I hate to tell you, but everyone dies
Spoilers Coda Trilogy Discussion Thread
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I hate to tell you, but everyone dies
I'm not sure I really want to finish the trilogy, to be honest. After Ezri in Book 1 and DS9 and the Prophets being sacrificed in Book 2 and the ongoing continuing Yet-More-Picard stuff, it just seems way, way too weighted in favor of certain characters. Especially since the DS9 novels were what kicked the whole thing off and really were the backbone of this novelverse. I read the thread and its disappointing to know that except for a good scene with Kira and the appearance of Benny Russel the DS9 characters take a backseat.
Picard is a centerpiece of modern Trek, featuring him heavily makes a lot of sense from a commercial standpoint.
You can read and enjoy the First Splinter novels without ever having picked up a DS9 book from Resistance to Coda.
Late to the party but I finally finished reading the trilogy yesterday. I thought it was an excellent read. Good action, good character moments, even some good humor (mirror Picard saying “shut up Wesley” and being satisfied about it made me lol) a real page turner from start to finish.
I’m not a die hard reader of the TNG/DS9/VOY continuation novels set in the “first splinter”. So a lot of the characters, ships etc… were new to me or I just had a passing familiarity with. But I think the books did a good job of putting enough weight behind the deaths/sacrifices they made so even though I didn’t know much about Chen or Bowers. Or how Ro ended up commanding DS9 they didn’t feel disposable.
Kudos to the authors.
I’m not a die hard reader of the TNG/DS9/VOY continuation novels set in the “first splinter”. So a lot of the characters, ships etc… were new to me or I just had a passing familiarity with. But I think the books did a good job of putting enough weight behind the deaths/sacrifices they made so even though I didn’t know much about Chen or Bowers. Or how Ro ended up commanding DS9 they didn’t feel disposable.
Kudos to the authors.
Honestly, speaking as someone who's been here through every step of the First Splinter timeline and before that (I started reading the novels right around the time of the Invasion crossover, so 96ish)... I enjoyed Coda. Is it how I would have closed out the novelverse, the curtain call I'd have given the storylines and characters who've maintained this expansion of the Trek universe over the last twenty years? Probably not - it did feel a little sparse on non-TNG characters in roughly half of it, I do feel the novel original characters didn't get their due (what with Konya, Elfiki, and Trys all dying in the course of the first book, Bowers being the only significant original character in book two, and the only non-canon originating characters of note in the third being MU versions of canon characters, so while TECHNICALLY original, they don't quite fit the bill in my ranking), which really hurt with regards to the Titan crew, who really got underutilized, and, yeah, I'd have liked some indication that someone would subsequently remember what happened in resetting the stage for the "Prime" timeline, something tangible that says to someone in-universe "this happened and it mattered," rather than just leaving the audience with that awareness, rather than anyone in universe who knows the sacrifice made to allow all of it to continue.
Still, I enjoyed it. I mean, yes, if pressed, I would probably just call Collateral Damage the place where the novelverse ends in my heart, because it means that all the characters I love are still going off, still existing, having further adventures, even if that's not something that, by nature of tie-in material, would ever be depicted officially. Which, given the little continuity hiccups - not just Ranjea's appearance, or Hegol's miraculous recovery no one talks about, but also Kira's inner monologue at one point refers to the Kai as "he," when last I knew, the Kai was Kai Pralon, and no one talks about the Kai changing hands or Pralon transitioning - I honestly feel like there's room to, if desired, treat Coda as a splinter of the Novelverse, like how Wesley uses his Traveler abilities to touch the Rene's of other timelines, so there's acknowledgement that there are timelines where he does exist beyond the one presently under attack.
But for what Coda is, the Novelverse's curtain, I enjoyed it for that. Maybe it was caught up more in the message about how this timeline is giving way to the Prime version that it lost sight of its characters, but... I mean, that's not exactly new to the Star Trek experience, now is it? Star Trek has always been about messages, and, looking beyond my own full awareness of this as the end of the Novelverse, that there has to be an end to the continuing adventures that I've loved for years, and it was decided to offer a story that said that the sacrifice of this timeline is in service of the overriding canon... Honestly, I still see the optimism in that story, that message. Because what I'm taking away is a message that feels very Trekkian - act to protect, act to help, act to save lives, even if the people you're saving will never know of your efforts, even your sacrifices, because it's the right thing. That, fundamentally, the most important phrase in the universe is "let me help." That you do the right thing not for accolades but because it's right, because no one is watching, no one is judging you... except yourself. That these characters recognize the gravity of the threat facing them and decide to fight back, even knowing that, win or lose, they do not make it out.
