Hey, I never noticed that before....
- Thread starter Warped9
- Start date
She wasn't unknown. She ran her mission and soup kitchen, the 21st Street Mission. She was well known locally.
For all we know, that could have also mattered.
And the Guardian is something they can't change, so....
Good ideas.
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Right, and something else. A record of how Edith was supposed to die was on Spock's tricorder. She died in a traffic accident. In order for the correct timeline to come into existence there had to be witnesses to that death. I left that point open in my previous post, but it's really not. Not only is evidence required of her death, it has to specifically be the death reported in the papers that Spock scanned on the tricorder. Otherwise, it would be a different timeline.
So, in order to save Edith, they would have to convincingly fake her death in the same way that she died. They didn't even know the time and place exactly, because of the limitation in Spock's equipment built with 1930s resources, until it was about to happen. They simply did not have the resources needed to pull off a fake death. So, it's impossible to save her.
As @Search4 says, you can't guarantee that the butterfly effect won't matter as well. Even if it's not one newspaper story, maybe it's something else that matters, that's connected to her death, but that they don't know about, because it cannot be retrieved from the tricorder, assuming it's even on there. The best they can do is let what's indicated to the best of their knowledge unfold, and as Kirk said, get the hell out of there.
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Thing is, though, the heroes can rule out butterfly effect. They have already messed up the timeline badly enough, altering the paths of dozens upon dozens of people, never mind talking with the one kingpin character and altering the way she thinks about the things she firmly and importantly believes in (even if only by reinforcing her convictions). If this doesn't matter, then killing a dozen or saving a hundred won't, either - why should it?
What they can't rule out is that butterfly effect exists but they are predestined to create the effect. But in that case, there's no sense in stopping short of evacuating Keeler to another time alive, since there's no way of telling how far the predestination will reach.
The safest bet would be to believe in only the coarse timelines mattering: just silence Keeler and all is fine and well. Kill, kidnap, discredit, everything is equally possible. Perhaps whisper a few untruths and have Eleanor R become jealous?
Timo Saloniemi
What they can't rule out is that butterfly effect exists but they are predestined to create the effect. But in that case, there's no sense in stopping short of evacuating Keeler to another time alive, since there's no way of telling how far the predestination will reach.
The safest bet would be to believe in only the coarse timelines mattering: just silence Keeler and all is fine and well. Kill, kidnap, discredit, everything is equally possible. Perhaps whisper a few untruths and have Eleanor R become jealous?
Timo Saloniemi
Locally, yeah. Everybody is known locally, I am known locally. There's nothing special about that.
Nationally and internationally, which is what counts for the timeline, she was an unknown.
She managed to screw up the war!!! That's a major accomplishment, in a grim sort of way. How many people In the world could have done that? no more than ten, probably less than five.
Yeah, and perhaps the bum that self-disintegrated invented a new way to steal someone's wallet in a crowded place. Imagine how many wallets might have been saved by his death!!!
No, you've conflated two issues. You don't need to be internationally known in order to be missed if you suddenly disappear.
Plus, being missed is not the only possible significance of the accident not happening, were she to disappear anyway. @Search4 pointed out that someone observing the accident itself could have been significant to the timeline.
In any case, the conditions for entering the correct timeline were given in the tricorder recordings. Either she meets Roosevelt or she dies in a traffic accident. If she goes to the future, the traffic accident would have to have been faked, and that was infeasible.
For all we know the conditions included Kirk having Chicken Marsalla for dinner and he didn't so...
In Ellison's version Trooper's death is directly commented on at the end: it doesn't matter to the timeline but he mattered.
In the episode the Guardian flat out tells them that if they are successful in restoring the timeline they will be returned as if nothing happened. The implication is if they don't, they're stuck. There's no option of bringing Edith back. So Kirk could save her but he and Spock are trapped in the past.
In the episode the Guardian flat out tells them that if they are successful in restoring the timeline they will be returned as if nothing happened. The implication is if they don't, they're stuck. There's no option of bringing Edith back. So Kirk could save her but he and Spock are trapped in the past.
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The problem I have is that Edith Keeler is quite smart, I am sure if they told her the whole story and why it is important that she didn't start her peace movement she could be persuaded not to start it. At least until Hitler is defeated. The problem is that they aren't offered the chance to do so, even though it would solve the problem.
Thats not a "problem". That's not the story. McCoy interfered and destroyed human history going forward and that has to be fixed. Edith is a focal point on which one course of history turns. If she lives there's no guarantee the rest of history will proceed as it had before. Her disappearance could fuck things up, too, Butterfly effects and all that.
