What are your controversial Star Trek opinions?

Yes, they have.

In the teaser to "I, Excretus," the Cerritos warps off to rescue the Bakersfield from a temporal causality loop, stranding the lower deckers while they are repairing a space module.

 

I have a feeling that Manny Coto got rid of it too soon. It was the studio's idea for the show, as crappy and out of place the idea was. I get that it needed to go, but it probably went away a season too early.

I think the executives at UPN would have tolerated another season of ENT if that concept was left alone. And if the show got five seasons, it would have gone the full seven, as the money would be coming in from syndication.

In fact, if TATV was treated at Temporal Cold War shenanigans from the beginning, the show probably would have come back already. Even though Trip faking his death and becoming a Section 31 agent is the far more interesting idea to come out of it.

 

Same with alternate futures... but they should be carefully limited. Maybe one per series: "All Good Things", "The Visitor", and "Timeless", with "Year of Hell" as the wildcard.

It would be a subpar episode, to be sure... but not nearly as hated as it is today.

I wonder if Boimler will still have purple hair...

 

I like it when time travel is some weird thing that doesn't make much sense. I find it weird when it's used casually like Kira borrowing the Orb of Time, or O'Brien's kid falling into some random time portal at a chance on that entire planet, or that starship captain the DS9 crew all talked to actually died ten years ago or whatever. I guess TOS set it up with "Assignment Earth" and Star Trek IV. I think "Yesterday's Enterprise" was one of the best but I like how creepy "Time Squared" approaches it.
I don't fault the writers trying it every so often though.

 

Well I didn’t know about it <sulks>

 

I've always suspected that the plans for the show changed a lot after "Calypso" was shot. So trying to tie it into canon now, might be more trouble than it's worth.

Although here is how I personally would do it:

Spoiler: story idea

Zora imagined the whole thing, as part of her journey towards becoming sentient.

 

Holodeck stories are holodeck stories, even if a time element is used within the holodeck. When you can simply say, "Computer, reset to beginning of program" and it does exactly that, how is that time travel?

I actually don't count this, since we never actually see time travel/loop/causality/paradox/insert timenobabble here.


Having said what I did for both examples, I would be happier if time travel was not used, even as a comedic background element.

 

Jack Quaid said it’s the full Boimler, hair included.

 

We heard the repeating distress signal loud and clear over subspace radio. It was more than simply name-checked. It counts.

 

"Calypso" could be set on a quantum duplicate of Discovery (like "Deadlock") in the 42nd century.

 

Hope it's not the Full Monty Boimler, as seen sometimes on LD. Some things, I don't WANT to see in real life!

 

That's right. I forgot about that part. Then every single series has used time travel.

 

Did someone come up of an example of time travel in Short Treks? I can't think of an example in it, so that could well count as a series not having time travel, if we're counting Short Treks as a series. I accept it as a series, an anthology series, but as such that's definitely unlike the other series.

 

Of course, since it doesn‘t have time travel. The end if season 2 of Discovery retroactively inserted time travel into the backstory of „Calypso“ but there is non present in the actual episode. And by that logic we could argue that every TOS episode set after „The Naked Time“ is a time travel episode because the Enterprise is three days older than it should be.

 

While it is true that SHORT TREKS had no time travel episodes, I'm on the fence on whether it can be called a series or not.

Part of the reason why I don't consider it a series is because of how short the episodes are. And part of the reason why I do consider it a series is because it does expand on STAR TREK a bit, which is by definition what every show has done since TAS.

It's a strange paradox, honestly.

 

I would say it's not a series because different Short Treks are supplemental additions to mutiple separate series.

 

I'd say that's often part of what makes time travel stories fun. (Nog: Father, doesn't this Gabriel Bell human look just like Captain Sisko? Or Janeway 'I get the feeling I'm about to be drafted' kind of understanding (but not really) why she has to repair Seven's repairs to the timeline, by making them unnecessary in the first place).

But I also agree that it has been overused. Time for TTTTTT! (Trek Trashing Tired Time Travel Tropes)

 

It’s a glorified webisode series.

 

Time travel has provided some of the greatest Star Trek episodes ever (“The Visitor”, “City on the Edge of Forever”, “Trials and Tribbleations”, “Past Tense”, “Cause and Effect”, “Little Green men” off the top of my head), but it has been overdone. The rot has set in by Voyager’s “Timeless”, which was a poor man’s “The Visitor”, and then “Endgame” was a poor man’s “Timeless”.

If they have a genuinely great time travel story they should do it (“Magic to Make the Sanest Man…” was a genuine highlight of DSC’s first season), but, frankly, after the bitter sting of PIC season two I never want a prolonged stay in the past, ever again (almost the entire season I was shouting, Bender style, “let’s GO alreeeadddy!”. Less is more.