Star Trek

That is a good question. Star Trek was always supposed to have a past close to our own. Close enough that we could see Trek as our future. If they update the show's history to mimic ours, then it throws the idea that Nero was the point of divergence completely out. On the other hand, if they keep the past they always talked about, it takes the show farther away from us.

I wasn't really talking about the 1920s setting, which is why the televised version is still the most expensive episode of TOS ever, I was talking about the titular City.

Try doing this with 1960s TV shoestring-budget effects.◊

Just rewatched the DS 9 episode Children of Time.

Other!Odo sacrificing the entire 8,000 people of his village borders on Anakin Skywalker levels of evil. Especially for the sake of one woman's love. That's just . . . that just paints how horrifically inhuman he can be.

I'm counting down to Children of Time. It's the last one I definitely remember seeing in the weekday strip, which I'd always remembered as maybe getting as far as early season four before the station surrendered that hour of programming to not-Trek after years of cycling TNG before the aborted DS 9 run.

It's a good episode, just has some seriously fucked up implications about just how different Odo really is from most people. I doubt most would have the . . . I don't even know what to call it. If you look favorably on him, it's guts. If not? Selfishness. He'd certainly make a decent Dark Jedi for that, if he had the Force. Not Sith, since he did it for someone else.

I don't think what Old Odo did in "Children of Time" was so horrific, or at least it was only horrific because of how the ethical dilemma in that episode was framed. Old Odo didn't kill all the people on the planet, he changed history so that the conditions that caused them to be born never existed, so the people never existed either. But think about it this way: the inhabitants of the planet only existed because the original crew of the Defiant were stranded on the planet, and they were forced to have children with a mate that they would probably not have chosen otherwise. For example, Miles had a loving marriage with Keiko, so it seems quite unlikely he would've had kids with anyone else, had the Defiant not crashed on that planet. If not for the crash, most of Defiant's crew would probably have kids with someone else. (And even if they'd ended up having kids with the same person, the kids would've still been different people because of insemination works.)

So yes, Old Odo's choice resulted in 8000 people ceasing to exist. But on the other hand, because of the crash the potential children and grandchildren the Defiant people would've had if they'd returned safely to DS9 were never born. So Odo's choice gave these potential people the chance to live. It's not a choice between genocide and non-genocide, it's a choice between which set of descendants do you want to exist. Admittedly the episode itself justifies Old Odo's choice with only his love for Kira, but I'd like to think that deep down he knew the real stakes, since as Changeling his understanding of time would be different from humans.

I agree that Old Odo's choice is still callous, because he'd lived with these descendants for 200 years, whereas the potential set of descendants he gave life to was unknown to him. But I still feel the ethical dilemma in the episode is posed incorrectly, because if Odo is a murderer, so is any Star Trek character who travels back in time and changes the past even the slightest, since the butterfly effect means at least some kids won't be born who otherwise would have.

Furthermore, if we accept the TNG episode "Parallels" as canon, then the infinite universes theory is true in the Star Trek, and multiple different timelines do co-exist. In that case, the descendants on the "Children of Time" planet never actually ceased to exist, Old Odo's choice simply created two parallel timelines, one where those 8000 people are still living on the planet, and one where the Defiant never got stuck there. Since the Changelings are an ancient race, it's quite likely they know about the existence parallel timelines. And since Odo linked with the other Changelings, he would've had this information too. So it's perfectly possible Old Odo knew he wasn't really dooming anyone to non-existence.

edited 10th Dec '15 4:11:00 AM by Tuomas

I always refer to beings that exist due to temporal paradox "people in theory" so that the ethical dilemma inherent in their existence doesn't keep me awake

The fun thing is that, in the case of "Children of Time"^note Never realised before how Whovian this name sounds now, it's the main characters who end up existing because of a temporal paradox. Old Odo is the one who negates the timeline to which he belongs, while the descendants existed only because of Stable Time Loop (well, stable until Old Odo broke it).

Of course from a Doylist point of view, since all the actors for the descendants were extras, they were the ones existing "in theory" from the moment they appeared.

edited 10th Dec '15 4:06:17 AM by C105

But again, if "Parallels" is canon (and there's nothing to suggest it isn't), Old Odo didn't actually negate his timeline, he just created a separate parallel timeline where the Defiant managed to escape the planet. Old Odo's parallel timeline would still be intact, and the inhabitants of the planet would still continue to live happily there.

I'll go with that. I'm a big supporter of multiple universes. Time travel? Not at all. I don't think it can exist. The Universe would protect itself from self-destructive paradoxes like that. The closest you could get would be finding a Universe that approximates the time period you want to jump to, and going there for a visit.

I'm also a supporter of parallel universes, but one of its drawbacks from a narrative point of view is that it turns any Set Right What Once Went Wrong plot into a selfish attempts of the time-travelling characters to jump into a nicer universe.

Also, while Trek has no definite answer on the subjects, there are cases where it's very clearly shown that time is itself changing ("Yesterday's Enteprise" comes to mind) and not the characters sliding to another universe.

Apart from that, my headcanon very much wants the parallel universes theory to be the actual one, as it means that the Abramsverse is happening somewhere far, far away from the real timeline, but that's just me hating the Abrams movies.

I agree that some ST episodes seem to contradict the parallel universe theory, but since the Mirror Universe is such a strong, consistent part of the canon, I'd argue that the evidence for the existence of parallel universes is stronger than evidence for "only one universe".

Actually, Star Trek seems to distinguish parallel universes that are visited accidentally from those caused by an alteration of the past. I tend to think the narrative reason for that is that, otherwise, characters who accidentally changed the past would simply need to find the correct parallel universe to return to in order to try fixing it.

