Poll Is this 32nd century a keeper?

[Noname Given]

Borg was ok. Ferengi was embarrassing.

Why? Picard and the Federation knew about the Ferengi before Picard actually first encountered them.

Hell given the way the Ferengi turned out the one episode that really stands out as a WTF episode WRT the Ferengi was TNG's "The Battle" which has a Ferengi vessel attacking the USS Stargazer out of the blue for no reason; and continuing the attack as Picard tries to make peace.
^^^
Given the Ferengi were ultimately shown to be interested in nothing but commerce and profit; an open and unprovoked attack on an alien vessel that didn't attack them first makes zero sense. You"d think they'd have respond to a hail from a federation vessel with an offer to sell something to the Federation, are strike up some sort of commerce agreement.

 

[RPOW0614]

My two cents...total speculation...

The ship will be left in the future because of the sphere data. Eventually retrieved by future Starfleet.
The crew has to go back because for some reason (insert techno babble here) they caused the the "Burn" by traveling to the future. With the ship safely hidden in a nebula they travel back and save the Federation by rebooting the timeline. Probably get a new ship and name it Discovery.

I just keep getting the feeling they are foreshadowing this.

 

[Christopher]

Why? Picard and the Federation knew about the Ferengi before Picard actually first encountered them.

Knew about them by name but had never met them face-to-face and didn't know what they looked like, similarly to the Romulans as of the start of "Balance of Terror." Which "Acquisition" successfully maneuvered around by never having the Ferengi mention their species' name to Archer's crew. So all Federation history would have recorded was a pirate raid by an unknown species. It wouldn't have been until after "The Last Outpost" that the Federation would've been able to figure out that the big-eared pirates who attacked NX-01 that one time had been Ferengi.

It's sort of like how we used to believed Columbus was the first European to "discover" the New World because we'd forgotten that the Vikings had been here nearly 500 years earlier. We tend to remember the last "first" contact, the one that sticks, while earlier one-time encounters are overlooked.

 

[TimeIsAPredator]

It's probably the real future for now. Some other Trek series in the future could come along and say it's an alternate future though.

Ten years from now someone will do a prequel where Lt. Manny Bothans starts the Klingon war 2 years before Vulcan hello

 

[JoeZhang]

It's probably the real future for now. Some other Trek series in the future could come along and say it's an alternate future though.

I think a lot of fans have to get their head around the fact that now it's the permeant setting for these characters, it's not the future, it's the present.

As other people have pointed out, the chances of it being wiped out are slim to zero - in the same way that Enterprise was never going to reveal that the TNG period was an alternative future...

 

[Christopher]

I think a lot of fans have to get their head around the fact that now it's the permeant setting for these characters, it's not the future, it's the present.

Yes. And it's strange to see so much resistance to that. Whatever happened to all the fans complaining that there were too many prequels and the franchise needed to start moving forward again?

Although I don't recall anyone theorizing that Picard would use time travel to undo the synth attack on Mars and the ban on AIs. But then, Picard didn't include time travel as part of its narrative. Even though Discovery did everything it could to tell us that the time travel would be one-way, merely a plot device to get the characters to the new setting and nothing beyond that, it's still established in viewers' minds and so some of them expect it to continue as a factor.

 

[fireproof78]

It's funny to me what people want to use time travel to undo. Like, we can't go back and stop the Dominion War, or whatnot, but undoing the Burn? Absolutely, we must fix that.

 

[Christopher]

It's funny to me what people want to use time travel to undo. Like, we can't go back and stop the Dominion War, or whatnot, but undoing the Burn? Absolutely, we must fix that.

As I said, I think some people are assuming that because the situation was introduced through time travel, that means it will be resolved that way too.

I was going to point out that the fairly consistent pattern in Trek is that the only problems undone by time travel are those that were caused by it in the first place -- Edith Keeler being saved, young Spock not being saved, the Enterprise-C falling through a time warp and creating a war timeline, the Borg ruining Cochrane's first flight, the Bell Riots not happening, the Year of Hell, etc. But when I looked into it, I realized that there are a fair number of later instances of stories where time travel was used to undo bad futures that weren't originally caused by time travel -- "The Visitor," "Visionary," "Time and Again," "Timeless," "Endgame," "Twilight." Interesting that they mostly came later in the franchise.

