Literature / Star Trek: Coda

All good things must come to an end.

A trilogy of novels that serve as the Grand Finale to the Star Trek Novel 'Verse for the Star Trek Expanded Universe in the Star Trek. It brings a close to the shared continuity of Pocket Books line that has been continuously ongoing since 2000. The end of the Novelverse was announced soon after the creation of Star Trek: Picard and the irreconcilable nature of that show to the Litverse continuity.

Wesley Crusher (now a time-hopping Traveler) discovers that the universe, even the Multiverse itself, is under attack after the destruction of the Guardian of Forever. Seeking out his mother and stepfather, Beverly Crusher and Jean Luc Picard, he attempts to warn them about this all-powerful threat. But can Starfleet stand against a threat that is able to rewrite history seemingly at will? Even if they do stop it, will it be a universe they recognize afterward?

• Moments Asunder by Dayton Ward
• The Ashes of Tomorrow by James Swallow
• Oblivion's Gate by David Mack

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This series contains the following tropes:

• Alas, Poor Villain: In a sense, the psionic fragment of the alternate Riker that possesses 'our' Will for much of the trilogy. He's insane and jeopardizing the Novel Verse's response to the Temporal Apocalypse. But he's also lost everything to the Devidians and is completely broken. Deanna and even 'our' Will can't help pitying him afterwards.
• Alien Arts Are Appreciated: Perhaps unsurprisingly, The Ashes of Tomorrow reveals Elim Garak has been reading (and been amused by) John le Carré's The Russia House to Bashir during his catatonia.
• The Alleged Car: The DS9 cast reminisce on the old space station.
  Kira: I can’t believe I’m going to say this, but as good as this station is, it doesn’t have the character of that iron-clad monstrosity we used to live on.
  Bashir: Quite.
  Quark: (grumbling) That’s the Federation for you. Eventually they knock the sharp corners off everything, and what does that leave you with? Just a lot of … round things.
• All for Nothing:
  • In The Ashes of Tomorrow, Riker declares that by aiding Picard, Tom and B'Elanna have thrown away their futures and all the goodwill and redemption they've gained in the decade since returning from the Delta Quadrant. Tom counters that if Picard doesn't stop the Temporal Apocalypse, it won't matter...because there will be no future for anyone.
  • Averted with the ending of the trilogy. While the Novel Verse and its characters lose everything and are erased from existence, their sacrifices still matter. Picard gets the satisfaction in his final moment of existence knowing they've succeeded as the temporal recursion is initiated.
• Alternate Timeline:
  • Oblivion's Gate confirms in-story for the characters what the readership already knows: That the Novel Verse is ultimately an alternate timeline (dubbed 'The First Splinter' in-universe). The surprise for both readers and characters is learning where and when it diverged from the Prime Reality: The events of Star Trek: First Contact and the Enterprise-E's jaunt back to 2063.
  • The 2373-A timeline created by the Borg in First Contact is revealed to still exist due to the temporal shenanigans likewise splitting it off from the Prime Reality. Like the Novel Verse, it is also (and finally) destroyed by the end of Oblivion's Gate as part of The Plan to end the Temporal Apocalypse.
• Ambiguous Situation: As of Moments Asunder, the current status of Voyager following the ending of the final VOY Relaunch novel To Lose the Earth. Janeway and company left the Milky Way in 2382 with the Edrehmaia to explore a neighboring galaxy. This is mentioned in passing when Tom and B'Elanna are discussing the Krenim at a Starfleet Command briefing. But the novel doesn't reveal their current status or if they've even returned.
• And the Adventure Continues: A variation in Oblivion's Gate. The trilogy closes with Benny Russell figuratively and literally closing the door on the Novel Verse and beginning work on new chronicles of our heroes and their adventures. His first sentence of this new chronicle leads directly into the opening of Una McCormack's Star Trek: Picard - The Last Best Hope.
• Anyone Can Die:
  • And how! The Guardian of Forever, Ezri Dax, T'ryssa Chen, Taurik, and others all die in the first book alone.
  • James Swallow has admitted this trope was very much in play when they were deciding the casualties and making Ezri the big casualty of Moments Asunder.
  Swallow: One of the reasons we decided to take a main cast member and do away with them in this dramatic fashion, is we wanted to say to the readers, 'All bets are off. Nobody is safe, and you’re not going to know how this is going to play out.'
  • The second book adds Martok, Klag and the crew of the I.K.S. Gorkon, Nog, Miles O'Brien, Quark, Ro Laren, and the Bajoran Prophets to the butcher's bill.
  • The concluding installment lives up to David Mack's fan nickname of 'The Angel of Death', although it's also a complicated example. The characters learn early on that the Novel Verse is doomed and they're all going to die no matter what. The driving tension is really more about who dies first, how, and whether their deaths will help stop the Temporal Apocalypse before it's too late. Leonard James Akaar and Kellessar zh'Tarash are killed when the Devidians destroy Earth. Sisko dies on the 2373-A Earth. The final battle claims the Mirror C.S.S. Enterprise characters (Luc Picard, Troi, and K'Ehleyr), Mirror Ezri, Geordi, Wesley, Bashir, Worf, Alexander, Kira, Data, Lal, and the entire Titan cast (including Deanna and Will). The only heroes still standing in the final seconds are Picard, Beverly, and Rene — and they all die once Picard initiates the temporal recursion and the Novel Verse is retroactively erased.
• Apocalypse How: Class X-5. The Devidians are collapsing entire timelines and feeding on their collective neural energy. They began their harvesting with newer, more unstable timelines and have been working their way back through the multiverse and onto older, more stable realities — thereby weakening the very foundations of spacetime.
• Author Appeal:
  • As the primary Next Generation Relaunch writer from Typhon Pact onward, Dayton Ward unsurprisingly focuses on the Enterprise-E for Moments Asunder.
