All Dr. Who managed for their temporal wars was upping the grimdark angst in their protagonist to the point he shot out "No More" in English (not Gallifreyan?) with a blaster and... yeah
Has the Temporal age become Trek's best mystery time period?
- Thread starter Quantum21
- Start date
A temporal "hot war" would absolutely be nigh impossible to portray. We aren't witnessing a "war" as we know it, with people physically fighting each other. We're seeing a thousandish years of various era's attempting to manipulate the timeline to obtain a favorable result for their agenda... it's not hard to do the smaller scale, like an individual "battle", but showing "the war" as any sort of whole is almost meaningless.
Time travel can totally be done in a long-form arc... it's been well several times. Too well sometimes (looking at you, Sarah Connor Chronicles... the show was TOO smart and people couldn't handle it.). 2016's "Timeless" series did it pretty well too.
A more interesting potential issue with a hot temporal war is the manner in which time travel works in Trek, which is... basically any possible way it can, it does. There may be more conventional hot wars as a part of it, as a splinter-timeline creates a new quantum reality/"alternate universe" and it's now fighting for its survival.
How were they even able to fight a temporal war in the revelation that after the temporal wars time displaced and universe displaced people ended up getting terminally ill and there's still no cure? Add to the fact that much time travel in Trek creates an alternate universe (i.e. Nero), and honestly no temporal war combatant should have been able to fight for very long.
The whole illness nugget comes from Discovery, one of the many things it has "graced" us with...
BUT... at the same point, it's not a death sentence. There's a "distance" component to it, if you are in a universe that is "close" to the next, there's not much of an effect.
We also know many factions had temporal shielded that actively protected them from timeline changes. The Relativity was "always" in its timeline no matter what happened around them, much like Annorax.
One of the hands-down dumbest things in Discovery, considering all your atoms cycle out over the course of 1-2 years, as you ingest food and your body repairs, meaning nothing should remain from your original universe/time period.
In Star Trek maybe. Probably. But I thought 12 Monkeys did it pretty well.
I expect Time Trek would be a lot hairier.
Last edited:
After we were told in Picard that a certain character (keeping it vague if someone STILL hasn't seen Picard S3) naturally and accidentally conceived a child in her mid 50s, I'm just assuming now that Trek humans are so biologically different from real life humans they might as well just be aliens...
I'm alittle more sympathetic to that. The medical technology they have at their disposal has drastically increased life expectancy and generally made older people capable of much more. A Federation woman in her 50's is probably biologically closer to a 2024 woman in her 30's.
Star Trek has souls that can separate from the body so that might not change.
Nowhere did I say it was one of the dumbest things in Trek in general.
On the "souls" aspect, I always find it amusing that in Return to Tomorrow, Roddenberry insisted John Dugan change the ending, which originally had Sargon and Thalassa, when they left Kirk and Mullhall's bodies, surviving as disembodied spirits. Roddenberry insisted they die in eternal oblivion. So he had no issue with Cartesian dualism, he just demanded there be no way a "soul" survive outside of a body and/or mechanical substrate.
Even so, examples like that I can give some measure of benefit of the doubt to, both because it happened so long ago, along with it really being scientifically unproven either way. In contrast, examples like the thing on DIS (or Brannon Braga's numerous fuck-ups involving DNA/evolution) just display both writers who know very little about science, and science consultants who apparently either don't do their job, or are ignored.
Ignored, usually.
It's as much space fantasy as science fiction. So, any quibbles I have are usually ones I dismiss easily I i enjoying it.
Mileage will vary.
And Chakotay's doesn't strike me as so long ago but I guess it is.
My point is the mind/body division is fundamental to Trek, and goes all the way back to TOS. It has been shown, repeatedly, to be true. Hell, an entire Star Trek movie (The Search for Spock) doesn't work unless you take it as a given that souls are real.
Agreed, so I don't see the ovjection if the mind might be something separate from the body and thus not adjusted to the 32nd century.
I believe that, while not explicitly stated, it's the spirit behind the idea that the transporter does NOT kill a person and then create a new one.
Rather than using the word soul, I like to think that Star Trek of the future has developed a keen understanding of consciousness, and as it turns out said consciousness is not necessarily tethered to the physical body.
It's why transporters work. It's why Spock's Katra could be put into GenesisSpock. It's why non-corporeal beings... exist. It's why Picard could become GolemPicard.
