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

[JoeZhang]

But really, enough was going on that Q's sudden appearance would've been gratuitous unless properly foreshadowed/tied in.

It was - twice - the first two books both comment the Q and other higher beings have disappeared - which quite a few of us took that as set-up.

Something that occurred to me - it's the end of reality and we never saw anyone panic or act out. They were like robots who just got on with it.

 

[Jinn]

Something that occurred to me - it's the end of reality and we never saw anyone panic or act out. They were like robots who just got on with it.

Except for one of the robots

 

[thribs]

I still think the Enterprise should have played a larger role. I would have replaced the Titan with it.
I should check out these Mirror universe novels. Wasn’t aware that there were a few out there. I remember reading the ShatnerVerse novels about it and wasn’t aware the history was so different. There was no emperor Tiberius in this version which is a shame.

 

[VESATI]

I still think the Enterprise should have played a larger role. I would have replaced the Titan with it.
I should check out these Mirror universe novels. Wasn’t aware that there were a few out there. I remember reading the ShatnerVerse novels about it and wasn’t aware the history was so different. There was no emperor Tiberius in this version which is a shame.

The MU books are some of my favorites.
As things became progressively worse in the PU Litverse, things got better in the MU, a subtle reminder that the Mirror Universe isn't doomed to always remain the darkest timeline... Just a road not traveled.

 

[Christopher]

I can't believe the Q continuum wasn't involved. It has the ability to stop the Devidians. If the timeline collapses what happens to Q? Would they all hop to another timeline? Is the continuum even in the timelne, or another inter time pocket universe?

Do we try to save every animal in a forest fire? Or do we accept their deaths as part of the cycle of nature and just try to limit the overall damage? From the Q's perspective, the inhabitants of any timeline are fleeting mayflies anyway.

And there are always alternative versions of the same people. It's not as if the Q haven't been shown to be willing to play fast and loose with reality, e.g. Q offering Picard the chance to alter his past as a cadet and lead a different life (assuming anything in "Tapestry" was real).

 

[Happenstance]

I kind of expected Q to pop up at the very end and possibly save Picard, Crusher and Rene into a pocket dimension or something but then I realised I was just expecting the same ending to Crisis on Infinite Earths.

 

[VESATI]

Do we try to save every animal in a forest fire? Or do we accept their deaths as part of the cycle of nature and just try to limit the overall damage? From the Q's perspective, the inhabitants of any timeline are fleeting mayflies anyway.

And there are always alternative versions of the same people. It's not as if the Q haven't been shown to be willing to play fast and loose with reality, e.g. Q offering Picard the chance to alter his past as a cadet and lead a different life (assuming anything in "Tapestry" was real).

My thought was that there is only one Q Continuum for the multiverse, but the Q are so far above everyone and everything else that a single Q is capable of (and likely does) interact with multiple (if not infinite) timelines simultaneously... At least from their own perspective.

It would be like if I was consciously aware in this moment of every chess game I will ever participate with in my life; the boards might be a little different in shape and size, but the pieces and the rules are all the same, and it's still the same "me" interacting with them.

Taking that analogy to the extreme, the Litverse was that one chess board where some of the pieces discovered fire and set their chess board (and some of the surrounding chess boards) on fire.

 

[thribs]

It’s funny how the book has two references to Control. First from Spock about that Red Angel nonsense in Discovery, and then from Bashir when he defeated it with Data in the book, Section 31: Control.
Considering they it was supposed to be gone in Discovery (the whole reason they jumped 900 years after all), how can it be in the Control novel?

 

[Christopher]

My thought was that there is only one Q Continuum for the multiverse, but the Q are so far above everyone and everything else that a single Q is capable of (and likely does) interact with multiple (if not infinite) timelines simultaneously... At least from their own perspective.

It would be like if I was consciously aware in this moment of every chess game I will ever participate with in my life; the boards might be a little different in shape and size, but the pieces and the rules are all the same, and it's still the same "me" interacting with them.

And really, from a Many-Worlds quantum physics perspective, any single person is actually the amalgam of all their different versions in parallel timelines. Alternate versions of the same person aren't actually separate entities, just non-interacting, superposed quantum states of the same being, like the way a subatomic particle can be in two or more quantum states at the same time. (Well, the individual particles making up a person would be replaced over time, so I'm simplifying.) So Q probably perceives all the alternate iterations of Jean-Luc Picard as facets of the same greater Picard. And different eigenstates of that ur-Picard no doubt get collapsed out of existence all the time, like the "Yesterday's Enterprise" Picard or all the time-looped Picards in "Time Squared" and "Cause and Effect." So Q wouldn't have any particular reason to favor any one Picard-state over the others.

Considering they it was supposed to be gone in Discovery (the whole reason they jumped 900 years after all), how can it be in the Control novel?

The novel established that Control occasionally split off variants of itself to experiment with different approaches, and showed that when the characters believed they'd defeated it, they only defeated that one facet while the original lived on. Presumably DSC's "Control" was another offshoot, one that ran out of control and had to be pruned.