In looking to conclude the novelverse, rather than leave it left uncertain, give it a clear finale that lets people walk away, to disembark this journey, because there's a different one that the books are mandated to adhere to (to strain my metaphor), the message I ultimately take away is that even if no one else knows, our actions, our choices matter.
"If nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do."
Still, I enjoyed it. I mean, yes, if pressed, I would probably just call Collateral Damage the place where the novelverse ends in my heart, because it means that all the characters I love are still going off, still existing, having further adventures, even if that's not something that, by nature of tie-in material, would ever be depicted officially. Which, given the little continuity hiccups - not just Ranjea's appearance, or Hegol's miraculous recovery no one talks about, but also Kira's inner monologue at one point refers to the Kai as "he," when last I knew, the Kai was Kai Pralon, and no one talks about the Kai changing hands or Pralon transitioning - I honestly feel like there's room to, if desired, treat Coda as a splinter of the Novelverse, like how Wesley uses his Traveler abilities to touch the Rene's of other timelines, so there's acknowledgement that there are timelines where he does exist beyond the one presently under attack.
But for what Coda is, the Novelverse's curtain, I enjoyed it for that. Maybe it was caught up more in the message about how this timeline is giving way to the Prime version that it lost sight of its characters, but... I mean, that's not exactly new to the Star Trek experience, now is it? Star Trek has always been about messages, and, looking beyond my own full awareness of this as the end of the Novelverse, that there has to be an end to the continuing adventures that I've loved for years, and it was decided to offer a story that said that the sacrifice of this timeline is in service of the overriding canon... Honestly, I still see the optimism in that story, that message. Because what I'm taking away is a message that feels very Trekkian - act to protect, act to help, act to save lives, even if the people you're saving will never know of your efforts, even your sacrifices, because it's the right thing. That, fundamentally, the most important phrase in the universe is "let me help." That you do the right thing not for accolades but because it's right, because no one is watching, no one is judging you... except yourself. That these characters recognize the gravity of the threat facing them and decide to fight back, even knowing that, win or lose, they do not make it out.
In looking to conclude the novelverse, rather than leave it left uncertain, give it a clear finale that lets people walk away, to disembark this journey, because there's a different one that the books are mandated to adhere to (to strain my metaphor), the message I ultimately take away is that even if no one else knows, our actions, our choices matter.
"If nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do."
I have to admit, it just didn’t work for me. Not as one big story, nor as a trilogy of connected stories, nor as a (literal, thematic) coda to the litverse.
I like past work by the writers involved. And I appreciate the effort, from them and from Pocket, to close the curtain on the litverse rather than just leaving it dangling, as it were. But it just struck too many wrong notes.
The villains were disappointing, simultaneously overpowered and undermotivated. In a universe full of cosmically powered higher beings, why go with the Devidians, especially as they’re not only obscure but had to be altered beyond recognition for plot purposes anyway? And then there were the villains’ endless hordes of henchbeings, both humanoid and serpentine, who were lethal but boring, and whose powers and behaviors weren’t even depicted consistently from one volume to the next. The Nagas were simply a bad idea, from their first appearance to their last.
Then there’re the plot mechanics. Even in a universe famously full of technobabble, this seemed less cohesive than usual. Indeed it literally contradicted itself in some ways. For instance, the story invented tech enabling the characters to communicate instantly across different points in the timeline and even across universes(!), because the ticking-clock plot structure and the need for the characters to collaborate required “simultaneous” communication… *but* at the same time the story insisted it was somehow *impossible* for the characters to synchronize their plans without having Kira carry a MacGuffin into the wormhole. And those plans apparently had to be synchronized for some reason, even though the finale (and locus of the threat) was actually situated somewhen explicitly *outside* the actual flow of time. And even though it *was* outside time, apparently quite a few other versions of Wesley, Picard, etc., had attempted much the same plan there “previously” without succeeding, as we were both shown and told… whatever sense “previously” makes in this context.
