Star Trek Online is a separate continuity from the regular books.
Official Description and Cover up for DTI: Watching the Clock
- Thread starter JD
- Start date
Star Trek Online is a separate continuity from the regular books.
Does the DTI already have the ability to detect changes in their own timeline? Even with just 24th century technology.
See, that's the problem! If the DTI was doing its job, it would be on top of all of this.
That interpretation of Lucsly, "Dulmer" (as it was spelled there), and the DTI served Mike Martin's purposes for that particular book, but my purposes were served by going in an unrelated direction. There are no points of continuity between TNotM and DTI:WTC.
Did they? DTI is civilian. The 29th-century timeships are (or will be) Starfleet.
I can't explicitly address it, since the novel is told from the perspective of people in 2381-2, so they would have no way of knowing what would happen 5 years later, let alone what would happen in a separate timeline's past as a consequence of that future event. But once you've read the novel, you should be able to deduce why there's no need to "fix" anything involving that timeline, and why people in the Prime timeline wouldn't necessarily know it even exists.
In their own timeline, yes; see "Gods, Fate, and Fractals." But if a separate timeline branches off in parallel without affecting theirs, there's no reason they'd know about it.
Like they did in that Jean Claude van Damme Timecop movie.
Well, if it affects someone else's timeline, they won't know about it anyway, and it won't matter to them. Their job is to protect their timeline. Dealing with problems in an independent timeline is the responsibility of that timeline's version of the DTI or other temporal agency.
Daniels was referred to as a Temporal Agent working for the Federation. Whatever his agency's ancestry, it evidently doesn't have the same name as the DTI -- and has a much more activist approach to time.
I always interpreted it as a conflict between two powers far in the future, both subtly trying to manipulate different points in history to shape their present so that they come out on top without a shot fired between them in real time.
Oh, I got that - they just never seemed to have any driving purpose or REASON behind what they were doing. Didn't seem to be a whole lot of motivation. They just seemed to be shotgun blasting the past for some nebulous future reason. And wasn't shadow guy from the 26th century and Daniels from the 29th? How does a war even break out between centuries? There are just a lot of unexplained inconsistent things that really need a LOT of explaining for the TCW to make sense.
Which is what Christopher will try to do. When he gets all sciencey on a subject's ass, you know we're in for one hell of a good ride.
Eesh. So we've possibly got three different groups handling time crimes by the 31st century! (DTI, Starfleet timeships, Daniels' group) I wonder if they ever cross paths, or screw up each others' work?
I think Daniels might have been part of Starfleet's Temporal Intelligence division, unless Starfleet has become Timefleet by that time, who knows. DTI may not even exist in that time period if Starfleet is policing the timeline.
Well, the DTI's goal is to keep the timeline as pure and unaltered as possible, and actually travelling through time themselves would increase, rather than reduce, the risk of alterations. So it's not something they would do as a rule. And not necessarily something they could do reliably with the resources available in the 24th century. It's not as easy as it's sometimes been made to look, or else it'd already be routine.
We were introduced to at least four TCW factions in the course of ENT. There was Future Guy from the 28th century, the Federation Temporal Agents from the 31st century, the Sphere Builders from an extradimensional realm, and the Na'kuhl from the 29th century (aka the Space Nazis). And "Future Tense" implied that the Tholians were involved in the TCW as well -- perhaps simply as local proxies like the Suliban Cabal, the Xindi, and Archer, but perhaps as something more. And we've seen other time-travelling groups in other series that could potentially have been involved. For instance, in Howard Weinstein's TOS comics for DC, he established that Gary Seven's employers, whom he named the Aegis, were fighting to protect the timeline from disruption by other, more hostile factions. This was written ten years before ENT premiered, but it sounds awfully familiar, doesn't it? (Though it may have been inspired by the original pilot version of "Assignment: Earth," in which Gary would've been a time traveller battling shapeshifting Omegans who wanted to alter Earth history.)
Honestly, there never was a real purpose. The producers didn't even want to include time travel; UPN insisted because they were nervous about doing a straight-up prequel and wanted something that moved forward from the 24th century. So the time-travel elements didn't really arise from the producers' own plans or goals for the series, and thus it was kind of tacked on.
But that's the challenge, both for me as a writer and for the characters as investigators: figuring out what could tie all these seemingly random, unconnected temporal events together.
At least three groups, yes, but not necessarily contemporaneous. Still, with time travel, that doesn't mean they couldn't cross paths.
And the 29th-century timeships were working for the Temporal Integrity Commission. We know that much.
We don't have any clear indication that Daniels was in Starfleet, except in his cover identity.
Is it possible that the DTI became the Temporal Integrity Commission, and like the DTI perhaps using Starfleet for assistance, the TIC did as well with the Starfleet of their time?
Possible? Sure. Likely? Who knows?
It was pretty easy in the 23rd century, when Kirk went back in time for a Starfleet-ordered historical mission. Perhaps not routine, but it couldn't have been much of a problem. Kirk certainly abused the ease of time travel, anyway...he had, what, seventeen temporal violations?