Going with this idea, I think it adds a new and somewhat terrifying depth to TNG "Second Chances"... transporters don't make a copy. It's just not what happens. It's not how the technology works. A copy WAS made, but in the metaphysical... either Riker's "soul" was duplicated, or it was also split into two. I prefer to think of it as the former and ponder the implication... Star Trek has the power to create souls. They don't know HOW or WHY, but their technology did it.
I also like to think that while people know about this, and it's part of the application of some technology... given the massive implications such understanding has, it's something not really spoken of. There's some canon to back that up in the form of Lower Decks... how Shax literally returned from the afterlife, something that oddly common enough, and the entire crew made a point to not talk about it. Under any circumstances.
Although really, in a world of Q's and Trelane's and Organians and all manner of things... the idea that there is something more within sentient, sapient creatures isn't really all that shocking.
(There are some obvious limitations to the technology/understanding. They can't really "cheat death"... they can't make a transporter copy and just slap a "soul" into it. They can't just make an android body to do it... reliably, anyway. You still, usually, need "the original" to accept it. GenesisSpock was... close enough.)
While that was no doubt the intent of the writers, if you analyze the actual dialogue and events, I don't think there's any actual "proof" of a soul in Star Trek 3 and basically what we have since the end of Star Trek 3 is a Genesis-created clone of Spock who has the same memories as the original due to the katra (i.e. memory) transfer power that Vulcans have. Logically, the Spock clone would act the same as the original as he has the same memories, but that's it--no proof of some spiritual soul or anything.
Thomas Riker is arguably proof that transporters do indeed kill people and just make clones with identical memories. Picard S3 further compounded this by showing that transporters take "shortcuts" and just swap in common humanoid DNA haphazardly, which made it so easy to hijack the transporters and alter everyone's DNA who stepped in.
Except they can and wrote themselves into a corner as admitted in Discovery. Culber basically said the Soong method should work all the time but doesn't, and no one knows why (i.e. the rules of Trek as given by Picard allow immortality for everyone and literally the only reason why everyone isn't immortal is because writers knew that kills drama and wrote in a lazy "The Soong method is unreliable" without even bothering to give a technobabble explanation)
Last edited:
Ehh - if the time ship / time starbase is all protected, then you could have all sorts of serialized storylines going on, in their protected bubble, and half of what becomes relevant or interesting can be the fact that people, places, history, things, entire identities can change from episode to episode as the universe AROUND them changes. If done right, it could actually be super interesting. Or even learning new possible context of events by the introduction of a path-not-taken timeline. Tech from a redundant timeline being used for something in a place where it never existed. all sorts of cool stuff.
completely random side thought, when thinknig of Shatner and Muldar...... god, i would have paid to see Denny Crane and Rosalind Shays face off against each other.
There are unresolved temporal wars timelines hanging from Enterprise, namely who Future Guy is and whether he really is an evil President Archer.
My guess is the only way a “hot” temporal war could be interesting is if the implication that even correcting the timeline and preserving the prime continuity leaves lasting damage to the fabric of reality and causes weirdness.
Like altering the very nature of existence weirdness.
Spoiler for the novels in the “Three-Body Problem” series:
Something like that would explain why just correcting the timeline doesn’t fix everything and make everyone forget there was a war in the first place. The residual damage done to the universe from repeated time incursions might still be detectable.
Like altering the very nature of existence weirdness.
Spoiler for the novels in the “Three-Body Problem” series:
One of the most chilling responses by a species in the books is the use of weapons which take out threats and are capable of collapsing a three-dimensional star system into 2 dimensions.
And it’s implied that because of the “Dark Forest Hypothesis,” this type of warfare had already collapsed the universe from its original 10 dimensions at its origin to the 4 we’re capable of experiencing.
And it’s implied that because of the “Dark Forest Hypothesis,” this type of warfare had already collapsed the universe from its original 10 dimensions at its origin to the 4 we’re capable of experiencing.
Something like that would explain why just correcting the timeline doesn’t fix everything and make everyone forget there was a war in the first place. The residual damage done to the universe from repeated time incursions might still be detectable.
I think its more interesting to think that he isn't evil, but is a version of Archer from a previous iteration of the timeline that was on a mission to preserve the formation of the Federation
Similar threads
