Spoilers Coda: Book 3: Oblivion's Gate by David Mack Review Thread

Well there was a ship named Ni'var in Enterprise and the word is even older than that, but considering its more recent use in Discovery, it probably was probably fresh on the mind and probably a nod to Season 3.

 

Apocalyptic tentacles and AI? I think they caught that from lit trek.

 

The mirror Calhoun cameo was easily the best thing about this whole trilogy. A real laugh out loud moment for me.

 

Between Rise like Lions and this book, did the configuration of the Jaunt ship change?

 

I got that impression, too.

Before, there were apparently nacelles attached to the ring housing the jaunt drive for the warp drive.
Now there don't appear to be separate nacelles, and the ring contains both the jaunt drive and a quantum slipstream drive.

The jaunt ships may have just undergone a refit in the intervening time.
Memory Omega gets all the best toys, so I imagine they're constantly upgrading the ships to the latest and greatest.

 

Nacelles are mentioned in this book near the end as part of jaunt ship debris.

 

Ah, I missed that.

To be honest, reading the last third of the book was a bit like reading while falling down a flight of stairs.

All of the feels.

Also just now putting this together, did the authors of the Coda trilogy intend to kill a Wesley in each book?

 

I'm thinking that some of this might be best explained as a Third Splinter that the Devidians didn't eat, that somehow still interacts with the First Splinter timeline.

EDIT: A logical creation point for the Third Splinter could be Ducane and Noi coming back to order Dulmur and Lucsly not to prosecute Janeway.

 

Had to keep him shut up somehow.

 

I would think that the divergence point would be the moment when the Devidians started their temporal attack and began changing things.

 

That did seem to be the case in the first book of the trilogy, where the Temporal Apocalypse was happening across time, and we saw (implicitly) the First Splinter version of the Relativity being attacked by the Devidians, whom they obviously did not remember from that time they unmade all of reality a half-millennium earlier. It was a bit Doctor Who-y in that multiple points in history seemed to be being attacked at once (not that that sentence makes any sense).

 

with Ni'Var being derived from one of the 1970s NEW VOYAGES anthologies its a complete turnaround for that one to find its way onscreen and then back to the books

along with the Strangers From the Sky reference early on, old fan representation is achieved

 

If there are various sets of time travel rules at play in one universe, as certainly has been the case throughout the 55 years of Star Trek, it’s quite possible that all known rule books are out the window.

 

Except there's only one set of physical laws in the universe, so what seem to be different manifestations of time travel would have to be just different applications of the same laws in differing conditions and circumstances -- just as the physics that make you float in an orbiting spaceship are the same physics that keep you on the ground on a planet's surface or tear you apart near a black hole, merely in different contexts. Same equations, different values plugged in. If things look contradictory or inexplicable to us, it's simply because we haven't yet found the unifying theory.

That was my goal in Watching the Clock -- to work out the overarching set of rules that would account for all the seemingly disparate and incongruous time travel occurrences in Trek.

 

Q&A was a better threat to all of reality (that somehow no one in this trilogy remembered happening just a few years ago). A Singular Destiny was a better love letter to the full and whole Litverse in all its aspects. Watching the Clock was a better temporal morass to untangle. And none of them had to kill off an umpty-kajillion people to feel like they had real stakes.

But I'm glad at least that, as they said again and again beforehand, they wrapped up every dangling plot thread in the Litverse. The true nature of the Prophets and the Bajoran Wormhole after the revelation of Endalla as a falsework, Sarah Sisko's strange and unusual Prophet-like temporal powers, the extragalactic mysteries Moriarty hinted at having discovered on Mudd's World; we really hit them all.

I don't want to come off as just a CinemaSins-esque "PLOTHOLES EQUAL BAD" nitpicker, though. It wasn't just plot details that bugged me, though I have so many I could run off besides those three major dangling threads above that never even got mentioned, even though two of them would have been so relevant to events in this story that I legitimately wonder if the writers read the last few DS9 novels. Honestly, fundamentally, it was the entire tenor of the trilogy. People mentioned having a spark of hope from this, but I just don't see it, unless the hope is that Star Trek will continue to exist as a television and movie franchise. This entire trilogy just came off as grim. It felt loveless, like Ward, Swallow, and Mack were just gleefully tearing everything in the Litverse down because they were given the opportunity to, without any actual positive feelings towards what had come before. As though the only thing worth caring about are the characters we see on screen, when one of the best parts of the Litverse was fleshing out the setting of Star Trek beyond the screen. New Frontier, SCE, Gorkon/Klingon Empire, DTI, Rise of the Federation, Vanguard/Seekers: the best parts of the Litverse had barely anything to do with the actual series. But here it just felt like they weren't worth anything but cannon fodder.

Swallow's said that the reason they killed off Ezri in book one was to make you feel like no one was safe, and that the usage of the Devidians was meant to evoke a sense of cosmic horror, in the proper "you are insignificant in the face of the cosmos" sense. And I think both of those highlight the core problem I have with the trilogy. When you feel like no one's safe, it just means every death to follow feels hollow and meaningless. I'm reminded strongly of something that KRAD's said again and again in his Trek rewatches on Tor: The "redshirt" phenomenon is one of the worst things about Star Trek, because it treats people as disposable. Death doesn't mean anything when it's constant. And I know Mack's joking reputation for his books being a slaughterhouse, but leaning into that is the worst part of his writing, because at a certain point you just stop caring. Feeling like everything is always under threat isn't evocative, it's trite, and it dampens emotional connections with characters. There's a reason why Bakula stood his ground and refused to let Enterprise have meaningless redshirt deaths.