The Butterfly effect doesn't happen selectively to one small event and not another... It happens SYSTEMATICALLY, each time the smallest disturbance is done at ANY moment in the past. You modify ONE atom and in about one nanosecond the atom that would have collided with it is modified, two nanoseconds and it's four atoms. Ten nanoseconds and it's two to the tenth power atoms that are modified, after a minuscule fraction of a second ALL the atoms in the vicinity of the disturbance have been modified, that disturbance then travels at the speed of light in every direction, after a short while all small objects that could be influenced by the Brownian motion are modified (that includes spermatozoa) and that means that approximately nine months later only one child in millions is identical to what he would have been in the other timeline!!
That's the butterfly effect.
Exactly. This is a conversation-stopper for me. The script has flaws, but this wasn't one of them.
Write a lot without saying much, don'cha? You're fixating about the specific meaning of a term and deliberately missing the point.
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No, you're the one missing the point. Because of the butterfly effect, any intervention in the past has catastrophic consequences. So you either ignore it and get stories like this or you apply it and as soon as anybody goes in the past the present is dramatically transformed. You can't have both.
Agreed. It's utter nonsense that Kirk stepping on a cockroach or Kirk saving Keeler would differ in "failing to preserve the timeline". And as usual, you have to justify utter nonsense in scifi by making up a rule and handwaving around it. And "City" makes a halfhearted gesture to establish that certain people matter while others do not - which then means there is no butterfly effect involved in any sense of the term. If you want to flatten a continent, you have to use a boot the size of a continent; kicking over a molehill with your sandal a few centuries earlier won't work. Unless it's a Special Molehill.
The door then is jammed open for defining Special. Some may say Keeler needs to be run over by a truck of a specific make that very night and the driver must be smoking a specific brand at the time. Others may say Keeler just needs to tone it down a bit when meeting Roosevelt. The episode itself has the heroes leaning more toward the former than the latter, but offers no support to the idea that they'd actually know their shit. It's basically just the inhuman Spock erring on the side of caution, and this caution then carrying the day, without allowing the audience to learn whether it was erroneous or not.
It's in the greater Trek context where we know that the butterfly effect doesn't exist or matter. In "City", the heroes need not care, because they're just pawns in a game the Guardian is playing. Does it lay down the fancy rules to its amusement? To make all the pawns move the exact right way so that its desperate struggle to save the multiverse will succeed? Again, we don't learn, and we need not care. But we can write off certain ideas and interpretations.
Timo Saloniemi
The door then is jammed open for defining Special. Some may say Keeler needs to be run over by a truck of a specific make that very night and the driver must be smoking a specific brand at the time. Others may say Keeler just needs to tone it down a bit when meeting Roosevelt. The episode itself has the heroes leaning more toward the former than the latter, but offers no support to the idea that they'd actually know their shit. It's basically just the inhuman Spock erring on the side of caution, and this caution then carrying the day, without allowing the audience to learn whether it was erroneous or not.
It's in the greater Trek context where we know that the butterfly effect doesn't exist or matter. In "City", the heroes need not care, because they're just pawns in a game the Guardian is playing. Does it lay down the fancy rules to its amusement? To make all the pawns move the exact right way so that its desperate struggle to save the multiverse will succeed? Again, we don't learn, and we need not care. But we can write off certain ideas and interpretations.
Timo Saloniemi
GUARDIAN: Time has resumed its shape. All is as it was before.
To me, "all" means that Kirk, Spock and McCoy never visited Keeler's mission and Rodent never got disintegrated in the "resumed" time stream. The Guardian returned Kirk, Spock and McCoy with all of their original clothing and equipment as he said he would. McCoy's type one phaser was just hidden under his shirt.
To me, "all" means that Kirk, Spock and McCoy never visited Keeler's mission and Rodent never got disintegrated in the "resumed" time stream. The Guardian returned Kirk, Spock and McCoy with all of their original clothing and equipment as he said he would. McCoy's type one phaser was just hidden under his shirt.
GUARDIAN: Time has resumed its shape. All is as it was before.
To me, "all" means that Kirk, Spock and McCoy never visited Keeler's mission and Rodent never got disintegrated in the "resumed" time stream. The Guardian returned Kirk, Spock and McCoy with all of their original clothing and equipment as he said he would. McCoy's type one phaser was just hidden under his shirt.
The GOF is either grossly incompetent or some kind of prankster...
Whatever it is, it's not a dumb time elevator that obeys verbal commands. If anything, it would seem to be user-unfriendly to the extreme, perhaps explaining why it never gets customers. Why, it has been waiting for "a question" for millions if not billions of years!
(It's a different semantic issue whether it has not heard one in all that time, or whether it gets asked a question every fortnight or so. But it would seem evident that no customer ever returns, except perhaps with a complaint and a WMD.)
Timo Saloniemi
(It's a different semantic issue whether it has not heard one in all that time, or whether it gets asked a question every fortnight or so. But it would seem evident that no customer ever returns, except perhaps with a complaint and a WMD.)
Timo Saloniemi
I think the Guardian was built as an entertainment device gone wrong.