  • For The Ashes of Tomorrow, James Swallow (who wrote several Titan novels) puts focus on Riker, Troi, Vale, and their crew.
  • The ending of Ashes and Picard and his allies heading into the Mirror Universe to escape Starfleet's manhunt also pretty much answers in part why David Mack got dibs on Oblivion's Gate. Indeed, the novel is Mack's very last chance to play with his mirror universe characters and narrative.
• Awful Truth: Geordi, Data, and Wesley discover early on in Oblivion's Gate that the Novel Verse is not the Prime Reality as they'd all thought, but merely an alternate timeline that was created by the temporal shenanigans of First Contact. The existential horror and shock is bad enough, but, worse, its unique creation and composition is what attracted the attention of the Devidians and set the Temporal Apocalypse in motion in the first place. But most awful of all, they discover there is no way to save the Novel Verse and that they're going to have to destroy it and themselves in order to stop the Devidians — and save the Prime Reality.
  • Later on, Wesley learns that he is unwittingly responsible for the creation of the Devidians' Nagas and Avatars. The Devidians capture him alive during his survey of their intertime base, harvest his Traveler genetics, and bond them with their Ophidians — which they then deploy in the Temporal Apocalypse and start the chain of events that brings Wesley to them in the first place.
• Back for the Dead: Klag and the crew of the Gorkon in The Ashes of Tomorrow.
• Back for the Finale: Despite their destruction in the Destiny Trilogy, the Borg return in Oblivion's Gate. The twist is that it's an alternate (and if anything, even more nightmarish) version of the now-destroyed Collective from the alternate, assimilated 2373 as seen in First Contact
  • Averted with the Voyager characters. Apart from those who remained behind in the Alpha Quadrant at the end of To Lose the Earth (Tuvok, Tom, and B'Elanna), neither Janeway or any of the others appear or return from their extragalactic sojourn to aid in the fight against the Devidians. This was done intentionally, as Kirsten Beyer had effectively concluded the VOY Relaunch storyline with To Lose the Earth.
• Badass Family: The Picards during the final assault on the Devidian temporal collider in Oblivion's Gate.
  • Also, in a sense, Worf, Alexander, and Mirror K'Ehleyr during the same assault.
• Batman Gambit: Once Picard and company decide to go rogue in The Ashes of Tomorrow, they correctly anticipate that Akaar and Starfleet Intelligence are monitoring them. They take advantage of this to deliberately lay a false trail for them to follow and try to arrest Picard...in order to conceal their true getaway from Sector 001 (on the Aventine) and buy enough time to get a head start from the inevitable pursuit.
  • Titan XO Dalit Sarai uses one in Oblivion's Gate to relieve the now-insane Riker of command after Deanna and Vale's earlier attempt backfires spectacularly. Sarai deliberately provokes Riker into physically striking her in front of the bridge crew. Sarai's able to use this violation of the Starfleet Code of Military Justice (specifically assaulting a commissioned officer) as grounds for legally removing him from command. It also doesn't hurt that by this point, Keru and the rest of the remaining Titan senior staff have had enough of Riker's behavior and are on her side.
• Beard of Sorrow: Sisko notes in Oblivion's Gate that Bashir (who's been bearded in the novels since Typhon Pact: Zero Sum Game) has been hit with this. His normally groomed and trimmed beard is now unkempt and in disarray following the deaths of Sarina Douglas and Ezri Dax (to say nothing of their friends aboard DS9 II).
• Big Bad: The Devidians from TNG's "Time's Arrow" are revealed to be the architects of the Temporal Apocalypse. This also gives them the distinction of being the Final Boss of the Novel Verse.
• Big Bad Ensemble:
  • In The Ashes of Tomorrow, while the Devidians are still the trilogy's overarching threat, Riker essentially becomes the secondary villain after Picard and his allies go rogue to stop the Temporal Apocalypse on their own.
  • Oblivion's Gate keeps the same Big Bad Ensemble, or at least until Riker's temporal psychosis is finally treated partway through. But it also adds in the Borg and Borg Queen from the alternate 2373 from First Contact.
• Big Damn Heroes: Riker and the Titan during the final battle of Oblivion's Gate.
• Big Good: Wesley Crusher serves as this, both as his present self and a 300 year old version that has been fighting the threat for centuries.
• Big "SHUT UP!": Overlaps with Mythology Gag. The mirror universe Picard ends up doing the iconic "Shut up, Wesley!" to 'our' Wesley partway through Oblivion's Gate. Amusingly, Luc Picard then internally admits that saying this felt...strangely satisfying, although he has absolutely no idea why.
• Bittersweet Ending:
  • Moments Asunder, with a heavy emphasis on the 'Bitter' (and just barely bordering on Downer Ending). The Starfleet mission 4,000 years in the future succeeds in retrieving valuable intel from a Devidian temporal hub. They also manage to destroy the hub and disrupt the progress of the Temporal Apocalypse. But Ezri Dax and T'Ryssa Chen are among the casualties (in addition to all the other casualties racked up throughout the book). The retrieved intel also reveals that the hub was only one of many throughout this timeline (let alone the multiverse) and they've only thrown a minor, temporary wrench into the gears. The scope and scale of the Devidian attack is also revealed to be far worse than they'd feared.
  • The Ashes of Tomorrow: Picard, Sisko, and their allies successfully destroy the Devidians' primary beachhead into their reality. But the price paid for that victory is the destruction of Deep Space Nine II, the Bajoran wormhole, the Rio Grande, and a good chunk of the Bajoran system — to say nothing of the lives of the Bajoran Prophets and many of the DS9 characters. Cutting off their timeline from the Devidians is also only a stopgap measure; the Temporal Apocalypse is still underway in other realities and the Novel Verse will still ultimately fall unless they can take the fight to the source. Picard and his allies are also now fugitives from Starfleet (with Riker leading the manhunt and hellbent on bringing them to justice). They're also unable to prevent Sam Bowers and the Aventine from being taken into custody before going on the lam — and with no other safe harbors left in the Galaxy, they're forced to seek refuge in the mirror universe.
