Small-Universe Syndrome

^^Then there's the Abrams movies which carry the implication that even being in temporary command while the captain is away entitles you to be called "Captain" which is just weird.

 

^Or that you can become a captain by falling ass-backwards into the center seat despite having little or no command experience, at the expense of other officers with more service time.

--Sran

 

What about Voyager's journey through the Delta Quadrant? In the rough line they traverse across an entire galactic quadrant, they encounter:

an unstable temporal micro-wormhole leading to a next-door neighbor of the Federation ("Eye of the Needle")
a colony of descendants of centuries-ago abducted members of a founding Federation species ("The 37's)
The Sky Spirits of Chakotay's ancestors ("Tattoo")
the displaced Ferengi encountered by the Enterprise-D ("False Profits")
in all of the Borg's gigantic sphere of influence, assimilated nationals of local space nations ("Unity", "Scorpion", "Survival Instinct", "Unimatrix Zero, Part II")
Species 8472's possibly sole training facility in the space-time continuum ("In the Flesh")
the centuries-lost Ares IV and the exact anomaly that took it ("One Small Step")
the homeworlds of all 4 of their Borg children charges ("Tsunkatse", "Child's Play", "Imperfection") (though they couldn't deliver Mezoti home as they had already passed Norcadia Prime)
the one other surviving Caretaker abductee Starfleet vessel, who also jumped thousands of light years ("Equinox")
a traveling group of the Federation's next-door neighbors ("Prophecy")
a centuries-lost lost Earth space probe ("Friendship One")

 

The who? All I saw was a bright flash. Nothing else to see here, move along.

 

I don't mind Small Universe Syndrome at all. Yes, it's ridculously implausible, but I love the possibilities it opens up. Some complained about the Admiral Archer reference in ST'09, but I love the idea that the young Kirk and Scotty knew the now-ancient former captain of the NX-01.

 

It's funny - I was thinking about this very topic from another angle the other day. I work in a largish business school - there are about 300 academics - we work in divisions - I am a critical management theorist so work in the management division, we have accountancy and finance, Marketing, Economics etc.

Occasionally I will attend an event and someone will say "I guess you know Bill Smith" - because he's an economist, even though his office is likely to be within 100ft of mine, I have no idea who he is.

 

Maybe they encountered a number of unstable wormholes, but we didn't see the cases where the wormholes led nowhere useful, because then there wouldn't have been 42 minutes' worth of story.

Those are rather more coincidental.

And this one made no sense at all, because according to dialogue in "The Price," they should've been stranded less than 200 light-years from the Gamma/Delta Quadrant border, whereas Voyager's position at that point was more than 20,000 ly from that border.

I'll grant "Unity" and "Scorpion," but in the case of "Survival Instinct," those ex-drones had been searching for Seven, I believe. And in the case of "Unimatrix Zero," the drones in U0 were physically located all over Borg territory.

As for the Borg children, the proximity isn't so implausible. Since they were children (and Borg apparently accelerate children's maturation), they wouldn't have been abducted that long before, and thus it stands to reason that they'd be relatively close to the places they were abducted from.

What's more implausible is that their homeworlds actually survived rather than having been wiped out entirely by the Borg. We were given an excuse for that in the case of Icheb's homeworld, but not the others.

"Boothby" specifically said "There are a dozen more scattered throughout the quadrant."

Not very implausible, because both ships started from the same place and were headed for the same place. They were just going at different rates, which is why it took so long for Equinox to catch up.

There may have been a lot of such probes, increasing the odds that they'd run into one. It seems like a coincidence that it was the first, but statistically the odds of finding that one are no worse than the odds of finding any of the others.

And I'll never get why some people assume it has to be Jonathan Archer rather than his child or grandchild. Is it so hard to believe he procreated?

 

He can have as many kids as he wants - but the idea of Jonathan Archer knowing James T. Kirk is a million times more interesting.

 

^To you, maybe. I think it's just tiresome small-universe laziness. To me, it is more interesting to enlarge the universe, which makes it feel more solid and real, than to limit yourself to a Dickensian degree of self-reference within a finite pool of characters, which makes it feel more like a fictional construct and more superficial.

 

There was a nice scene where Nog likes the sound of that; O'Brien bursts his bubble by saying there would be nobody left by the time Nog would take command.

 

Voyager encountered a Borg sphere hijacked by Klingon General Korok towards the end of "Unimatrix Zero, Part II".

 

^Yes, and Borg vessels have transwarp drive which lets them move across huge distances very quickly. So that doesn't prove that Korok's sphere was near Voyager to begin with.

