The curse(?) of small universe syndrome

[Christopher]

Talking about more than power source. In fact I wasn't talking about that at all.

Which is why I offered a countering perspective. Yes, it is self-evident how Trelane and Q are related as characters in a work of fiction, but from an in-universe standpoint, they have so little in common that it's not even remotely "natural" to suggest a relationship.

 

[korblborp]

as i recall, unless it's a different novel than the one i am thinking of, trelane was NOT presented as a Q, but part of a "bad crowd" of similar beings that Q (De Lancie) fell in win when he was a "teenager", which included "god" and the thing the Galactic Barrier was made to keep out.

 

[Forbin]

as i recall, unless it's a different novel than the one i am thinking of, trelane was NOT presented as a Q, but part of a "bad crowd" of similar beings that Q (De Lancie) fell in win when he was a "teenager", which included "god" and the thing the Galactic Barrier was made to keep out.

I think he's referring to Q-Squared.

 

[Christopher]

as i recall, unless it's a different novel than the one i am thinking of, trelane was NOT presented as a Q, but part of a "bad crowd" of similar beings that Q (De Lancie) fell in win when he was a "teenager", which included "god" and the thing the Galactic Barrier was made to keep out.

You're thinking of Greg Cox's The Q Continuum trilogy, which featured the Sha Ka Ree "God," the "Day of the Dove" evil pinwheel thingy (called "(*)" in the text), and Gorgan the Friendly Angel.

Peter David's Q-Squared definitely did present Trelane as an immature Q, which was a conceit I never found plausible, though the novel itself is probably my favorite of Peter's novels in spite of that.

 

[Starflight]

Even if Trelane were biologically godlike instead of getting his power from a special mirror (lol), I don't see why he'd necessarily be tied to Q. There's other species like the Daud or even, to an extent, Apollo's race who have similar abilities.

Their ideologies don't even seem to be the same - Trelane is a dick but never hurts anyone (and arguably doesn't intend to, even when hunting Kirk), and his parents are furious at him for messing with other lifeforms. Meanwhile Q throws the Enterprise into Borg space and watches as 18 people get dragged away and assimilated, then makes Picard beg for mercy, which feels a little bit different from Trelane's mischief, to put it mildly.

SNW's decision to make him a Q did inordinately annoy me not because I care that much about Trelane, but rather because it speaks to a certain mindset. TOS' approach is "space is operatic and mythic, anything can happen, there's all kinds of unknowable weirdness out there" while SNW's ethos feels more like "the galaxy consists chiefly of things James Kirk saw, many of which are connected to each other", and the former approach to the setting seems so much more interesting to me.

 

[Christopher]

Even if Trelane were biologically godlike instead of getting his power from a special mirror (lol), I don't see why he'd necessarily be tied to Q. There's other species like the Daud or even, to an extent, Apollo's race who have similar abilities.

Exactly. The galaxy is over 13 billion years old, and humans are newcomers. Logically, species immensely more ancient and advanced than humans should greatly outnumber species at a comparable level to humans. So there's no reason to assume any given two super-advanced species are related; statistically, it's vanishingly unlikely. And it makes especially little sense with Trelane's species and the Q, when every specific detail about the respective species' nature and abilities is different and the only similarity is one of personality between a single individual of each species.

SNW's decision to make him a Q did inordinately annoy me not because I care that much about Trelane, but rather because it speaks to a certain mindset. TOS' approach is "space is operatic and mythic, anything can happen, there's all kinds of unknowable weirdness out there" while SNW's ethos feels more like "the galaxy consists chiefly of things James Kirk saw, many of which are connected to each other", and the former approach to the setting seems so much more interesting to me.

I agree that "Wedding Bell Blues" was a terrible idea, but to be fair, it never explicitly said that the "Wedding Planner" was Trelane or that the parent voiced by John deLancie was Q; it just implied it strongly. So we don't have to take it as fact if we don't want to. The Planner could've been a different member of Trelane's species, and a voice is just a voice. James Doohan voiced Sargon, but that doesn't mean Sargon was actually Scotty.

 

[Dukhat]

SNW made Trelane a Q for the same reason that they had a holodeck episode. Because they want to make SNW into the next TNG despite the conceit of it being a prequel to TOS. It's not much different than ENT in that regard. Of course, none of that is going to matter a year from now.

 

[Christopher]

SNW made Trelane a Q for the same reason that they had a holodeck episode. Because they want to make SNW into the next TNG despite the conceit of it being a prequel to TOS.

I agree that the episode's problem was being over-referential, but it's because of their (or more likely Akiva Goldsman's) desire to remake TOS, not TNG. "Blues" failed as an episode because its climax was just a rehash of "The Squire of Gothos"'s climax, which wasn't a good ending even in the original episode because it was a deus ex machina where Kirk did nothing to bring about the outcome, beyond avoiding getting killed by Trelane long enough for the situation to resolve itself. It's not bad to revisit old continuity if you do something that adds to it or reveals it in a new light, but this was just pure nostalgia, rehashing a story we'd already seen, and it carried little meaning for viewers unfamiliar with the reference. Note how the only things we discuss about the episode are its TOS references, rather than its own story or character beats. The referentiality was the point of the story, so the story was empty in its own right.

I really don't see what SNW has supposedly done to make it "the next TNG." It hasn't done a Borg episode or a Ferengi episode. It hasn't shown first contact with the Betazoids or Bolians. Aside from doing a holodeck episode and casting John deLancie to deliver a couple of lines as a familiar-sounding but anonymous character, its references have mostly been to TOS-era stuff -- Vulcans, Gorn, Klingons, Robert April, Sybok, Rigel VII, and of course Kirk and the Farragut. "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow" implicitly referenced ENT's Temporal Cold War and brought in the Department of Temporal Investigations from DS9, but was mostly referencing Khan and the Romulans. "Those Old Scientists" crossed over with Lower Decks. The Illyrians are partly an ENT reference and partly a TOS/TAS reference, since D.C. Fontana's novel Vulcan's Glory established Number One as an Ilyrian, one L, which may have been meant to be the same species to whom Harry Mudd sold Starfleet Academy according to TAS: "Mudd's Passion." And of course it's also followed up on the Klingon War from DSC. So it's referenced other series a lot more than it's referenced TNG.

 

[Dukhat]

You seriously don't see the analogy between the SNW Gorn and the Borg?

They don't have to literally use the same aliens. It's the concept that's the point here.