  • Oblivion's Gate: The Temporal Apocalypse and the Devidians are stopped and the Prime Reality and the rest of the Trek Multiverse are saved. But the cost of that final victory is the retroactive erasure of the Novel Verse and the Literary versions of Picard and company. While the canonical Star Trek characters still exist in the Prime Reality (as do re-canonized Literary characters like Christine Vale or Ranul Keru), characters who were born (or revived) after the divergence in 2373 aren't so lucky (ex. Rene Picard, Tasha Riker, the resurrected Lal and Data). The Prime Reality characters will also never know the sacrifices their counterparts made to save all of them — though it's at least heavily implied the Prime Reality Bajoran Prophets do remember the Novel Verse thanks to their nonlinear existence. Benny Russell also remembers the Novel Verse.
• Bolivian Army Ending: Martok, Klag, and the surviving crew of the Gorkon during the Devidian attack on Boreth in The Ashes of Tomorrow. Given they're Klingons, for them it's a fitting way to go out.
• Book Ends:
  • A meta one for James Swallow in The Ashes of Tomorrow. Swallow's very first contribution to the Novel Verse was the short story "Closure" for the Voyager anthology Distant Shores. As he concedes in the Afterword, Coda thematically brings all of his work in the Novel Verse full circle.
  • The Ashes of Tomorrow: By the end of the book, Tom and B'Elanna's storyline has come full circle with "Caretaker". They are once again disgraced Starfleet officers and criminals after aiding Picard. Neither of them have a problem with it.
  • David Mack in Oblivion's Gate:
  • The cameo of Sonya Gomez and the DaVinci. His very first contribution to the Novel Verse was the Starfleet Corps of Engineers novel Wildfire, so having the S.C.E. characters return (albeit briefly) works as a nice bookend.
    • Mack's first direct-to-paperback books in the Novel Verse were A Time To Kill and A Time To Heal from the Star Trek: A Time to... series. As Oblivion's Gate is his final direct-to-paperback book in the Novel Verse, Mack likewise includes plenty of callbacks and nods to that earlier duology.
• Brick Joke: Arguably a very dark one in The Ashes of Tomorrow with O'Brien's death. The running joke throughout DS9 was that there would always be at least one 'O'Brien Must Suffer!' episode each season (as O'Brien was the everyman and in many ways an audience surrogate). That gag finally gets taken to its final, fatal conclusion here.
• Broken Pedestal: Picard has become this to Riker after the events of The Ashes of Tomorrow and Jean-Luc's role in the Bajoran catastrophe.
• The Bus Came Back: Wesley Crusher returned in Star Trek: Cold Equations but no one expected his expanded role in this trilogy.
• Call-Back:
  • Moments Asunder has plenty of them to Ward's previous TNG Relaunch novels. But there's also a subtle callback to "The Best of Both Worlds" when Worf is offered command of the Prometheus. Just like Riker over 20 years earlier, Worf is uncertain about accepting a captaincy and Picard encourages his XO to take it. And just like Riker, this offer quickly takes a backseat as Worf and the Enterprise are again thrust into an existential crisis that will decide the fate of the Federation.
  • The Ashes of Tomorrow has two major call-backs to the TOS movies. Just as in The Motion Picture, Spock senses a major psychic presence out in space while on Vulcan. He even references the encounter with V'Ger.. Then, just as in The Search for Spock, somebody tries to steal the Enterprise from Earth Spacedock. It even gets lampshaded in-universe.
  • Boreth's time crystals exist in the Novel Verse continuity as well. This ends up making them a target for the Devidians in The Ashes of Tomorrow.
  • "Year of Hell" and the VOY Relaunch novel A Pocket Full of Lies are also cited by Tom Paris and B'Elanna as their reasons for aiding Picard. Knowing what Annorax and the Krenim did and what happened to Voyager in that timeline, Tom and B'Elanna at least have a better understanding of what's at stake in the Temporal Apocalypse than Command.
  • Keith DeCandido's Star Trek: The Brave And The Bold ends up getting a major one in The Ashes of Tomorrow. Spock's mind meld with Worf and the lingering, previously dormant psychic connection it left behind is what brings Spock into the plot.
  • Geordi utilizes Scotty's...unorthodox transporter techniques to prevent Riker from taking Picard into custody at the end of The Ashes of Tomorrow. He even mentions Scotty in passing.
  • The entire schism between Picard and Riker in The Ashes of Tomorrow evokes the alternate future from TNG's series finale. Once again, Picard has gone rogue with the-now Admiral Riker pursuing him and thinking his old captain has lost his mind. Even the makeup of Picard's core team of rogue Starfleet officers is the same as in that alternate future (Beverly, Data, Geordi, and Worf).
  • In Oblivion's Gate, Sisko takes a page out of the Maquis' playbook. Using the very tactics Eddington and others used against him at the time, the now-rogue Defiant hides in the Badlands to evade Admiral Riker's manhunt while they await safe passage into the Mirror Universe.
    • Adding to the irony, it's noted that the specific coordinates of their departure point are not too far from where Voyager and her crew were first pulled into the Delta Quadrant. Like Janeway, Picard and his team are about to venture where no 24th-century Federation starship has gone before.
• Call-Forward:
  • According to Swallow, O'Brien's death scene during The Ashes of Tomorrow was intended to be a subtle Call-Forward to Star Trek: Lower Decks and the statue in the future citing Miles as perhaps the most important person in Starfleet History.
  Swallow: I wanted to write a scene that makes [Miles] worthy of that statue he gets in Lower Decks. I actually wanted to put a line in at the end of the story where O’Brien says, “If I don’t get out of this alive, tell them to build a statue of me.” But it was just a little bit too on the nose.
