Even worse. I came this close to saying Q was the same character as the Genie from Aladdin, but the Genie was a lot friendlier. Either way, I don't like outright magic in my science fiction. DeLancie is the only thing that makes Q tolerable.
Personally I have always liked Q, yet his character had to be used well and with the right people. He worked so well in TNG because of his chemistry with Picard, on VOY he just felt like a play thing for the writers, as Chris talked about above (insert lazy writing here). I have no issue with god-like aliens in my sci-fi as long as it's a good story. Here's to hoping this story line will be worthy of Q's best appearances
Actually Voyager did terrific stuff with Q, 2 times out of 3. They made Q a richer and more sympathetic character by showing us the Continuum and giving us a context for him, and making him an actual rebel within his community rather than just some isolated magic man bugging us humans. The only dud was "Q2." But even Q's VGR appearances were driven largely by DeLancie's personality. The banter between Q and Janeway was mainly about giving good friends DeLancie and Mulgrew a chance to have fun playing off each other, and "Q2" was all-out nepotism, an episode written to let DeLancie show off his son.
I don't know, that's not that much of an issue. After all, Q as we see him isn't how he actually looks, it's a form he adopts to make it easier to interact with humans. So for some reason he how wants to look older. Besides, aside from gray hair, John de Lancie hasn't changed that much today compared to his TNG days. Were he to play Q now it wouldn't really be too distracting. Personally I love The Squire of Gothos because Trelane is such an awesome character.
The opening scene with Q and Picard is in the Prime universe (or the Countdown version thereof), so I'm inclined to think it'll be the Prime DS9. I mean, remember, these comics have to fit around the movies and avoid doing anything that would conflict with them too much. Showing the future of the Abramsverse would run a huge risk of contradicting galaxy-changing events in later movies. So I think they'll want to shy away from that. And I think, judging from the opening, that this is meant to be the big Abramsverse/Primeverse crossover story that a lot of fans have wanted. Okay, people probably wanted to see a crossover between the two versions of Kirk's crew, but that would've created continuity problems with the Primeverse (e.g. Spock Prime learning too much about his own future), so making it the Countdown-era Primeverse avoids those complications.
That was kind my line of thinking too, and the description for the issue is kind of vague, which is why I was wondering.
I'm almost certain that the announcement for this issue some months ago said that they would be visiting DS9 of their own timeline.
Perhaps minor points like the solicitation for the next issue: Star Trek #36 Mike Johnson (w) • Tony Shasteen (a & c) The epic Star Trek event of 2014 continues here, in Part 2 of The Q Gambit! Captain James T. Kirk and the crew of the Enterprise are thrust into the future of their new timeline thanks to the mysterious being known as Q. But in this alternate reality, what has become of the space station once known as Deep Space Nine… and the man called Benjamin Sisko? Don’t miss this all-new story developed in association with Star Trek writer/producer Roberto Orci! FC • 32 pages • $3.99 [Also, Q pretty much says it's what he's going to do during his conversation with Picard.] Pretty sure this is going to be a Bad Future Must Be Changed scenario anyway, based on this issue.
If the future of the Alternate Reality is visited, why does the DS9 cast look the same as always? Or would Kirk Prime and Kirk 2, if they met, not notice they're played by different actors (so to speak)?
In the 2009 movie, Spock Prime recognized young Kirk and Scott on sight. They only look different to us because they've been recast, just like Saavik or Tora Ziyal. In-universe, they look the same.
Spoiler: speculation I'm starting to think it's some alternate future all together, neither the Prime or Abramsverse. Given the recently released cover for part 3 which shows Worf as some sort of warlord. On the one hand, Spock Prime can recognize everyone in the movies. On the other hand, IDW has acknowledged in Countdown that Kirk looks different in the two timelines and in Mirrored that McCoy and Scotty do as well. Countdown can at least be explained being released before XI, and IDW went with the Kirk familiar to everyone. Mirrored is a bit harder to ignore, given they draw Abramsverse McCoy and Scotty being shadowed by their Prime selves.
I don't see how it could be the future of the Abramsverse. The likelihood that, in that timeline, any of the characters we're familiar with would even exist at all, would seem to be very low indeed. Remember the butterfly effect. The existence of Abrams versions of characters like Sisko, Worf, Bashir, etc. is highly suspect - history would have diverged so much that they might never be born. There may not even be a DS9.
In that case, and given what Q says in the previews, it's most likely meant to be the future the Abramsverse will have unless some change is made to prevent it, i.e. the usual cautionary-glimpse-of-the-future trope seen in stories like "All Good Things..." or ENT: "Twilight" or the Terminator franchise: "This is the horrible future that will result if you don't prevent X from happening."
If the butterfly effect was an issue, we also wouldn't have ended up with an Enterprise with the exact same cast of characters.
There's the butterfly effect, but there's also the weight of history. Any event has a whole constellation of contributing causes. Sure, in some cases, changing one of those causes will have a positive feedback on the other factors and escalate into a massive change. But in many other cases, there will be a negative feedback and the effects of a change to history will be damped out by the stabilizing influence of all the other, unchanged causal factors. Poul Anderson used this idea in his Time Patrol series to explain how the past could be changed without having a profound effect on the future or who existed in it. He pointed out that, after a few dozen generations, the amount of genetic material that a given ancestor contributes to your DNA becomes effectively nil, so if they were deleted from history, it might not have any effect on your own odds of being born. Whatever genes a slightly more recent ancestor might have contributed could just as easily have been compensated for by whoever took their place in your family history. Now, granted, given that only 10,000 of the planet Vulcan's 6 billion inhabitants survived, then the odds are only 1 in 600,000 that any given Vulcan born on their home planet would have survived. But Tuvok, for example, was born on the Vulcanis Lunar Colony in 2264 in the Prime Universe. That means there's a pretty good chance that his parents survived and he was born anyway, although there's no telling whether, say, Selar or Taurik or Vorik would've been born. As for humans, if anyone had ancestors living in downtown San Francisco in 2259, then they might've been casualties of the Vengeance crash and thus not born, but the only Trek character I know of who's a San Franciscan by birth is Hikaru Sulu, who we know is already alive in the Abramsverse. I think it's safe to assume that Sisko's clan has lived in New Orleans for generations. And there's no reason why events in the Federation would affect events in the Bajoran/Cardassian sector, and thus no reason why Terok Nor wouldn't have been built, or why Kira Nerys wouldn't have been born and become a resistance fighter, or why Odo wouldn't have fallen through the wormhole and been found by Dr. Mora, or why Quark and Rom wouldn't have come to Terok Nor to seek their fortunes. And so on.