It’s all just plot contrivance piled on plot contrivance, as precarious as a house of cards, hanging together through the sheer power of repetition as much as anything else. I feel like CLB, with his famously deft handling of Trekian temporal mechanics in the DTI books and elsewhere, might’ve been able to come up with something at least a little more logical, but he didn’t have a hand in it.
Then there’s the choice of the very *kind* of story to tell, and the thematic points that it conveyed. It basically entailed lots and lots of repetitive battle scenes, shot through with lots of gruesome death, suffering, and a pervasive sense of futility. None of that is what I turn to Trek for. By the third book, that sense of futility was so blatant that Mack literally lampshaded it with a conversation between Lal and Data, addressing (as best he could) readers’ foreseeable questions about why it had to be *their* universe to be sacrificed, so that a different one could survive.
Really, though, that’s a question a lot of characters should have been asking, especially since the temporal mechanics were so impenetrable. As another poster already mentioned, it would’ve been perfectly reasonable for Starfleet, Riker, and lots of others to ask (basically) “why us? why this?”, which could’ve generated plenty of dramatic tension in its own right without the bizarre side plot about cross-universal mind-possession. It would have been more relatable than how things played out. I’ve read a lot of time-travel stories over the years… and as motivations go, it’s just *not* credible for characters to willingly sacrifice themselves, and literally everyone and everything they’ve ever known and loved, for an alternate timeline that’s arbitrarily different but not necessarily better. Very much the contrary, in fact. That’s just not self-evidently the Right Thing To Do. Yet almost all the main characters in Coda willingly did exactly that, essentially on faith.
Finally, there’s the aspect so many other posters have mentioned… which is that the trilogy stubbornly resisted offering almost any meaningful emotional closure for familiar litverse characters (or readers), nor any sense of hope or optimism.
Granted, the basic endpoint was always predetermined. But it could have been done differently. It could have been more like Alan Moore’s famous “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow,” as another poster mentioned… a swan song for the pre-Crisis Superman that certainly had its dark moments, but that was also solidly grounded in the characters, their history, and their relationships. That story left readers feeling wistful. This one left us feeling wrung out.
I like past work by the writers involved. And I appreciate the effort, from them and from Pocket, to close the curtain on the litverse rather than just leaving it dangling, as it were. But it just struck too many wrong notes.
The villains were disappointing, simultaneously overpowered and undermotivated. In a universe full of cosmically powered higher beings, why go with the Devidians, especially as they’re not only obscure but had to be altered beyond recognition for plot purposes anyway? And then there were the villains’ endless hordes of henchbeings, both humanoid and serpentine, who were lethal but boring, and whose powers and behaviors weren’t even depicted consistently from one volume to the next. The Nagas were simply a bad idea, from their first appearance to their last.
Then there’re the plot mechanics. Even in a universe famously full of technobabble, this seemed less cohesive than usual. Indeed it literally contradicted itself in some ways. For instance, the story invented tech enabling the characters to communicate instantly across different points in the timeline and even across universes(!), because the ticking-clock plot structure and the need for the characters to collaborate required “simultaneous” communication… *but* at the same time the story insisted it was somehow *impossible* for the characters to synchronize their plans without having Kira carry a MacGuffin into the wormhole. And those plans apparently had to be synchronized for some reason, even though the finale (and locus of the threat) was actually situated somewhen explicitly *outside* the actual flow of time. And even though it *was* outside time, apparently quite a few other versions of Wesley, Picard, etc., had attempted much the same plan there “previously” without succeeding, as we were both shown and told… whatever sense “previously” makes in this context.
It’s all just plot contrivance piled on plot contrivance, as precarious as a house of cards, hanging together through the sheer power of repetition as much as anything else. I feel like CLB, with his famously deft handling of Trekian temporal mechanics in the DTI books and elsewhere, might’ve been able to come up with something at least a little more logical, but he didn’t have a hand in it.
Then there’s the choice of the very *kind* of story to tell, and the thematic points that it conveyed. It basically entailed lots and lots of repetitive battle scenes, shot through with lots of gruesome death, suffering, and a pervasive sense of futility. None of that is what I turn to Trek for. By the third book, that sense of futility was so blatant that Mack literally lampshaded it with a conversation between Lal and Data, addressing (as best he could) readers’ foreseeable questions about why it had to be *their* universe to be sacrificed, so that a different one could survive.