  • That said, The Ashes of Tomorrow did sneak in a reference to LD, via the California-class USS Saticoy (the same class as the Cerritos), commanded by Nog who sacrifices himself and the ship to destroy a pair of Devidian Nagas.
  • In their last scene together in Oblivion's Gate before the temporal recursion, Lal tells Data that if they had to do it over again, she would like to have had a sister.
• Cassandra Truth: After learning about the temporal psychosis that's afflicting Worf, Picard tries to covertly warn Deanna and Riker (as he and Worf recognize Will's exhibiting the same symptoms). Riker refuses to believe Picard or to even look at the evidence.
  • By contrast, Deanna is hesitant to take Picard at face value...but, she also recognizes and has to concede that something's very wrong with her husband. Vale, as a former cop, agrees with her assessment in Oblivion's Gate.
• Cluster F-Bomb: The now-insane Riker goes off on a profanity-laden tirade in Oblivion's Gate after he's relieved of duty and escorted off the bridge. According to Troi's narration later, it lasted for the entire trip down to sickbay.
• Coming in Hot: The I.K.S. Gorkon gets essentially shot down by the Nagas in the skies above Boreth during The Ashes of Tomorrow. It crash lands on the surface and the wreckage serves as the site of the crew's last stand against the Devidians.
  • The Defiant likewise gets shot down in the skies above the alternate, assimilated 2373 Earth in Oblivion's Gate (although they are ultimately able to repair it and take off).
• Continuity Snarl: A possible example in Moments Asunder with Meyo Ranjea, who is the main Department of Temporal Investigations character. Readers of the DTI books have correctly pointed out this is a major goof as Ranjea chose to remain in the past at the end of the final DTI novella Shield of the Gods. However, the DTI fears that the damage from the Temporal Apocalypse is nullifying their temporally shielded records and ability to track any timeline alterations. So, it's possible Ranjea being back in the Present Day with DTI is a subtle example of showing the alterations to the timeline.

  • This also got explicitly pointed out on the Literary Treks podcast for Moments Asunder. Ward's reaction to the question was very coy...

  • Happens again in The Ashes of Tomorrow when Hegol Den is present at Picard's covert summit at his chateau despite having been killed in the previous book. Likewise, Spock and Saavik are no longer married as they are in Josepha Sherman & Susan Schwartz's Vulcan novels. It's again unclear if these are goofs or another subtle clue about the Devidians' impact on the timeline.
  • Also in The Ashes of Tomorrow, Kira contemplates speaking with the Kai and uses the pronoun "him" in reference to them. The last Novelverse visit to DS9 and Bajor had the female Kai Pralon holding the position. While granting that the better part of two years had passed between the stories in question, giving time for something to happen to Kai Pralon, nothing implies that the position has transferred to someone else.
• Cosmic Horror Story: The Temporal Apocalypse and its architects in all their terrible, horrific glory. Would you have imagined that an invisible 'Alien Race of the Week' squatting in a cavern from late TNG would be capable of wiping out entire timelines and feeding on their collected neural energy? And that they've been doing this for years across countless realities and nobody realized what was happening until it's finally their time in the barrel? Picard and company certainly didn't. Neither did Starfleet, and their inability to grasp the scale and scope of the crisis causes major problems in the second book.
  • James Swallow's discussed how this exact Trope was a major factor in selecting the Devidians as the Trilogy's Big Bad. Swallow had always felt there was an underlying horror element to the Devidians that made them absolutely terrifying antagonists, but which was never really conveyed on screen that well. Coda gave the creative team a chance to finally realize that potential.
• Cosmic Retcon: Serves as one for the NovelVerse, leading into the new TV continuity.
• Crisis Crossover: Like Star Trek: Destiny before it, Coda is one for the entire 24th Century branch of the Novel Verse.
  • As of Moments Asunder, the roster is as follows: We have the Star Trek: The Next Generation Relaunch crew leading the charge. Supporting roles are played by the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Relaunch (in the form of Ezri Dax and the Aventine) and Star Trek: Department of Temporal Investigations. The Star Trek: Titan and Star Trek: Voyager Relaunch crews have much more limited roles in the kickoff (in the form of extended cameos by Riker, Troi, Tom Paris, and B'Elanna Torres).
  • The Ashes of Tomorrow elevates Titan and the DS9 Relaunch to main roles alongside the TNG Relaunch while also bringing in Star Trek: Klingon Empire and even The Original Series in the form of Spock in supporting roles.
  • Oblivion's Gate elevates Star Trek: Mirror Universe alongside the TNG/DS9/Titan casts while also bringing in Starfleet Corps of Engineers in a minor supporting role.
• A Day in the Limelight: On the Literary Treks podcast for Moments Asunder, Ward stated this was one factor in selecting the Devidians as the Big Bad. Apart from Star Trek Online, they hadn't been used in the tie-in media since "Time's Arrow". Ward, Swallow, and Mack were interested in the chance to further develop and flesh them out (in addition to needing an antagonist with temporal capabilities).
• Death by Irony: Quark's death in The Ashes of Tomorrow. The beloved Ferengi goes out in a selfless sacrifice (along with Ro) aboard DS9 II to help buy time for Kira and Sisko to complete their plan.
  • O'Brien's death shortly thereafter. He dies in Ops while making emergency engineering repairs to allow Kira to survive the explosive decompression caused by the Nagas breaching DS9 II. He even lampshades to himself that his death is, in essence, him trying to solve another engineering problem.
    • Ironically, Kira nearly ends up dying this way anyway during the climax of Oblivion's Gate when the mirror Defiant suffers multiple hull breaches. She's only saved by the intervention of the Prophets — and even that's only a brief reprieve to ensure the Orb of Time completes its part in The Plan before the Novel Verse is erased.
  • Oblivion's Gate: Sisko, whose character arc really began with the Battle of Wolf 359 — and who built the Defiant solely for the purpose of killing Borg — is killed by a Borg drone from the alternate 2373. Making it more ironic, he even acknowledges he's on a mission being led by the very former Borg drone (i.e. Picard) who irrevocably changed the course of his entire life.