 

[valkyrie013]

Law of unintended consequences.. Oh lets fix this this way, and then latter.. Oh.. we F'd up.. crap, its now worse.
In Timeless and Endgame, Voyager didn't destroy the Transwarp network, In the Litverse, it caused the borg to just loose it and atempt to genocide the federation, but in the original timeline, that didnt happen.
In the Burn, if it was galaxy wide, then literally Trillions would have died and more in the aftermath. Do we have a Death count limit that time travel could be an option?

 

[fireproof78]

Do we have a Death count limit that time travel could be an option?

Depends on who is in charge.

 

[Phily B]

If they hit the reset button, they'd probably lose me for good.

 

[CorporalClegg]

I think the long-term goal is for another franchise-wide reboot, not a full hard reboot, but certainly more substantial than alternate timeline shenanigans.

 

[Christopher]

I think the long-term goal is for another franchise-wide reboot, not a full hard reboot, but certainly more substantial than alternate timeline shenanigans.

That's what they just did. Fans are too preoccupied with continuity; to storytellers, "reboot" just means a fresh start, a reinvigoration, a new way of telling the story, whether it's a new continuity or just a new phase of the existing one. Jumping centuries beyond the known Trek timeline is an even bigger reboot in terms of narrative possibility than the Kelvin rehash of TOS was. It's a fresh beginning that lets them use anything and everything from previous Trek but not be constrained in their storytelling options by any of it, which is the best of both worlds (to coin a phrase).

As far as continuity is concerned, I think Picard, Lower Decks, and the upcoming Strange New Worlds make it crystal-clear that the current creators of the franchise love Prime continuity and want to continue building on it. The notion that they have some ultimate goal of throwing everything out and restarting doesn't make much sense in light of what they're actually doing.

 

[CorporalClegg]

You are arguing points I neither stated nor implied.

 

[Christopher]

You are arguing points I neither stated nor implied.

Well, I'm not quite clear what you could mean by "another franchise-wide reboot" in any case, since if you mean "reboot" in the sense of a continuity reinvention, that has never happened in Trek, except in the subtle ways that any new installment in a franchise will tweak the continuity while pretending to be consistent.

 

[CorporalClegg]

I mean they're going to use Discovery and the "New Federation" as a foundation/springboard/whatever to launch a new Star Trek franchise. They'll let the current stuff play-out, of course. But pop-culture anthropologists are saying the current nostalgia saturation bubble is due to burst any time now. I have to believe Kurtzman and Co are keenly aware of that and are planning ahead.

Also, I don't give two flying-flips about canon or continuity or any of that nonsense.

 

[serabine]

I think Discovery is going to stick to the cover story of having been "out there" for 1,000 years. They'll tell Starfleet Command, but they won't tell anyone else. Zora will take it a step further and tell Craft she's been waiting in the nebula for 1,000 years.

In an era when time-travel is illegal, Starfleet Command wouldn't want people thinking Discovery, potentially their great salvation, travelled through time.

This is my actual opinion of what I think will happen. The more I think about it, the more comfortable I am saying it. I think this is the least convoluted way to tie "Calypso" into the third season of DSC. "But they don't need to tie "Calypso" in!" You really believe they won't? They will. Even if how I think they'll do it is wrong, I don't think I'm wrong in saying they'll tie the two together in some way.

Oooooh, "straight up lie" would be a really neat way to avoid further time travel.

 

[Airmandan]

Putting it so far in the future means they can do literarily whatever they like. They don't have to worry about it conflicting with any of the other shows that were previously or currently in production. I'm perfectly fine with that idea.

 

[somebuddyX]

I very much doubt they would.

Sure. It's not impossible though, is it?

I think a lot of fans have to get their head around the fact that now it's the permeant setting for these characters, it's not the future, it's the present.

As other people have pointed out, the chances of it being wiped out are slim to zero - in the same way that Enterprise was never going to reveal that the TNG period was an alternative future...

Yeah but all I'm saying is that some other writer could come along and wipe the slate clean. They probably won't. But they could.

 

[fireproof78]

Why? Picard and the Federation knew about the Ferengi before Picard actually first encountered them.

How does embarrassment translate in to "they should have never heard of them before?"

I just found the whole episode to be very cringe inducing with the way the Ferengi were just grabbing stuff for the hell of it. It was all very strange.