Frustrations with Trek lit...

[David cgc]

The second book after the time jump was when I finally gave up on New Frontier.

I wish I had. I've stuck with it, but I'd recommend "Stone and Anvil" as the endpoint for the series. The NF crossovers since then have been good, but the mainline books never recaptured their momentum after the time skip. It just ended up adding more balls in the air to a setting that was already nearly past capacity. It's similar to my big problem with the headline Deep Space Nine books (there were a couple when, a hundred pages from the end, O'Brien would be mentioned as attending a staff meeting, I'd go, "Oh, right, O'Brien's back. I forgot," and then wouldn't be involved in the rest of the story, and I went back to thinking he was still on Earth or Cardassia).

 

[jaime]

Any time someone brings up Irumodic Syndrome (which was never mentioned outside of Q's fantasy and may not even "exist" as a condition outside said fantasy) I feel awfully "frustrated".

Anything in the 'present' of all good things pretty much exists, allowing for the potential get out of the reset to the teaser.

 

[Stevil2001]

I wish I had. I've stuck with it, but I'd recommend "Stone and Anvil" as the endpoint for the series. The NF crossovers since then have been good, but the mainline books never recaptured their momentum after the time skip. It just ended up adding more balls in the air to a setting that was already nearly past capacity. It's similar to my big problem with the headline Deep Space Nine books (there were a couple when, a hundred pages from the end, O'Brien would be mentioned as attending a staff meeting, I'd go, "Oh, right, O'Brien's back. I forgot," and then wouldn't be involved in the rest of the story, and I went back to thinking he was still on Earth or Cardassia).

I only read Missing in Action because it was part 2 of After the Fall, but it was one of those reading experiences where I really shouldn't have, as two chapters in, I was like, "actually, I didn't care at all how these plots were going to wind up." I agree that Stone and Anvil is the ideal stopping point, though honestly the decay set in with eXcalibur. Funny that there are fewer books from what I think of as "real" New Frontier (original quartet through Dark Allies) than from the later periods that I do my best to forget!

 

[STR]

Anything in the 'present' of all good things pretty much exists, allowing for the potential get out of the reset to the teaser.

Except none of it existed. Period. Not sorta, or "pretty much". The whole event occurred to Picard while he was getting ready to exit the turbolift near Worf and Troi.

Picard's diagnosis was exactly as real as the Enterprise-D with 3 nacelles.

 

[Christopher]

Except none of it existed. Period. Not sorta, or "pretty much". The whole event occurred to Picard while he was getting ready to exit the turbolift near Worf and Troi.

That doesn't mean the disease was imaginary, though. If the goal was to convince Picard that the experience was real, it would make sense to use a real disease. And it's possible that it wasn't an illusion, that Q was showing Picard an actually possible future. So there's no reason to assume Irumodic syndrome is imaginary.

 

[STR]

That doesn't mean the disease was imaginary, though. If the goal was to convince Picard that the experience was real, it would make sense to use a real disease. And it's possible that it wasn't an illusion, that Q was showing Picard an actually possible future. So there's no reason to assume Irumodic syndrome is imaginary.

It doesnt mean it is either. I see no reason you'd need an actual disease. How would it be more real when Picard isn't a doctor and has no way to step out of the illusion to look it up. He was given a diagnosis by fake-Crusher and had no reason to doubt it.

Beyond that, if Q can manipulate Picard's into thinking he's old (or even into seeing a non-corporial Q in the first place), how can he not manipulate his perceptions sufficiently to think he might have a disease which conveniently makes his future jumps harder to manage.

I'm irumodic agnostic. Downright skeptical as it applies to Picard personally.

 

[Dayton Ward]

I guess I don't get the hang-up about the disease. "Present Day" Crusher said that there was no guarantee he'd ever actually begin to show symptoms despite what her scans found. The books are now fifteen years later - in-universe time - and there's been no mention of him showing any signs, and I can't recall any reference to the disease itself in anything published in recent years.

So, I'm not sure what we're worried about here.

 

[Idran]

It doesnt mean it is either. I see no reason you'd need an actual disease. How would it be more real when Picard isn't a doctor and has no way to step out of the illusion to look it up. He was given a diagnosis by fake-Crusher and had no reason to doubt it.

Beyond that, if Q can manipulate Picard's into thinking he's old (or even into seeing a non-corporial Q in the first place), how can he not manipulate his perceptions sufficiently to think he might have a disease which conveniently makes his future jumps harder to manage.

That's circular logic. You're assuming that everything in AGT was an illusion (by taking as given that Q only manipulated Picard into thinking he was old instead of actually putting him into a reality in which he was old), and using that to argue that everything in AGT was an illusion. You're assuming your conclusion.