• Diplomatic Impunity: As a Founder of the Dominion, Odo is able to use this in Oblivion's Gate to be released from Federation custody after posing as Picard at the end of The Ashes of Tomorrow. Insane or not, this understandably really pisses off Riker.
• Disproportionate Retribution: Riker increasingly keeps resorting to this throughout The Ashes of Tomorrow, much to the alarm of Vale, Tuvok, and Deanna. It gets even worse in Oblivion's Gate.
• Do Not Go Gentle: Oblivion's Gate in a nutshell. Despite knowing they're doomed and dead no matter the outcome, the Starfleet characters are resolved to make their deaths matter and defeat the Devidians as their last act of existence.
  • The now-insane Admiral Riker also decides to go this route after he's relieved of command to be treated for his temporal psychosis. It takes multiple Titan security personnel just to physically drag him down to sickbay and restrain him. And even then, it still takes the full psionic capabilities of Deanna and Tuvok just to get a hold on the alternate Riker's psionic fragment and boot it out of the mental driver's seat.
• Doppelgänger Replacement Love Interest: Mirror K'Ehleyr for Worf during Oblivion's Gate. To his credit, Worf intellectually knows this isn't his K'Ehleyr and he can't project his feelings for his lost love onto her counterpart. However, the two still end up falling for one another anyway.
• Dramatic Irony: Riker gets one in The Ashes of Tomorrow when he keeps trying to create a family picnic on the Titan holodeck to calm himself, only to becoming increasingly frustrated as he keeps getting details wrong. The readership of course will recognize why Will keeps getting the details wrong: Because he's unknowingly recreating the Picard version of his family and their home, not the Novel Verse version.
• Dwindling Party: While the Starfleet characters suffer casualties throughout the first two books (especially after Picard and company go rogue), the trope really kicks into high gear with Oblivion's Gate.
• Easily Forgiven:
  • The Titan crew towards Riker in Oblivion's Gate after his temporal psychosis is cured and explained to the ship. Even with all the weird crap and possessions Starfleet (to say nothing of the Titan itself) has dealt with, Riker understandably did not expect to be forgiven by Vale or his crew after his actions and behavior throughout the last two books.
  • Picard and Riker easily and quickly reconcile when the Titan arrives at the final battle at the Devidian temporal collider. It doesn't hurt that they're the cavalry and this is literally their last chance to reconcile before the temporal recursion's initiated.
• Expendable Alternate Universe: An alternate reality where Picard remained assimilated is the first victim of the threat.
  • Played with in that this parallel reality and its versions of Riker and the Enterprise-D had been previously introduced by Dayton Ward in the 2017 TNG novel Headlong Flight. So it's destruction simultaneously has significance for followers of the TNG Relaunch while establishing for non-TNG readers the full scale and scope of the Temporal Apocalypse.
  • The Novel Verse itself, ironically enough, ends up becoming this for the Prime Reality by the end of the Trilogy. It has to be destroyed to save the Prime Reality and the rest of the Trek multiverse from the Devidians.
• Even Evil Has Standards: After Rene Picard is rapidly aged during the Devidian attack on the Enterprise in Moments Asunder, part of Picard momentarily, and in denial, thinks that this is some sick game or joke of Q's. But he quickly dismisses the thought. However much Q loves tormenting Picard, the entity does have rules of conduct and even he wouldn't be this cruel.
• Evil Me Scares Me: Worf was apparently kept out of the loop on who Regent Worf was in the Mirror Universe, leading to a tense introduction with Mirror K’Ehleyr, who expects him to be the same tin-plated dictator his counterpart was when they first meet.
• Explosive Decompression: During the climax of The Ashes of Tomorrow, DS9 II's Ops compartment is breached and begins venting atmosphere. O'Brien seals himself inside and sacrifices himself to ensure Kira can survive and complete the plan to collapse the wormhole.
• "Eureka!" Moment: Meta example. According to James Swallow, this happened when he, Dayton Ward, and David Mack were debating whether to use the Devidians as the Big Bad and helped finalize their decision.
  Swallow: When we started looking into the nuances of the characters, if you watch “Time’s Arrow,” it’s three guys in a cave and Picard deals with it and it’s like, 'Oh, well, that’s done and off we go.' But we thought that can’t be all there are. There’s got to be more of them. Because we know they can travel throughout time and space, we started to wonder; what if they’re everywhere? What if these guys and in fact like termites in wood, they’re kind of infesting the background of the universe and they’ve been there all along? That ties in nicely to this idea of this cosmic existential threat.
  • Oblivion's Gate reveals the Devidians had one in-story when the unique nature of the First Splinter timeline got their attention. They experimented, realized the potential of harvesting an entire timeline's neural energy, and from there it was off to the races. This is also a major part of why retroactively erasing the First Splinter timeline is necessary: To remove that original source of cosmic temptation and thus ensure the Devidians won't ever have that "Eureka!" Moment. Without it, they'll stick to being the temporal carrion eaters we first met in "Time's Arrow" rather than becoming multiversal apex predators.
• Fighting from the Inside: After Riker's temporal psychosis is cured in Oblivion's Gate, Will reveals he had been trying to fight back against his counterpart's psionic fragment since The Ashes of Tomorrow. However, the harder he fought, the more the alternate Riker buried his consciousnesses.
• Foregone Conclusion:
  • Regardless of how it ends, this trilogy will conclude the Novel Verse. Since it doesn't have to ensure the continuation of this continuity, anything can happen and anyone or anything can die.
  • Cleverly utilized by David Mack in the prologue of Oblivion's Gate wherein Picard, Sisko, and their allies fail to stop the Devidians in their intertime base and die before the narrative jumps back 48 hours to show us how we got there. It doesn't become clear until later in the novel that what we actually saw were alternate versions of the characters (from the Second Splinter, the first alternate timeline that branched off from the Novel Verse) that were also trying to stop the Devidians.