 

[thribs]

Well don’t tell Michael that. She and her crew will feel like idiots.

 

[Christopher]

Well don’t tell Michael that. She and her crew will feel like idiots.

Not at all. They defeated the version of Control that endangered all life. So they succeeded in what they set out to do.

 

[David cgc]

Something that occurred to me - it's the end of reality and we never saw anyone panic or act out. They were like robots who just got on with it.

The government in the Mirror Universe flipped their shit when Spock suggested they try maybe not flipping their shit and doing something constructive with their inevitable death. The Prime... um, not-Mirror government was also in pretty deep denial about the disaster, and probably only declined to flip their shit because they didn't get the chance before they evaporated. As for (most of) our heroes, they are people who have stared death in the face on a regular basis and learned to remain functional. For most of the TNG cast, if they were going to be totally unable to process the need to remain functional for the greater good in the face of certain death and likely futility, they probably would've done it when Riker ordered the ship to ram the Borg Cube way back when.

And really, from a Many-Worlds quantum physics perspective, any single person is actually the amalgam of all their different versions in parallel timelines. Alternate versions of the same person aren't actually separate entities, just non-interacting, superposed quantum states of the same being, like the way a subatomic particle can be in two or more quantum states at the same time. (Well, the individual particles making up a person would be replaced over time, so I'm simplifying.) So Q probably perceives all the alternate iterations of Jean-Luc Picard as facets of the same greater Picard. And different eigenstates of that ur-Picard no doubt get collapsed out of existence all the time, like the "Yesterday's Enterprise" Picard or all the time-looped Picards in "Time Squared" and "Cause and Effect." So Q wouldn't have any particular reason to favor any one Picard-state over the others.

I loved the way Dave Galanter explained it in "Dead Endless," that for beings that could cross timelines, they lived in something like Plato's Heaven of Forms, where there's an ideal chair, or an ideal tree, or an ideal Jean-Luc Picard, and all the ones you encounter in the physical world are incomplete aspects of it, but they're all fundamentally the same despite only manifesting part of the complete, ideal form.

 

[Ronald Held]

I think there is only 1 Q Continuum, and they rode it out there. Is there my reason to expect A to deal with more than one Jean-Luc Picard?

 

[VESATI]

The biggest question I'm left with at the end of this trilogy is this:
If Memory Omega possessed the ability to not only view other realities, but also (with the use of a properly configured jaunt drive) cross into other realities, why was there no attempt to "swim upstream" to a more stable reality and establish a refuge there once it was determined that the only way to stop the Devidians was to burn the First Splinter down?

Also, and this might just be the over-nerd in me, but as a Twelve Monkeys fanboy I love that "First Splinter" is the in-universe name for the Litverse.

 

[Brendan Moody]

I would assume the in-universe logic is that all the very limited resources they had at their disposal had to be used in holding back the Devidians and collapsing the First Splinter. Out-of-universe, it’s because the writers had decided that if they couldn’t play with these toys anymore they were going to nuke the toybox from orbit.

 

[Allyn Gibson]

Memory Omega gave me some serious Doctor Who vibes. More people may have thought of Dr. Strange in the Avengers movies, but my reaction was, "Holy shit, they built the Panopticon!" Then I wondered if the Commonwealth was a player in the Time War.

 

[Tuskin38]

Can't remember if I mentioned this, but there was a small nod to the Discovery depiction of the Mirror Universe, with the stars being dimmer than in the Prime Universe.

I don't know if it was meant to be literal or metaphorical in this book.

 

[Solarbaby]

Do we try to save every animal in a forest fire? Or do we accept their deaths as part of the cycle of nature and just try to limit the overall damage? From the Q's perspective, the inhabitants of any timeline are fleeting mayflies anyway.

And there are always alternative versions of the same people. It's not as if the Q haven't been shown to be willing to play fast and loose with reality, e.g. Q offering Picard the chance to alter his past as a cadet and lead a different life (assuming anything in "Tapestry" was real).

I get where you're coming from. And even as insignificant as the Milkyway may be to the Q it really wouldn't be any challenge for them to wipe the Devidians out of existence.
So why would they stand back and watch, or jump universe? Maybe they revel in watching the Devidians become the ultimate apex predator.
Q seems to admire the Borg in Q Who?

If this anti time apocalypse reduces the universe to the point of the Big Bang and therefore eventually all the other breaching timelines, that's a lot of hopping from from 1 to another for Q and super beings. At some point they must get pissed and even worried at the power the Devidians were amassing.

I think some explanation of what happened to the Q would really have benefited the book.

 

[captainmkb]

Q seems to admire the Borg in Q Who?

also seemed to be some subtext in his "don't provoke the Borg!" comment in VOY s7.

things like the universe splintering time-beam really justify the Q's attitude - and his initial concern that the Humans needed to have preparation for them (which he initiated in QWho)

 

[Christopher]

also seemed to be some subtext in his "don't provoke the Borg!" comment in VOY s7.

I always hated that line. The idea that beings as powerful as the Q would be worried about the Borg is ridiculous.