 

[F. King Daniel]

Except none of it existed. Period. Not sorta, or "pretty much". The whole event occurred to Picard while he was getting ready to exit the turbolift near Worf and Troi.

Picard's diagnosis was exactly as real as the Enterprise-D with 3 nacelles.

My understanding of the episode was that Picard's consciousness was plucked from the present and placed into a possible future timeline, as real as any presented in Trek.

 

[Christopher]

It doesnt mean it is either. I see no reason you'd need an actual disease. How would it be more real when Picard isn't a doctor and has no way to step out of the illusion to look it up. He was given a diagnosis by fake-Crusher and had no reason to doubt it.

Except that Picard is not some 21st-century illiterate who has no critical thinking skills and just blindly believes what he reads on Facebook. He's a highly educated Renaissance man with six decades of wide-ranging life experience and a keen, well-trained intellect. It would be foolhardy to assume he's completely ignorant of medical matters and would just swallow a fake disease. If it was an illusion -- and I'm not conceding that it was, just addressing the premise for the sake of argument -- the first rule of a good con is to keep it as close to the truth as possible, to minimize the ways it can be discovered. The more you can ground it in the reality that the mark already knows, the more convincing it will be.

Also, you're forgetting the way the story was structured. Picard mentioned Irumodic Syndrome to Crusher, not the other way around. He already had it in the future vision, so then he mentioned it to Crusher in the present and she scanned him for evidence.

 

[STR]

That's circular logic. You're assuming that everything in AGT was an illusion (by taking as given that Q only manipulated Picard into thinking he was old instead of actually putting him into a reality in which he was old), and using that to argue that everything in AGT was an illusion. You're assuming your conclusion.

Close, I'm concluding that some things were "fictional" illusions therefore all of it *could* be. I'm assuming nothing, which is the point.

Except that Picard is not some 21st-century illiterate who has no critical thinking skills and just blindly believes what he reads on Facebook. He's a highly educated Renaissance man with six decades of wide-ranging life experience and a keen, well-trained intellect. It would be foolhardy to assume he's completely ignorant of medical matters and would just swallow a fake disease.

This argument is the equivalent of "I read articles on the Mayo Clinic site, so I'm practically an expert in medicine." Which is absurd. Being generally well read doesn't make Picard and expert on rare neurological diseases, especially since medicine is *not* one of his usual hobbies. It doesn't even mean he'd have a passing familiarity. Why would he? It's not like he has a irumodic relatives in his family history.

Even actual doctors don't know every disorder out there, especially if it's outside their specialty.

My understanding of the episode was that Picard's consciousness was plucked from the present and placed into a possible future timeline, as real as any presented in Trek.

It's not clear what Q did. The one thing we haven't seen him do is send people into the future, even alternate ones. We have seen him construct elaborate fictions which, while possibly deadly, are still not *true* (a better term I think than "real").

 

[Christopher]

Close, I'm concluding that some things were "fictional" illusions therefore all of it *could* be. I'm assuming nothing, which is the point.

But we're talking about fiction here, and tie-in fiction works by taking ideas from the source material and finding new things to do with them. If there's a worthwhile story to be told about something that might or might not have been imaginary, then it serves the purposes of the storyteller to assert that it wasn't imaginary. If we were assessing something that really existed, then it would make sense to be skeptical about something whose reality was ambiguous. But it's just stories, so there's no ultimate truth except what can generate a worthwhile story.

Indeed, there have been instances where something that was explicitly imaginary in its original appearance -- a dream or an illusion or a fake of some sort -- was popular enough that some excuse was contrived to make it real after all. The one example I can think of is Robin Williams's Mork; originally he existed only in a dream in a Happy Days episode, but he was well enough received that he was retconned into a real alien and given a spinoff, with the ending of that Happy Days episode actually reshot for reruns to establish that Mork was real after all. And there's The Flash replacing its impostor Harrison Wells from the first season with a real (alternate-timeline) Wells in the second. And I think the reverse has been done as well -- a character from an alternate reality being popular enough that their real counterpart later turned up and became part of the series.

 

[jaime]

Close, I'm concluding that some things were "fictional" illusions therefore all of it *could* be. I'm assuming nothing, which is the point.



This argument is the equivalent of "I read articles on the Mayo Clinic site, so I'm practically an expert in medicine." Which is absurd. Being generally well read doesn't make Picard and expert on rare neurological diseases, especially since medicine is *not* one of his usual hobbies. It doesn't even mean he'd have a passing familiarity. Why would he? It's not like he has a irumodic relatives in his family history.

Even actual doctors don't know every disorder out there, especially if it's outside their specialty.



It's not clear what Q did. The one thing we haven't seen him do is send people into the future, even alternate ones. We have seen him construct elaborate fictions which, while possibly deadly, are still not *true* (a better term I think than "real").

