let on, and that Picard, despite his Irumodic Syndrome, had figured out how to guarantee that the Phoenix would be going back in their own timeline (à la First Contact, and not Star Trek '09).
So does your model assume that the Abrams timeline will overwrite the prime timeline (i.e. reconverge with it) at the moment Nero and Spock Prime travel back? If not, how is that different, in your view?
"Countdown" showed us that Picard, Data and the injured Worf still existed when Nero and Spock vanished. Bob Orci told us to "think 'Parallels' (TNG)" when trying to understand the new movie.
Millenium made it clear that it was using ST'09-style multiverse theory for it's time travel, and not the single-stream universe model. It was the trilogy's inconstistancy with itself that bothered me, nothing to do with the latest movie's retcons.
IIRC, according to "Watching the Clock", the timelines reconverge once all the changes made, and their effects, stop mattering - in this case it'd be the distant future.
I loved Millennium to bits. Such an epic tale that managed to avoid fanwankery.
If I had a gripe, it's that it was difficult to imagine such a big adventure occurring during DS9's fairly tight timeline, not to mention that it was never mentioned by anyone during the series. They did sort of acknowledge that by having Jake later reflect that it all seemed like a bit of a dream and was hard to remember. But all in all, that's a very minor quibble with such a great read.
If I had a gripe, it's that it was difficult to imagine such a big adventure occurring during DS9's fairly tight timeline, not to mention that it was never mentioned by anyone during the series. They did sort of acknowledge that by having Jake later reflect that it all seemed like a bit of a dream and was hard to remember. But all in all, that's a very minor quibble with such a great read.
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