Has Anyone Read Q-Squared?
- Thread starter Bones_McCoy21
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Personally, I'm of the opinion that Trelane was lying to Jack about that. Of course eventually every Jack Crusher would die, that's inevitable, but he was saying that at that moment, every other Jack Crusher was dead. Unless you want to go with the Buffy the Vampire Slayer idea, where alternate dimensions (or in this case timeline) proceed at a different rate of time than the others, the very same idea of alternate timelines also say that there are multiple timelines where Jack Crusher gets to live to a ripe old age. So I prefer just to believe that Trelane was lying in an effort to drive Jack insane, to see what the results would be.
^ Exactly. A subset of infinity is still infinity.
Sorry but as a mathematician I can't let this slide. {1} is a subset of N. :P
I mean you're right that the thing about Jack is ridiculous. But still.
It was my understanding that there would be no math.
Spot on. Q - our Q - is a trickster and prankster but has never been purely evil, malicious, sadistic, etc. And I don't even think that Q ever even flat-out lied to any of the people we saw him pestering.
Trelane, OTOH, is all of these things. Q would never do the kind of things that Trelane did. Carrying the 'child' angle through, Trelane is the kind who would torture small animals and then move on to large ones. If Trelane were a normal human, he'd be a sociopath serial killer. Trelane is Patrick Bateman with Q powers.
But they weren't his powers. "The Squire of Gothos" made it quite clear that it was Trelane's technology that made it all happen. Trelane himself explained that his people had "perfected a system" that was basically an advanced transporter/replicator technology. He depended on the machine hidden behind his mirror in order to create his illusions and transport the crew, and all Kirk had to do was put one bullet in that machine to ruin it completely. And when Trelane came back later, he said outright that he had additional "instrumentality" (i.e. technology) that was "unbreakable." So it was all unambiguously presented as advanced technology that Trelane was wielding. There was never any suggestion that he had innate mind powers of any kind. So I just don't get why people think he has anything in common with the Q.
Who says Q never uses technology? With the Q, everything could be a trick of perception. "Q-Squared" likens Trelane's technology to Q "training wheels"
But there are so many other "superraces" in Trek, why link these two? Why should Trelane be more likely to be related to the Q than the Organians are, or the Thasians, or whoever? The only reason it ever occurred to anyone to associate Q and Trelane is their personalities. Aside from that, any attempt to connect them is just selectively interpreting the facts or inventing rationalizations to support that preconceived notion.
To be fair, the personalities brought such a strong association that it even occurred to John de Lancie himself, who's even said he always assumed Roddenberry based Q on Trelane.
But even so, yeah, you're right, there's no strong in-text evidence to link Q and Trelane. Still a good book, though.
^Oh, yeah. Don't get me wrong, Q Squared is PAD's best Trek novel ever, and there are parts of it I find extremely powerful. But I find that aspect of its premise implausible. As a rule, I'm not fond of the tendency in fandom to take two entities in Trek that have one little thing in common and ignore the whole bunch of enormous differences between them in order to link them together. (I react the same way to theories that link the Borg and V'Ger.)
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Gene Roddenberry did half-jokingly say that the Borg Homeworld was the same machine planet whose inhabitants repaired and sent V'Ger on its odyssey to Earth. An angle for which Shatner and his ghost-writers explored in 'The Return'.
^And there are a bunch of reasons why it doesn't make sense. The Return concocted a bunch of convoluted rationalizations to explain away the inconsistencies, but it's so much simpler and more elegant just to have them be unconnected so you don't have to make up convoluted rationalizations.
In some ways, yes. It really depends on the story and what has been told before it.
Just finished the book myself. Really enjoyed it but is there a continuity issue with the Q Continuum trilogy when it comes to the barrier? The writer also highlights it being James R Kirk which I took to mean he was going to explain the name change but it was never addressed later on.
I had the William Tell overture in my head during the final act. I think that works better.
I had the William Tell overture in my head during the final act. I think that works better.
Captain Kirk's middle initial is "R" in the alternate universe where Jack Crusher lives to become captain of the Enterprise-D, but Kirk's middle name is Tiberious in the Prime Universe, where Jack Crusher died on (or, technically, near, IIRC) the Stargazer. Presumably, the other differences between WNMHGB and TOS proper in sets, costuming, makeup, the exterior of the ship, and so forth can also be explained by it being in an alternate, but similar, universe from the rest of TOS.
Many, many times
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