Posted by ATimson:
Well, the script contradicts itself: it says it's about seventy years after the current timeframe when Melanie shows up, placing it around 2440-2445, while it also says that Jake is in his seventies, placing it from 2426-2436. I chose to use the latter reference, and picked 2430 as being pretty much smack dab in the middle (while labeling it as being around that time).
I don't see it as a contradiction. I see its reference to Jake being around seventy as an instruction to the makeup department to indicate how advanced his age makeup should be. In other words, he should look around seventy by today's standards, regardless of his actual age.
Posted by Marco Palmieri:
Actually the later (not latter) date is closer to being correct, but even that may be too early. In "The Visitor," the wormhole's "subspace inversion" is stated to occur once every fifty years. The first time it happens, in 2372, Jake is 17 years old. The second time it happens, in 2322, Jake is 67, and still pretty fit. We don't really know how many years pass between the second inversion and his meeting with Melanie?and perhaps he just aged very poorly during the intervening years (not an impossibility)?but he certainly looks several decades older when he dies.
Umm, in the script Jake says he was 18 when it happened. There is an earlier non-dialogue reference to a picture of 17-year-old Jake with Ben, but of course the picture could've been taken earlier.
Okay, here's my breakdown of the alternate-future events in "The Visitor," based on script notations (spoilers):
The "present-day" subspace inversion where Sisko is lost takes place in early 2372, near the start of the fourth season.
The memorial service for Sisko presumably takes place a day or two later.
Sisko's first, brief return at the end of Act I (which Jake dismisses as a dream) takes place "a few months" later, and is probably in the summer of '72, because Jake and Nog talk about what they'll be doing come fall. (This would be after Nog left for the Academy in the main timeline, but here he's still on the station.)
Sisko's second return in Act II takes place "eight or nine months" later, "over a year" since the subspace inversion. (This tells us that the previous "few months" had to be at least four months, corresponding to late spring or early summer.) So this is early '73, maybe around the early fifth season. In the alternate timeline, Klingon-Cardassian war tensions were at an all-time high; in the main timeline, the Klingons were already openly at war with the Federation. (In my timeline, I've made the fourth season longer than normal to accommodate
The 34th Rule, so I have this part corresponding roughly to "Apocalypse Rising.")
"A few months" after this, the UFP cedes DS9 to the Klingons and Jake leaves. This would be mid-to-late '73.
Sisko's third return, when Jake is living on Earth and married to Korena, is when Jake is "about thirty-five." Going by Jake's statement that he was 18 at the start, this would be about 2389. But Jake said that he went back to school at the age of 37, and that was prompted by this event. I doubt he would've waited two years. So this sequence probably took place in 2391, or late '90 at the earliest.
Now, the second subspace inversion is supposed to be 50 years after the first, which would be 2422. But when Jake and Sisko meet, Jake says it's been 14 years since their last encounter, so this must be 2424-5. The "50 years" reference must be rounded off.
That leaves the Old Jake/Melanie frame story, which purports to be about 70 years in the future, or 2442ish. That puts it about 18 years after the previous scenes, and Jake would be around 88 -- though this could be give or take a few years.
So Sisko's returns (not counting the one Jake and Dax induced in 2424 or so) come at the following intervals: 4-5 months; 8-9 months; nearly 18 years; at least 32 years. "It is not linear."
Uh, the idea (as I saw it) was that this was how the Jake/Melanie encounter happened in the main timeline, whereas "The Visitor" showed an alternate-timeline version of it. Well, arguably that was the original timeline and the 4th-season-onward stuff has been an altered one, but you know what I mean -- it's theoretically the timeline in which the rest of the episodes & Relaunch books occurred.
-- I think it's necessary to assume there's some sort of "probability resonance" between timelines, some quantum phenomenon by which their events influence each other to happen similarly. So, whether it makes any sense or not in real-world terms, I think it's most consistent with established Trek to assume that the Jake/Melanie encounter in "The Visitor" and the one in "Revisited" took place on the same date -- after all, they even had a lot of the same dialogue.
I really need this info after viewing my DVD set. Thanks fellas!