Really, though, that’s a question a lot of characters should have been asking, especially since the temporal mechanics were so impenetrable. As another poster already mentioned, it would’ve been perfectly reasonable for Starfleet, Riker, and lots of others to ask (basically) “why us? why this?”, which could’ve generated plenty of dramatic tension in its own right without the bizarre side plot about cross-universal mind-possession. It would have been more relatable than how things played out. I’ve read a lot of time-travel stories over the years… and as motivations go, it’s just *not* credible for characters to willingly sacrifice themselves, and literally everyone and everything they’ve ever known and loved, for an alternate timeline that’s arbitrarily different but not necessarily better. Very much the contrary, in fact. That’s just not self-evidently the Right Thing To Do. Yet almost all the main characters in Coda willingly did exactly that, essentially on faith.
Finally, there’s the aspect so many other posters have mentioned… which is that the trilogy stubbornly resisted offering almost any meaningful emotional closure for familiar litverse characters (or readers), nor any sense of hope or optimism.
Granted, the basic endpoint was always predetermined. But it could have been done differently. It could have been more like Alan Moore’s famous “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow,” as another poster mentioned… a swan song for the pre-Crisis Superman that certainly had its dark moments, but that was also solidly grounded in the characters, their history, and their relationships. That story left readers feeling wistful. This one left us feeling wrung out.
It is when your universe is already doomed, but ending it on terms you set can save every other universe from extermination. I mean, heck, there's that whole scene at the Galactic Commonwealth Parliament where Spock explains to Eddington that their universe is already going to collapse -- there is no saving it. There is no avoiding death. But there is a chance to make sure your death prevents others' deaths.
That is, self-evidently, the Right Thing To Do.
I find this assertion puzzling. The existence of the other timelines, the impossibility of the First Splinter Timeline to continue, the threat posed to all other timelines by the Devidians, and the opportunity to stop the Devidians and save all other timelines by retroactively nullifying their own timeline, were all proven scientific facts. These weren't things taken on faith with no evidence.
It did offer hope and optimism. It just wasn't the kind of hope and optimism they wanted.
I agree with many of your points. You expressed them much better than I could have in fact. There seems to be quite a lot of debate about Coda. Some people loved it, some didn't, some were in the middle.
I was mystified how the Krenim weren't involved at all. It seemed that To Lose the Earth was setting us up for something with that. Some have said that the current showrunners asked them not to use the Krenim (they did get a token mention about being wiped out but that was all). I don't know if that's true or not, and if so what the reason is.
But I just didn't care for the trilogy. I found it despairing and almost hopeless. It's one thing when someone makes a brave sacrifice to save another. But willingly sacrificing an entire universe so that another might survive. And like you, I didn't entirely buy why one was more stable than another.
But most of all, I had hoped CODA would end with some optimism for the litverse. That they would face down some crisis and at the end they would win it, perhaps even at some cost, and then the litverse would sail off into the sunset. I didn't expect any future books. I had just hoped that it would end sort of how Star Trek VI ended.
And part of it is I really don't like Picard at all. The 2nd season is the first on screen Star Trek ever produced that I have absolutely no desire ever to watch again. I greatly preferred the litverse version of events. I realize that doesn't mean squat, but it's disappointing the litverse had to be sacrificed for such a poorly written show, IMO.
See, I didn't get that impression at all. Certainly the text emphasized those points, but they seemed like matters of edict, so much that they practically had "editorial mandate" tags hanging from them. Sure, Spock (and Data and Wesley) said so, but everyone else basically just had to trust their expertise and/or insight... IOW, take it on faith. Certainly there was nothing about the "science" (or to be more accurate, the plot logic) of the underlying temporal mechanics that made any particular sense. And if it made no sense to the readers (at least not all of us), then at least some of the characters should have been equally skeptical.
Lots of other posters here have already cited examples: what exactly is an "unstable timeline," and what makes it so? Why would a "chroniton attack" from Borg in one alternate timeline affect (one version of) a completely different timeline? Why would destroying the "last" unstable splinter (out of an infinite number... how does that work?) threaten any surviving "stable" timeline? Conversely, why would destroying that same splinter in a slightly different way work to defuse that threat?