• Foreshadowing:
  • Oblivion's Gate when Picard, Sisko, and company arrive in the alternate, assimilated 2373 from First Contact. Picard can once again hear the Collective in his head — which shouldn't be possible given the Caeliar's dissolution of the Collective and the purging of any and all Borg nanotech in former and current drones (Picard included) during Destiny. It sets up his realization during the later confrontation with the Queen that the Novel Verse's Borg likewise diverged from the Prime Reality and their origin is thus different. While it's not explicitly stated, since Picard's assimilation was in the pre-First Splinter divergence time period, the implication thus is that he's still connected to the Collective on some level despite the different temporal realities.
  • Mack leaves it ambiguous if the Prime Reality Borg didn't arise from the Caeliar, or if it's just the 2373-A Borg (given Starfleet never existed in this reality and thus Erika Hernandez and the Columbia never stumbled upon Erigol and set off that particular chain of events).
• Fountain of Youth: Rene Picard is hit by a Naga's Rapid Aging attack and is aged into a young man with a six year old's mind. Picard and Beverly are helpless to do anything for him.
• From Bad to Worse:
  • Meta example. David Mack has cheerfully invoked this Trope after the release of Moments Asunder and in response to the angry reactions to the kickoff's body count.
  Mack:Oh, sweet summer children … if you think book one of CODA is a kick in the teeth, you have no idea what awaits you in books two and three.
  • The ending of Moments Asunder: Picard and company learn that the scale and scope of the Temporal Apocalypse is far worse than they thought. The Devidians' actions aren't just affecting nearby timelines, but all timelines. If the Devidians aren't stopped, they could bring down all of existence...and the Novel Verse's timeline might have to be destroyed to halt the cascade...
  • The Ashes of Tomorrow picks up the ball from the first down line and keeps going. Picard and Wesley realize fairly quickly that as grim as things were at the end of Moments Asunder, they're in even worse trouble than they thought...because neither Starfleet Command or the UFP President are taking the crisis seriously enough. It get bad enough that Picard and his allies eventually go rogue, which not only cuts them off from the full resources of Starfleet, but also makes them fugitives. And this is all before the final, cataclysmic showdown in the Bajor Sector in the climax...and the necessary evil of destroying the Bajoran wormhole to destroy the Devidians' beachhead
  • Oblivion's Gate carries the ball into the end zone to score the 'touchdown' (so to speak). Picard, Sisko, and their allies learn that the Novel Verse is not the Prime Reality, but merely an alternate timeline that branched off due to the temporal shenanigans during First Contact. The unique way it was created set off the chain of events behind the Temporal Apocalypse and thus it has to be destroyed to stop the Devidians. Worse, the Devidians have already begun their final attack on the Novel Verse and our heroes have a little over 29 hours left to stop them. If they don't, then not only will the Novel Verse and its heroes have all died for nothing, but the energy surplus will finally allow the Devidians to take a crack at the Prime Reality. Once that happens, all of existence will be irrevocably screwed. And just to tilt the odds even further, the now-completely batshit insane Admiral Riker has commandeered most of Starfleet to find the Defiant at any and all costs — a vendetta that ironically ends up jeopardizing their last-ditch Hail Mary.
• Fun with Acronyms: Oblivion's Gate has some needed fun with this while the characters figure out how to dismantle the First Splinter timeline. Geordi and company dub the point of divergence between the Prime Reality and the Novel Verse the 'Original Disruption Event' (O.D.E.). The actual plan itself is thus dubbed the 'Corrective Disruptive Action', or C.O.D.A.
• Glad-to-Be-Alive Sex: Worf and the Mirror K'Ehleyr after nearly being killed by the Borg on the 2373-A Earth.
• Grand Finale: This will be the final trilogy of books set in the Star Trek Novel 'Verse.
• The Greatest Story Never Told: The very Novel Verse itself ends up becoming this by the end of the Trilogy. The literary Picard and company sacrifice themselves and their temporal reality to save all of existence — and their Prime Reality counterparts will never know their sacrifices or heroism. It's strongly implied, though, that the Prime Reality Prophets will remember the Novel Verse thanks to their unique, nonlinear existence. Benny Russell likewise remembers it, too.
• Head-in-the-Sand Management: Starfleet Command and the UFP President in The Ashes of Tomorrow. While they obviously agree a crisis is underway, they're not taking the full scale and scope of the Temporal Apocalypse seriously enough. This is what finally makes Picard and company go rogue to take matters into their own hands before it's too late.
• Here We Go Again!: Picard in The Ashes of Tomorrow once he and his allies are forced to go rogue. He essentially admits he didn't want to pull another Insurrection and defy Command like this again.
• Hero Antagonist: Riker in The Ashes of Tomorrow as he's leading the manhunt for the now-renegade Jean-Luc and his allies.
  • What makes Riker such an effective Hero Antagonist is that he's known Picard for over 20 years and served as his XO for the lion's share of that period. So Riker knows exactly how Picard thinks and how to keep up with him (to say nothing of likewise knowing all of Worf, Geordi, and Data's tricks).
• Heroic BSoD: Wesley has one in Oblivion's Gate after he and Data discover the true origins of the Temporal Apocalypse and how to stop it — and that the price will cost them everything.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Pretty much the entire climax of The Ashes of Tomorrow: Nog sacrifices himself and the Saticoy to save evacuating transports from the Nagas during their assault on the Bajoran system. Later, Quark, Ro, and Miles sacrifice themselves to buy time for Picard, Sisko, and Nerys to complete their plan to collapse the wormhole in the climax (and at the blessing and urging of the Prophets). Odo also sacrifices himself as a decoy Picard in the ending to ensure the real Picard and company can evade Riker and the Titan.