The Crusher in AGT was in no way a figment of Picards imagination. You can argue she was a figment of Qs imagination, but arguing he isn't an expert at everything is kind of...impossible.
In order for none of the events in AGT to be real, then the trial itself, and the threat, would also have not be real....there is no sign of this in the story, if Picard has failed the little test Q had put in motion to help Picard, then humanity would have been wiped from existence. Therefore it was all 'real' except insofar as there were divergent timelines all of which contribute to the end of humanity. Once the sentence was changed by the continuum, only the present continued to be real, and was reset to before Picards first time leap. Since it wasn't the time leaps causing his illness, but a preexisting flaw, he is still likely to get sick. Or not. The future was very much a worst case scenario in a lot of ways, and has already been changed. The AGT future is definitely a potential future when we see it, and is clearly a big signified for the future in Trek...it's why whenever we see the future, it strongly resembles AGT and not say Future Imperfect, which was indeed an imaginary future.

Short version...it's Q. He doesn't do parlour tricks.

 

[GaryH]

I only read Missing in Action because it was part 2 of After the Fall, but it was one of those reading experiences where I really shouldn't have, as two chapters in, I was like, "actually, I didn't care at all how these plots were going to wind up." I agree that Stone and Anvil is the ideal stopping point, though honestly the decay set in with eXcalibur. Funny that there are fewer books from what I think of as "real" New Frontier (original quartet through Dark Allies) than from the later periods that I do my best to forget!

I actually loved the Selar and Morgan Primus storylines from those books. The weakest part of the recent return was the focus on Calhoun dealing with past continuity, when he is the weakest character in the franchise despite being intended to be the strongest. I do like where all the characters were left at the end of The Returned, but that was a series were *not* doing a time jump may have hampered the possibility of future stories. A future story has a great place to start now, but may never happen now due to the seemingly negative overall reaction to The Returned from what I can see.

 

[JD]

My understanding of the episode was that Picard's consciousness was plucked from the present and placed into a possible future timeline, as real as any presented in Trek.

That's always been my interpretation as well.

It's not clear what Q did. The one thing we haven't seen him do is send people into the future, even alternate ones. We have seen him construct elaborate fictions which, while possibly deadly, are still not *true* (a better term I think than "real").

Didn't we see him pull people from the past into the present in the episode with Quinn?

 

[Idran]

I'm concluding that some things were "fictional" illusions therefore all of it *could* be.

No, you're assuming that some things were fictional illusions. You're not concluding anything, because that's just conjecture; there's nothing in the episode that establishes it firmly as either real or fictional; since these are all fictional events created by a group of writers for the sake of entertainment, there is no hidden truth that could potentially be uncovered down the line (barring a later episode or movie specifically saying for some reason), and so every interpretation that's consistent with what we see is equally valid, it's just a question of selecting which interpretation you want to personally have.

Your statement is "if some things were illusory then all of it could be illusory". That statement is true. However, there is still no proof that some things were illusory, because the episode never actually stated whether it was an illusion or an alternate timeline. That is what you are assuming to be true.

 

[Christopher]

Okay, consider this. In the concluding scene of "All Good Things...," the characters talk about Picard's experiences as if they represented an actual future timeline:

CRUSHER: You know, I was thinking about what the Captain told us about the future. About how we all changed and drifted apart. Why would he want to tell us what's to come?
LAFORGE: Sure goes against everything we've heard about not polluting the time line, doesn't it.
DATA: I believe, however, this situation is unique. Since the anomaly did not occur, there have already been changes in the way this time line is unfolding. The future we experience will undoubtedly be different from the one the Captain encountered.
RIKER: Maybe that's why he told us. Knowing what happens in that future allows us to change things now, so that some things never happen.

They all agree it's not a guaranteed future, but they all accept it as a genuine glimpse of a possible future, and nobody suggests that it was an illusion. After all, they'd have no reason to worry about timeline pollution if they thought it was just conjecture. And presumably Picard included the parts about Irumodic Syndrome, and if it had been a fake disease, Crusher would've said so, and that would've indicated that it was an illusion. So I think we can safely conclude that Irumodic Syndrome is a real disease in the 24th century.

 

[Dayton Ward]

As opposed to "Stick It To the Man-Neosis," which only occurs in the Firefly Verse.


WHAT?

 

[Greg Cox]

Nothing in "All Good Things" implied or intended that Q was creating illusions in the manner of, say, the Talosians in "The Cage." It was a time-travel paradox story, not a story about Picard realizing that Q was tricking him with an elaborate illusion.

Note that, at the end, Q congratulates Picard for figuring out the time-travel paradox, not for seeing through his "elaborate fiction."

 

[JD]

Was anything Q ever created an "illusion"? I always thought he was actually creating things and changing reality.