I was expecting something more like 200 or 300 years from now.
That was ruled out weeks ago when Teku said the Ishida Dynasty was 400 years old.
Honestly, I was hoping for something further ahead. For most of my life, I've noticed how reluctant SFTV seems to be to venture more than a paltry few centuries into the future. There have been so many shows set in the 22nd to the 25th century --
Star Trek, Buck Rogers, Logan's Run, Space Rangers, Babylon 5, etc. Not to mention all the near-future or present-day shows --
The Invaders, Lost in Space, Land of the Giants, Space: 1999, SeaQuest, Farscape, Stargate, etc., or late 21st century shows like
Cowboy Bebop and
Continuum. Yet there haven't been that many shows set much further in the future.
Firefly was in the 26th century, just a bit beyond the usual cutoff, as was
Cleopatra 2525, obviously.
Planet of the Apes was 2000 years or so in the future.
Red Dwarf began in the 22nd century but then jumped 3 million years ahead.
Futurama was 1000 years ahead.
Andromeda was 3000 years ahead.
Doctor Who, of course, jumps all over the timeline. But the majority of shows seem to stay within 500 years of the present. DM is a bit beyond that, but not by much.
Well, there's still
Killjoys, which certainly seems to be very far in the future, given the changes in spelling and cultural references, and the bit in the Scarbacks' benediction about coming from "a home we've forgotten."
I wasn't to bothered by the whole thing with the Raza crew being the insperation for FTL travel, these kinds of stories do that all the time.
Even so, it was done badly here. As I said, it's not as though there aren't already a ton of people today thinking about the prospects for interstellar travel. It's been an active field of research for decades. Plenty of people are already inspired to pursue it, both out of scientific curiosity and love of science fiction. So the idea that the inventor of FTL was inspired by her grandfather's tale of meeting people from the future as a kid, as if somehow nobody else outside her immediate family had ever been inspired by the possibility of star travel, is absurdly weak. If, say, they'd established that the
Raza crew had left some actual piece of technology behind that the kid's granddaughter had reverse-engineered, then that would make sense as a cause and effect. But just hearing tales from her granddad about meeting time travelers one day? No. That's just too feeble a connection. There's nothing there that would make her stand out from all the other people who are already inspired to research interstellar propulsion for various other reasons. As connections go, it's beyond weak -- it's downright homeopathic.