  • The heroes of the Novel Verse ultimately sacrifice themselves and their reality by the end of Oblivion's Gate to ensure the survival of the Prime Reality and the rest of the Trek multiverse.
• He's Back!: Bashir in The Ashes of Tomorrow when Garak relays the news of Ezri's death. This finally snaps Julian out of the catatonic state he's been in since Section 31: Control.
  • Riker in Oblivion's Gate after Deanna and Tuvok successfully treat and cure his temporal psychosis.
• Hidden in Plain Sight: The Ashes of Tomorrow reveals Data and Lal have covertly relocated to the ruins of Omicron Theta following the events of Section 31: Control and the destruction of their old home. The trope is specifically invoked by Data as the reason for hiding out on his abandoned homeworld.
• History Repeats Itself: In a cruel bit of irony after the climax of Moments Asunder and the death of Ezri Dax, Sam Bowers ends up becoming the acting commander of the Aventine. This is exactly how Ezri became the ship's captain back at the beginning of the Destiny trilogy — something which Sam bitterly acknowledges in-story.
  • As noted under Bookends, Tom and B'Elanna once again ruin their Starfleet careers and aid renegade officers and a hopeless cause.
• Hope Spot: One for Picard and Wesley in The Ashes of Tomorrow when they present their evidence and findings to the Admiralty and the President. Both men hope they can get everybody on board and come at the Temporal Apocalypse with the full weight and resources of Starfleet...only to slowly realize that Command and the President aren't taking the crisis seriously enough.
  • After learning Riker's afflicted with the same temporal psychosis that was affecting Worf, Picard covertly contacts Deanna. He hopes to warn her in the hopes of getting Will treated in time (and in doing so, also getting the manhunt called off). However, Deanna is understandably hesitant to believe him or go against her husband. Riker was also monitoring for covert transmissions and he refuses to listen to Picard or to review the evidence. As Picard and Bowers confer afterwards, they knew it was a long shot and had to roll the dice anyway.
    • Deanna and Vale then try to act on this in Oblivion's Gate to relieve Will of command and treat his psychosis. It looks like it's gonna work and he'll come quietly...only for Riker to reveal that he knew they'd move against him, prepared accordingly, and has them taken into custody on charges of 'mutiny'.
    • Following that, Riker openly defies direct orders from Akaar and the President and tells them both to go to Hell. Even they've finally had enough of his erratic behavior and as the Starfleet commander, Akaar begins to order the Admiral be relieved of duty. Before he can legally complete the order, though, Earth is destroyed by the Devidians and Riker assumes de facto control of what's left of Starfleet — and the Titan crew is too scared and stunned by Earth's destruction to go against him.
• Hoist by Their Own Petard: The Devidians' technology for collapsing entire timelines ends up getting hijacked against them by Picard and company in the climax of Oblivion's Gate and is crucial to ending the Temporal Apocalypse. Likewise, the 2373-A Borg's Temporal Disruptor, which started this whole mess, proves crucial to ending it and erasing their timeline for good.
• Humble Hero: The Mirror K'Ehleyr notes that Worf is this, affirming it as the most obvious difference between himself and his counterpart, as the Regent could never acknowledge his own failures where Worf declines to take credit for such successes as his role in Alexander's growth.
• I Surrender, Suckers: Admiral Riker in Oblivion's Gate when Deanna and Vale try to relieve him of command to treat his temporal psychosis. Instead, he suckers them and uses the attempt as 'proof' of mutiny and conspiracy and has them arrested.
• Idiot Ball: The crew of the Titan in The Ashes of Tomorrow. You're the flagship of your former Captain-turned-Admiral, you've known and worked with him for a decade now...and apart from Deanna and Vale late in the game, nobody bats an eye as Riker increasingly becomes erratic, irrational, and completely out of character? You'd think they of all people would be sensitive to this after what happened to Riker and the Aventine in the TNG Relaunch novel Takedown (which, in the internal chronology, was less than two years earlier).
  • It gets even more egregious in Oblivion's Gate when Riker has his own wife, Vale, and Dr. Ree arrested for 'mutiny' after they try to relieve him of command to treat his temporal psychosis. He then illegally commandeers Starfleet ships and personnel to hunt down Picard and the Defiant, puts bounties on their heads, and generally goes completely batshit crazy. While uneasy and scared, it takes more than half the novel for the crew to finally have enough and mutiny against Will.
• Insane Admiral: Riker finally becomes one in The Ashes of Tomorrow to the alarm of Picard, Deanna, and others. It's a justified instance, though, between the strain of hunting his now-fugitive former crew mates and friends and because Riker is also suffering from the same temporal psychosis that's afflicting Worf. It gets even worse in Oblivion's Gate before Troi and the others are finally able to treat his temporal psychosis.
  Swallow: It was fun to just place Riker and Picard on opposite sides of the coin and give Riker the opportunity to go full Star Trek ‘bad-miral’ — it was about time!
  • Ashes also gives us Rear Admiral Kaud Idyn, an associate of the late Admiral Dougherty. He's the most anti-Picard member of the Admiralty initially, as he still holds Picard responsible for Dougherty's disgrace and death even a decade later.
• Insane Troll Logic: Again, Riker increasingly throughout The Ashes of Tomorrrow and into Oblivion's Gate due to his temporal psychosis. Worf doesn't have it as bad (thanks to his Klingon fortitude allowing him to weather it better until Spock's mind meld helps cure him).
• Inspector Javert: Riker starts sliding from Hero Antagonist into this throughout The Ashes of Tomorrow and has fully embraced it by the ending and into Oblivion's Gate. He even goes as far as to actually post bounties on Picard and his old friends.
• It's Personal: Again, Rear Admiral Kaud Idyn and his aforementioned, enduring grudge against Picard for Dougherty's death during Insurrection.
  • Riker's pursuit of the renegade Picard and his allies becomes this through Ashes of Tomorrow and into Oblivion's Gate. Riker feels Picard's plans for stopping the Temporal Apocalypse are him personally threatening the lives of his loved ones. It gets even worse after he catches Picard covertly approaching Deanna for help and it drives him into a rage.