One might add, How and why did the Devidians devise such phenomenally powerful multiverse-threatening tech? Given that they did, why wasn't it defeated (or apparently even challenged!) by any of countless cultures across all of time and space who are considerably more powerful than (and equally threatened as) our heroes? How is it possible to oppose them "simultaneously" from different points in time and space, and outside time, all at (ahem) the same time? How is it even coherently possible to calculate a "countdown" for such a plan? What was the relevance of the bit (in the first book, later sidelined) about the bad guys using various kinds of spacetime anomalies to boost their powers, or launch their attacks, or whatever-the-rationale-was?
I could go on. But I hope the point is made?
(And just to be clear... I enjoy Picard. That's not what this is about!)
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But that's true of every story where Spock, Data, Geordi, and/or Wesley have to figure out the science. What makes their reliability as accurate arbiters of scientific happenings suddenly subject to question in this episode?
It made as much sense as time travel stories ever do. If we can't accept the premise here, then we might as well throw out every other ST time travel story ever written.
The "why" was addressed pretty clearly: So they could gorge themselves on the people dying in those other timelines.
The "how" seemed adequately explained to me: It took them hundreds, if not thousands, of years. The Devidians the protagonists fight are themselves from many years uptime of the 2380s.
I mean, the real answer is that Coda is a story about how the characters we have come to know and love from the Litverse continuity cope with the inevitability of death, not a story about how Godlike Alien #73 deus-ex-machinas the threat away.
If we really need a plot device to explain the lack of intervention from godlike aliens: Q & A already established that entire timelines can get wiped out without entities like the Q being affected.
Oh, c'mon, this is a really common conceit in time-travel stories, to treat different points in time as analogous to different points in space. The characters start off at the same point in time, and then they measure a subjective amount of time passing for them after that point regardless of their passage uptime or downtime. E.g., the characters all start off at one point in time, they set their watches to count down X hours, some of them travel uptime or downtime, and then they do a common thing when X number of subjective hours have passed, with the conceit being that they are still linked somehow. It's a really common creative conceit in time travel fiction.
The stakes, and the character of the advice being given. There's a huge difference between "Here's what we have to do to save the day / the ship / the planet," and "We're hopelessly doomed and we need to destroy the entire universe."
I emphatically disagree. I'm sure I'm not the only one here who's read (and watched) a lot of SF over a lot of years, and I have a particular soft spot for time-travel stories. There are plenty of them that operate according to carefully worked-out rules that are logical and internally consistent. This... wasn't one of those.
Yeah, that's another thing. The "gorging on death energy" thing is a ridiculously shallow villain motivation (and FWIW, also not even remotely scientific; it verges on the supernatural).
Yes, but... first, if you wind up having to consider real-world rationales to justify what's happening in a story, then the story isn't working in its own right. And second, given that the observation is true nevertheless... the fact remains that was a creative choice. The trilogy didn't have to be about "the inevitability of death." That's one of the complaints about it.
Since when has time travel made any sense in Star Trek?
I wrote DTI: Watching the Clock with the specific goal of making it make sense for a change.
I think it’s hard to deny that the metaphysical atmosphere (for lack of a better term) of Coda is more that of superhero comic crossovers or mid-twentieth century horror-tinged pulp SF than that of your average Star Trek story. It’s one of the ways in which the trilogy jars against the rest of the litverse, and feels more like a metafictional exercise than a, well, coda. You don’t have to look much farther than the titles of the individual volumes; the fact that Oblivion’s Gate is actually worked into the narrative is a particularly striking example.
Though if you take the last shot of Star Trek VI literally, they did literally sail off into the sun, presumably killing everyone on board. (And then a bunch of signatures showed up in space.) So maybe these endings are more similar than they appear??
I don't know, but let me know if the writers of Bill & Ted Face the Music have an answer for that one.
Usually their suggestions aren't "Let's destroy the universe." Good thing too, considering it's not that unusual for their first guess or first plan to turn out to be wrong.
Oh, that trope of the time travelers staying in sync with their own home time was in the original Bill & Ted movie. TV Tropes even calls it "San Dimas Time" in the film's honor.