I think it makes sense that regular time travel allows you to the only travel within the same parallel universe where you started your trip from, not to jump to other universes. So you if travel back in time and change the past, that branches this universe off from the original universe, where the past wasn't changed. And when you travel back to your own time, the changes made in the past are in effect, because your universe is now the branched one.

The jumping between parallel universes in ST is always done with other methods than the ones they use for time travel, at least they're consistent with that. It's not like Marvel comics, where time travel can sometimes randomly take you to another parallel universe than the one where you started from.

Its interesting to look at future-Odo's decision to wipe the colony out in the broader context of what we see with changelings and with Odo himself in the Dominion Occupation arc.

They're consistently demonstrated to be fairly sociopathic in their dealings with solids. Vorta, Jem'Hadar, everyone are secondary (if anything) to the Founders; hell the female Changeling even says that getting Odo back home to the Great Link is more important than the entire Alpha Quadrant itself.

Makes one wonder if their attitudes (through either socialization or physically linking with them) have influenced Odo's thinking in some way. He's grown a step beyond them in actually caring about a solid, but his future self's actions in Children of Time certainly seems reminiscent of the kind of self centered morality all too common with the Founders.

His near betrayal of the Federation and the DS 9 resistance early in season 6 paints him in a much darker light when you realize his love for Kira may have been the one thing that kept him from wholly defecting to the Dominion.

There's no "may have been" about that. Future!Odo sacrificed eight thousand actual people just to save her. You can call them "people in theory" all you want, but they did exist. As opposed to the possible future descendants that our crew might have, who aren't even figments of their possible parents' imaginations yet.

And then the show's writers kind of shat all over that anyway, for some of them. Probably the only main one whose family isn't going to turn out all sorts of fucked up is Chief O'Brien. Dax didn't even get a family. The best she can hope for is her memories getting to spend time with Ezri's kids. Assuming she has any. And the captain? Sure, he MAY be back to his family some day in the future, but he sure as Hell isn't going to be the Benjamin Sisko that Cassidy Yates fell in love with. He's going to be a full blown guru or worse. Doesn't Kira stick with Odo? I'm on season six so in a week or two, tops, I'll remember the answer myself. I THINK she goes to the Founders' world with him. It's a damn sight better than dying to a medical problem, but is that really going to turn out well?

The Freudian Excuse of the Founders is that they were spit upon by all the solids in the quadrant, so they engineered some races of solids who would revere or worship them and used them to conquer all those races that hated them. And basically became the monsters they were feared to be.

You know, for such a grey and grey morality show, I don't recall Deep Space Nine ever exploring the makeup of the Dominion much beyond the core races. Here and there there were refugees and oppressed folk, but mainly on the outskirts of the arc. The strongest example I can think of is the people the Dominion cursed with the plague that evolves so fast it's impossible to treat. Where are the Gamma races that saw the Dominion coming and said, "better that than what we've got now"? Where are the races who took honest work for the Dominion rather than being conquered or engineered? The Klingon and Romulan "empires" are lost causes for pluralism, but the Dominion was a chance to be much more patchwork.

Their only relevance to the show's goals was as a big bad to hang over everyone's heads. Showing them as a varied patchwork wasn't really important. In fact, unless there was going to be a revolt within the Dominion, it would probably have been detrimental to explore much of the other races. It's not like our focus was ever going to STAY in the Gamma Quadrant.

The first trailer for Beyond has been leaked (although in german). https://youtu.be/hYz13vgX0U0?t=1s

edited 14th Dec '15 4:05:04 AM by DeadlyAssassin

edited 14th Dec '15 8:31:59 AM by TairaMai

I don't know, it's a teaser that does very little to tease anything. The only real thing of note is the Enterprise getting skewered, but it's not the first time in this series that the ship gets beaten up really bad. From what we can tell of the premise it doesn't feel fresh and interesting, but has been done.

The one thing I kind of like is they've let Chris Pine's hair go more brown and a little shaggy, rather than having the slicked-back boy band look with frosted tips.

They're playing with the collars a bit. They're high and close now.

A franchise like Star Trek used to mean something, now each iteration is like a coke can: use once and forget.

~*le sigh *~

Oh well, at least CBS won't be changing the older series anymore....Looking at you Lucas -_-

edited 14th Dec '15 9:18:43 PM by TairaMai

They probably did overreach a bit with the CGI effects in TOS. But they were trying to stay true to the aesthetic and just fix things that were really terrible, like when instead of replacing the sky with a normal alien color the original effects crew just replaced it with crumpled tinfoil and called it a day.

And I can see the argument that the original effects elements just weren't of good enough quality to bring to the HD remaster. Even the TNG remaster remade the phaser beams and transporter sparklies in new CG because the originals had been processed in SD video.

It remains to be seen if they'll continue with Deep Space Nine and Voyager. A lot of fans want them to, but those shows transitioned to CG models partway through, which will be more expensive than rescanning the motion-control photography, as they'll have to suddenly build HD or better CG models and completely recreate shots again.

CBS seems to have been dedicated to cultivating their brand with respect for the material. Creating a new series is of course a business decision first (and yet again using it to pioneer a new distribution channel), but I think if the restoration effort is any indication, they'll be more about honoring the existing material than the "well, we blew it all up and started again" movies.

I've been trying to see the reboot movies in terms of a fourth vision of Star Trek. TOS was one approach, the TOS movies were a rebirth, TNG reinvented Trek again, and the problem lies in that the era of thinking like TNG covers four series, four movies, and eighteen years. It just is what Star Trek is for two or three generations. And then the reboots come along and go the farthest yet to get back to the roots superficially while also trying to update the franchise for a new era. And with CBS and Paramount being Star Trek's divorced parents but one of the producers of the movies leading the series, it'll be interesting to see what's the same and what's different.

edited 14th Dec '15 10:17:05 PM by TParadox