I haven't regretted reading a Star Trek book since Before Dishonor, but this trilogy just made me numb, so I had to give it a Poor.

 

That was a better-executed book than either of its predecessors— for one thing, characters actually have emotional reactions and grapple with the weight of events in scenes that build meaningful interior monologue and aren’t just there to advance the plot— to a point where I feel like we’d have been better off if Mack had just written the whole trilogy. (And I say that as someone who prefers multiple voices in Trek fiction, regrets the limited writer pool of the recent novelverse, and was initially pleased that Coda was a multi-author affair.) There are some odd choices, which I’ll get into below or in later posts, but I respect the end product in a way that I didn’t with the first two books. I still think this was a weird, unsatisfactory way to close out the novelverse and that the writers’ efforts to tack a hopeful Star Trek message onto it were as doomed as the First Splinter itself, but granting the value of the approach for argument’s sake, this is easily an above average novel.

The most baffling thing to me is the amount of time spent with mirror universe characters. K’Ehleyr at least was used to make a thematic point about pursuing joy even in the face of death, but did we really need that much time with mirror Picard, mirror Ezri, mirror Saavik, etc? The narrative justification is that our heroes have no one else to turn to, but that’s only the case because Riker once again spends most of the book being obviously unhinged for no real reason. When Troi and the others confronted him early on I thought, Good, we’re resolving this early, but nope, instead everyone else on Titan continued to act like idiots. Then I was hoping that Riker’s extended possession would at least give him some insight that would contribute to our heroes’ Pyrrhic victory, but nope, he and his ship were just more last-minute cannon fodder.

I did like the use of First Contact as a point of divergence for the novelverse. It makes sense in literal terms as a time-travel story set near the earliest major novelverse events, but it’s also symbolically fitting given the importance of the Borg to both the novelverse’ s biggest storyline and the TV series that brought the novelverse to an end.

 

I was quite excited for this trilogy a few months ago and now that I've finished it and had nearly a day to think about it I'm a little disappointed. Don't get me wrong David Mack's writing in Book 3 was captivating as always and there were many standout moments here and in the first two books but I fundamentally disagree on the ending being the right choice.

Ironically it's similar to how I regard Picard currently with certain great scenes and acting but just not meshing for me. I strongly prefer the tone and direction of the Litverse to the current shows (besides LD) so having everyone sacrifice their existence for it only adds to my frustration. I'm fine with a few deaths and the story in general but a more optimistic ending to celebrate the finale would have gone a long way. One last big adventure like Destiny is really all I wanted. I also would have been content with DS9 and Titan just getting a wrap-up novel or two each since I think TNG was in a good place after Collateral Damage.

Besides the bleak ending my other biggest surprise is that the unfinished Krenim thread from the Voyager novels didn't play any part and that Q or Voyager itself didn't appear. Considering this ending puts an end to their journey also its unsettling to think they were oblivious and helpless to contribute.

There are several books in Titan and TNG-R I never got around to reading and now I doubt I will considering the implication is the entire continuity I've become invested in for two decades never happened. Going forward I can see myself rereading Destiny, the Voyager relaunch, and Rise of the Federation in a few years. Maybe throw in Cold Equations and The Light Fantastic also since I loved how Data's return was handled.

To end on a better note some things I particularly enjoyed:

• Revisiting the Mirror Universe and Saavik/Spock
• Data and Lal
• Beverly and the Queen
• The final scene with the Troi-Riker family
• The quick SCE and New Frontier moments
• Data and Geordi
• Worf and K'Ehleyr

 

I’m 80% done. It’s been okay so far. The Borg Queen stuff was good. The image I had of her was something out of Hellboy.

 

Very true. In some ways, this should never have had so strong a Picard element. He’s the one character we *know* has ongoing stories (you know, that show I don’t remember the name of…) but the litverse only characters, or the characters who are currently not touched on screen? That’s who the focus should have been on. But, perhaps it’s for the best, as this was just…

 

I think the fundamental reason Coda doesn’t work for me has a lot to do with something David Mack said in the interview linked upthread.

That is, I think, a lot more honest, and certainly a much better reflection of the trilogy that was actually written, than the it’s a story about carrying light in the darkness line. To borrow from Mack’s author bio in this book, it’s a series dominated by “sad to see it go” with at best glimmers of “glad it happened.” The final chapter is an elegant, elegiac piece of writing, but it’s not really of a piece with the comic-book crossover/cosmic horror vibe of the rest of the trilogy.

I don’t know, of course, what kind of editorial constraints Coda operated under. It may have been a licensing fiat that the novelverse had to be positioned as a splinter timeline and written out of existence. But if the writers had the option to do something that focused on organically resolving lingering plot points and giving the various sub-series of the novelverse a gentle send-off, I certainly wish they’d done that instead. There’s a time and place to indulge regret and resentment that the novelverse went away, but this wasn’t it.