The Continuity and Serialization of Voyager

[Guy Gardener]

The Enterprise scenes from TATV were indifferentiable from every other scene in the series.

In Pathfinder, when Barclay was playing about with holograms of what they imagined Voyager might look like... They got it wrong.

 

[DigificWriter]

^ I think that notion is ridiculous and completely unsubstantiateable, but, just for the sake of argument, I don't see how that would 'invalidate' the series.

I'm not saying I think that, only that it opens up that avenue of interpretation, even if unintended. I didn't mean to siderail this away from Voyager again.

It's all good.

I've taken a break from watching YoH P2 - mainly because I'm tired and need to get some sleep - but wanted to address the perceived 'discontinuity' between Before and After and the events of the YoH 2-parter of the crew apparently not having any knowledge of the Krenim despite Kes having promised to write a report on the things she learned about them:

Given that we ARE dealing with a story about messing with time, it's really not unfeasible to infer that, in the 'here and now' in which Voyager encountered the Krenim, Kes never made good on her promise for whatever reason or else the events of Before and After were erased from history.

 

[Guy Gardener]

The Krenim say that while they are outside time that they do not age, and that they have been making MANY changes to the timeline for the last 200 years. Considering he's still trying to save his wife, that means that Annorax is hovering over the same year while making changes for the last 200 year son his ship floating outside of time. In every timeline that Kes warned Janeway not to engage with the Krenim, Annorax was not engaged either, and he reset time again. He could have fired his weapon 100s, or maybe even thousands of times. If they don't stop Annorax, they don't stop Annorax and they forget everything and begin at the beginning again.

We missed the first %99.5 of the story.

 

[DigificWriter]

Since time changed the instant Voyager was impacted by the first and second temporal shockwaves, it doesn't seem like a stretch to infer or assume that history was retroactively affected by the first shockwave's impact so that Kes' report wasn't written or she never experienced the events of Before and After in the first place, which was the point I was trying to get at.

 

[Guy Gardener]

I know. I agree.

I was explaining "how".

Also that it probably wasn't the first displacement wave we saw on camera.

It was 700 displacement waves earlier.

 

[DigificWriter]

^ Ok. I wasn't sure, so I figured I'd clarify my point just in case.

BTW, my 'personal canon' is that Kes simply didn't write her report and Janeway never pressed her about doing it.

 

[Guy Gardener]

Even if the report wasn't written, they all had a discussion that used the word "Krenim" more than once.

KES: Well, as Tuvok said, I've only seen pieces of one possible future.
PARIS: You know what? Don't tell me. I don't wanna know. I like a little mystery in my life.
JANEWAY: Tom's right. I think we should all leave the future to the future.
TUVOK: While I agree it would not be wise for Kes to make all of her experiences public, a report on anything she knows about these Krenim might be useful.
KES: I'll get started right away.
JANEWAY: Hang on a minute. I didn't mean now. Stay and enjoy your party.
KES: If there's one thing that this experience has taught me, Captain, it's that there's no time like the present.

Exactly how much rum does Janeway put in her coffee?

 

[Anwar]

"Before and After" got retconned out of existence as soon as Kes left the ship and became an energy being. Because of that, she never lived her life on Voyager including the Krenim encounters.

Notice how Seven was in Kes' place in getting the reading of the Chroniton Warhead? It was to show how Kes' role in the story now never happened.

They just didn't make it clear enough.

 

[R. Star]

All things being equal, what's more likely.... that they deliberately decided that all of Kes' experiences in Before and After magically disappeared after the Gift somehow, despite how many times Trek's engaged in time travel without memory loss on anyone's part, and deliberately decided not to mention or even hint at this.... or they just couldn't be bothered to look over their own episodes for important details like this? I think we all know the answer.

 

[Guy Gardener]

"Before and After" got retconned out of existence as soon as Kes left the ship and became an energy being. Because of that, she never lived her life on Voyager including the Krenim encounters.

Notice how Seven was in Kes' place in getting the reading of the Chroniton Warhead? It was to show how Kes' role in the story now never happened.

They just didn't make it clear enough.

In which case Neelix's Ocampan lung would have vanished and he would have died.

 

[Guy Gardener]

They're called Parallel timelines.

In Before and After, all of her new adventures downstream in the past made her old adventures in the future more impossible because the crew of Voyager never saw her coming or never expected her to be arriving despite in their own pasts encountering Kes in her personal future that they should have already met her, and they should have had a biotemporal chamber waiting for her.

 

[Melakon]

When they were doing the final rewrite to incorporate Seven, they probably just referenced the "Before and After" scene for the torpedo's frequency and rewrote Kes' dialogue for Seven. And Star Trek often suggests that trips into the future are only one possible future.

Exactly how much rum does Janeway put in her coffee?

More like Irish whiskey would be my guess.

 

[TEACAKE'S PLEATHER DOME]

Definitely whiskey.

 

[R. Star]

No wonder she flips out during the weeks they're roughing it again and power is scarce.

 

[MacLeod]

The Five Year Mission is, in the title sequence, said to be about them "seeking out new life and new civilizations" and going where "where no has gone before".

Going where no man has gone before, means going away from charted space and not going back into charted space. It's about going deeper and deeper into uncharted space and not leaving until the 5 years are up.

Going to colony worlds, starbases, etc, is them going where other men had gone before, and thus violates the title's premise.

There is a difference between uncharted space and unvisited space. For all we know there could be a dozen systems within a few weeks travel of say stabase 11 that had never been visited by a manned ship.

There is also of course the simple fact that's it's primary mission could have been the whole seek out new life...... but that wouldn't mean that Starfleet couldn't give it another mission i.e. Disaster relief.

And no it doesn't violate the premise, simple because all it states is that the Enterprise is on a five year mission to seek out new life and new civilisations....

Back in the days of sail, I might be mistaken but didn't those ships that where exploring the oceans of Earth sometimes call in at known places?

 

[Bad Thoughts]

Back in the days of sail, I might be mistaken but didn't those ships that where exploring the oceans of Earth sometimes call in at known places?

Voyages were about imperialism: rather than pure discovery, voyages of exploration were concerned with finding new routes to known production centers, controlling them, and securing the state's claim to them by establishing a presence in territories along those routes. Science and culture were secondary, at best.

 

[Anwar]

And no it doesn't violate the premise, simple because all it states is that the Enterprise is on a five year mission to seek out new life and new civilisations....

And any time they went to a colony world or a starbase or visited some area that sent out a message, they violated that mission.

If TOS can get away with it, I don't see why VOY should be endlessly critiqued because they didn't slavishly stick to their premise with no wriggle room whatsoever.

Especially seeing how VOY's premise wasn't a sustainable one in the first place.

 

[Bad Thoughts]

If your interpretation of TOS' premise held, Kirk would have been court martialed, had the Starfleet admiralty decided to.

If Voyager's premise held, the ship would have been, at times, dead in space. No one's decisions or actions, including Janeway's, would have made a difference.

The former can be dealt within internally to the story. The latter strains credibility.

 

[DigificWriter]

Enterprise is really the only one of the three "To Boldly Go" Trek series that could actually live up to its premise because it was set in a period of time where space truly was "the Final Frontier". TOS and TNG couldn't truly fulfill the tenets of that premise because there was actually very little space that hadn't been explored by the periods of time in which they were set.

 

[R. Star]

If Voyager's premise held, the ship would have been, at times, dead in space. No one's decisions or actions, including Janeway's, would have made a difference.

Yeah forbid we have stories about adapting under pressure, establishing relationships with new cultures to get the supplies or repairs they need. That would've been interesting.