 

When Walker Keel (who is introduced as a friend of Picard's) arranges a secret meeting of 4 captains,* as far as I can tell the only two who know each other at all are Keel and Picard. Tryla Scott and Rixx are strangers to Picard. Maybe they know Walker.

Shelby was new to everyone. Jellico was new to everyone. I don't think this small universe thing is really that pervasive.







*One of my absolute favorite scenes in any Trek anywhere. High-level captain counter-conspiracies--how cool is that?

 

Alright, I concede that one.

What about Voyager encountering the colony New Talax? Lo and behold, Neelix meets some of his people on the route to the Federation! And not only did they find some way(s) of jumping the path of decades of regular warp travel that Voyager skipped ("The Gift", "Dark Frontier", "Timeless", etc.), but they survived all the spheres of influence of the Borg and all the hostile beings who could outgun and outrun them!

 

IIRC, Picard and Rixx had met at a conference.

One of my favorites, too! I'm actually surprised things like this didn't happen more often; I always thought it would have been interesting had there been some sort of cabal of captains during the 23rd century--not a Good Ole' Boys Network, but a group of elite officers that banded together during a crisis.

--Sran

 

That was just dumb. They threw out the logic of the series premise -- the fact that it would take decades or centuries to traverse that distance without exotic shortcuts -- in order to contrive a way to write Neelix out of the show. I can rationalize it by assuming that the colonists either obtained a Sikarian trajector from "Prime Factors" (whose range limit was just about the distance to New Talax) or stumbled upon the Vaadwaur's subspace corridors (which we know reached as far as Talaxian space). But winding up directly in Voyager's path was a huge contrivance. It was a terrible idea and they should never have done it.

 

Kirk actually puts together a cabal like that at the end of the Section 31 novel Cloak, with a few faces we'd seen on TOS before. It was a very cool idea.

 

Let's also not forget the Voth, from Distant Origin, who just happened to stumble on Hogan's remains (and who also happened to be evolved from dinosaurs on Earth)

 

Well, they didn't "happen to stumble across" his remains; they'd been actively searching the quadrant for evidence of the Distant Origin theory. And the Voth, like the Borg, had transwarp drive, enabling them to cover huge distances very quickly. So it wasn't by coincidence that they came together with Voyager.

 

Here's a separate but related problem to small-universe syndrome in Voyager: how many people (apparently) have faster-than-warp transportation and interacted with U.S.S. Voyager as a result. Let's see:

Briori: unseen abductors of the 37s somehow went to Earth and back in the 20th century
Sikarians: advanced transporter than only works from their homeworld
the Sky Spirits of Chakotay's ancestors: somehow visited Earth circa 43000 B.C.E. and again as recently as 2252
Arridor and Kol the Ferengi: accidentally stranded and un-stranded via the Barzan Wormhole
Voth: transwarp drives
Borg: transwarp drive and transwarp conduit network (I'm not sure if those are the same thing for the Borg or not)
various Borg escapees: I dunno how Seven's former Borg crewmates in "Survival Instinct" got to Voyager's location in episode 6x02 but it must have taken some faster-than-warp propulsion. Meanwhile Korok of Unimatrix Zero seized control of his transwarp-equipped Borg sphere.
Species 8472: their home dimension is smaller than the space-time continuum, so I guess walking a step in fluidic space is like crossing light years in space-time
Kes the Ocampa: her awakened psionic abilities let her travel in space, teleport, push objects at warp speed, etc. So she leaves Voyager in episode 4x02 but finds them again in episode 6x23
Lyndsay Ballard and the Kobali: she dies at the hands of the Hirogen in 2374 but manages to find Voyager in episode 6x18 after Voyager had made jumps in "Night", "Timeless", "Dark Frontier", and "The Voyager Conspiracy", as does her new "family"
the genome thief: possessed a ship equipped with a coaxial warp drive
Arturis: his species developed quantum slipstream drive
Emck the Malon: discovered a spatial vortex and used it to dump antimatter waste in the Void thousands of light years away from Malon space
Devore Imperium: an interspatial flexure was known to be roving their space in 2375
Kuros's Think Tank: has some means of transportation that lets them go from Vidiian space sometime after episode 2x25 to being aware of Voyager's relations with the Malon to meeting Voyager in episode 5x20 after several of Voyager's jumps
Vaadwaur and Turei: Underspace
U.S.S. Equinox: killed the Ankari's "spirits of good fortune" for material to supercharge their warp drive
Tash: constructed a graviton catapult
colonists of New Talax: unknown means of going from Talaxian space to the Delta Quadrant-Beta Quadrant border