Spoilers Time travel in Picard and Coda

[Mike Doyle]

There has been lots of discussion since Episode 4 about why Guinan doesn’t recognise Picard from times arrow.

The answer is that they are in the Confederation timeline still and Times Arrow didn’t happen.

More info from @David Mack https://davidmack.pro/blog/2022/03/26/star-trek-picards-temporal-mechanics/

This got me thinking though that if Times Arrow didn’t happen then what else changes. The biggest issue is nobody putting a stop to the Devidians feeding on humanity allowing them to expand, become more powerful and become the multiversal threat from Coda.

Is it possible that the Devidians from Coda are the Confederate Timeline Devidians. There was never any suggestion in the First Splinter that they were even still around, never mind a threat. But then Q changes the prime timeline and suddenly they are here.

This does rest on the first splinter somehow being protected from the 2024 change. Maybe the fact that it’s inherently unstable does that.

It also explains the question of why Q didn’t turn up in Coda. He’s indirectly caused it.

So this now means to save the whole multiverse we haven’t got 3 separate teams in the Borg Timeline, First Splinter and The Celestial Temple but actually a forth in 2024 of the prime (but messed up timeline).

The Coda story as presented stops the Devidians at Oblivians Gate outside of time being able to devour more universes. But unless prime Picard rights the wrong of 2024 then there will be more Devidians within time able to make more oblivions gates.

Who’d have thought Times Arrow would be so important to Trek in 2022.

 

[Christopher]

There has been lots of discussion since Episode 4 about why Guinan doesn’t recognise Picard from times arrow.

I don't think it needs any explanation other than that she only met him for a few hours more than 130 years earlier, and he's much more elderly now. She did seem to recognize his name when he said it.

Also that it would've been a needless distraction to the viewers who didn't know about "Time's Arrow," since it wasn't relevant to the story. I.e. the same reason Seven of Nine didn't mention that she knows how to drive thanks to Tom Paris's holodeck games.

 

[Mike Doyle]

I don't think it needs any explanation other than that she only met him for a few hours more than 130 years earlier, and he's much more elderly now. She did seem to recognize his name when he said it.

Also that it would've been a needless distraction to the viewers who didn't know about "Time's Arrow," since it wasn't relevant to the story. I.e. the same reason Seven of Nine didn't mention that she knows how to drive thanks to Tom Paris's holodeck games.

Totally agree. My wife has never seen Times Arrow and enjoyed the episode just fine. That was just an intro to the second half of the post though. Really done want to rehash the Guinan stuff which has pages and pages discussing it in the Picard forum.

 

[F. King Daniel]

Forget the Devidians, the universe is already doomed because Janeway didn't die. Or something.

I can't remember if it was Voyager or DTI, but Janeway dying on that Borg cube is really important to the future.

 

[DGCatAniSiri]

Forget the Devidians, the universe is already doomed because Janeway didn't die. Or something.

I can't remember if it was Voyager or DTI, but Janeway dying on that Borg cube is really important to the future.

Technically speaking, it was that Kathryn Janeway HAD to die as a result of Admiral Janeway meddling with the timeline in Endgame and sparking the formation of the Omega Continuum, not that she had to SPECIFICALLY die on the Borg cube.

The simple solution, though, is just that Q (and Q and Q...) may have looked through the multiverse and seen Janeway dying as a result of that, but the framing of the multiverse is that there are conceivably infinite alternate timelines, and a subset of infinity is still infinity, so the Prime timeline is part of a timeline where Omega doesn't form and everything's fine.

Or that, because Omega was a threat from outside the universe as we know it, its reversion in the First Splinter lasted through to the Prime universe all the same because of something something multimodal reflection algorithms static warp shell something something technobabble.

 

[F. King Daniel]

Thinking more about it and how "Time's Arrow" didn't happen in Picard's 2024 (yet somehow The Punk remembered Star Trek IV and had grown from the experience), I think the weird causality makes for a better case that the entire novelverse exists as a seperate alternate reality and not just the "first splinter" of it post-First Contact Borg incursion. Destiny alone ties into the ancient past, and into the Romulan War era. The DTI books span millions of years. And with it's interconnectedness, pull one thread and the tapestry unweaves.

And yes I'm aware there's a very intentional Austin Powers mentality going on!

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[Tuskin38]

(yet somehow The Punk remembered Star Trek IV and had grown from the experience)

There's no evidence of this.

 

[Christopher]

There's no evidence of this.

Of course there is. He turned off the boombox immediately when asked, looked afraid, and reached for his neck, as if remembering being pinched. It was quite blatant.

 

[Tuskin38]

It's 40 years later, maybe he encountered someone else that scared him. Or he just mellowed.

Yes, out of universe it was a reference, but in-universe, anything could have happened.

 

[Leto_II]

^ He also apologizes to Seven and Raffi at least a couple times during that scene too, right after being confronted.

 

[Christopher]

Yes, out of universe it was a reference, but in-universe, anything could have happened.

That's overthinking it. What matters about the story isn't whether you can parse the time-travel mechanics. That's all nonsense anyway. It was a reference. Narratively, that was its purpose. The purpose of narrative is not just to make the continuity work out. It's to tell a story about characters and ideas and emotions and experiences. They put that scene in because they wanted us to have the experience of recognizing this as the same guy remembering what happened in TVH. If that contradicts what they claimed elsewhere about how the time logic supposedly works, that's their problem, not ours. They're the ones who chose to insert the contradiction.

 

[Bryan Levy]

That's overthinking it. What matters about the story isn't whether you can parse the time-travel mechanics. That's all nonsense anyway. It was a reference. Narratively, that was its purpose. The purpose of narrative is not just to make the continuity work out. It's to tell a story about characters and ideas and emotions and experiences. They put that scene in because they wanted us to have the experience of recognizing this as the same guy remembering what happened in TVH. If that contradicts what they claimed elsewhere about how the time logic supposedly works, that's their problem, not ours. They're the ones who chose to insert the contradiction.

God, thank you. It broke what they were trying to do. It’s a have eaten cake scenario. They wanted both things to be true, and it’s infuriating.

 

[Christopher]

God, thank you. It broke what they were trying to do. It’s a have eaten cake scenario. They wanted both things to be true, and it’s infuriating.

Not really, because only one is actually in the story as aired, and the other is left implicit and only mentioned in behind-the-scenes interviews. Those are two fundamentally different things, onstage and backstage. There's nothing in the aired episode that contradicts it being the same timeline. The only thing that seems to is Guinan not recognizing Picard, but it's ridiculously easy to explain why she doesn't recognize someone after more than 130 years, especially when she only knew him for a few hours and he's decades older now. So it doesn't matter what their stated rationale was behind the scenes. The only things that count are the ones actually present in the story.

 

[mastadge]

Regardless of what the intent was or whether there was an alternate TVH in this timeline, my inner editor still believes it would have been better to have the Bus Punk as a cute cameo for people to notice and appreciate rather than expanding it into a whole scene.

And my internal timeline guy is wondering, if they handwave Elnor back in, how they'll do it, and hoping it's not "technically it was the Confederacy version of Elnor that died, so when we fixed the timeline the Federation version was still alive!"

 

[Christopher]

And my internal timeline guy is wondering, if they handwave Elnor back in, how they'll do it, and hoping it's not "technically it was the Confederacy version of Elnor that died, so when we fixed the timeline the Federation version was still alive!"

Reminds me of Chekov coming back from his "death" in "Spectre of the Gun."