• It's the Only Way to Be Sure: This is tragically what necessitates destroying the Bajoran wormhole in The Ashes of Tomorrow once Picard and company learn how the Devidians are using it. Blockading or mining the mouth of the Wormhole (as was done during the Dominion War) obviously won't stop the Nagas. Sealing the mouth also won't work, because the Wormhole will still exist on the quantum level and the Devidians can thus still pass through it. It has to be figuratively (if not literally) nuked all the way down to the quantum level and beyond any repair to ensure the Devidians can't re-open their main beachhead into the Novel Verse timeline.
  • In Oblivion's Gate, Picard, Sisko, and their allies grimly realize they have to destroy the Novel Verse's timeline (and the 2373-A Borg timeline that birthed it) to stop the Temporal Apocalypse. By retroactively erasing the First Splinter timeline, it and the unstable quantum realities that branched off from it will never come into existence. Without this cosmic temptation, it will never get the attention of the Devidians and they won't get any ideas. The rub is temporally nuking both timelines has to be done very carefully. They need to ensure both timelines are erased at the moment of their creation and divergence and that the resulting time paradoxes resolve themselves without feeding back into the Prime Reality. If that happenes, it'll create new alternate unstable timelines — which will then attract the Devidians and restart all this.
    • The additional rub is that Picard and company have to do this even if it means killing themselves. If they don't nuke the Novel Verse timeline here and now, then the Devidians will still kill them all anyway within the next 29 hours — and the harvested power boost will finally put the Devidians in striking distance of the Prime Reality and the older, stable timelines. And once that happens, there will be no stopping them.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Quark as always. In The Ashes of Tomorrow, he helps Sisko and his allies sneak aboard DS9 II to honor Ezri's memory...for a reasonable fee, of course.
• Killed Off for Real: Averted with Wesley Crusher who comes back almost immediately after dying. Averted with just about everyone else.
  • Also ultimately averted with the Devidians by the end of the trilogy. Since the Devidians existed in the Prime Reality before the Novel Verse diverged, they survive the undoing of the Temporal Apocalypse. However, it's not a win for them...because the retroactive erasure of the Novel Verse timeline also erases the chain of events that inspired them to go from being temporal carrion eaters to timeline devourers in the first place.
• Kill the Cutie: T'Ryssa Chen was the bubbliest, nicest Vulcan who ever lived. It makes her death all the more heartbreaking.
• Last Stand: See Bolivian Army Ending.
  • The climax of Oblivion's Gate as the surviving 24th Century characters make their last stands on three separate battlefields (the Devidian temporal collider, the mirror universe, and 2373-A Earth).
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: This happens in Oblivion's Gate once it's revealed that the Novel Verse has to be destroyed to save the Prime Reality. There's a heaping helping of Rage Against the Heavens from the Starfleet characters about having to sacrifice themselves for another reality and its denizens, if their deaths will matter, and if there was ever any point to their lives. This is all very and deliberately meta-textual and reflects the same thoughts and feelings the readership and creators have felt in the Picard era and the necessary ending of the Novel Verse.
• Left Hanging: The whole point of the trilogy is to deliberately avert this for the Novel Verse and to give it a sendoff.
  • On a micro level, the creators have also stated another goal of the trilogy was to specifically wrap up as many dangling plot threads (no matter how large or small) as is reasonably possible. For example, The Ashes of Tomorrow finally ties up the long unresolved Andorian clone subplot from Star Trek: Titan - Fallen Gods (albeit in a passing line).
• Locked Out of the Loop: Once they hook up with the DS9 team late in The Ashes of Tomorrow Picard and Bowers initially conceal Data's conclusions — that the Bajoran wormhole has to be destroyed. Doing so will not only destroy one of the most unique phenomena in the entire galaxy, but also effectively destroy Bajor's gods and religion. They know trying to sell this plan to a Bajoran station and crew isn't going to be fun. However, it ultimately becomes a moot point when the Prophets contact Sisko and Kira during the final battle and reveal this plan is the ''only' way to stop the Devidian incursion.
  • Earlier in the novel, Picard and Paris deliberately invoke this to ensure that the latter's kept out of their planning beyond the broad strokes. This is to prevent Riker from extracting any intel from Tom or B'Elanna after they're taken into custody. Subverted in that it only works briefly; Riker, knowing Picard as well as he does, has a pretty educated guess as to his next move.
  • Before going rogue, Picard and Beverly wonder if this is what's going on with Will's strange behavior and if something's been said or done behind the Admiralty's closed doors that he can't legally tell them about.
  • Oblivion's Gate reveals Worf was kept out of the loop re: mirror universe events while he was stationed at DS9 (due to Starfleet restricting and classifying that information). So Worf didn't know about Regent Worf and is stunned to discover his counterpart was an irredeemable, dishonorable monster.
• Mental Fusion: As detailed under Call Back, this is an important plot point for The Ashes of Tomorrow. The mind meld that Spock and Worf shared back in The Brave and the Bold mini-series left a lingering, dormant psychic tether between them. Worf's temporal psychosis re-activates the link, which gets Spock's attention and brings him into the plot. He and Worf mind meld again to help treat his affliction. The meld not only cures Worf, but helps him understand exactly what's been happening to him — which then allows Picard and company to realize Riker's erratic, bizarre behavior is also the result of temporal psychosis.
• Mind Rape: The 2373-A Borg Queen subjects Picard to one in Oblivion's Gate while pumping him for information on the Caeliar. She forces him to relieve his worst memories — but enhanced with a heaping helping of Borg Nightmare Fuel.
• Mirror Universe: Bashir proposes the mirror universe as a safe (relatively speaking) harbor for Picard, Sisko, and their allies to avoid Riker and the rest of the galactic manhunt now underway at the end of The Ashes of Tomorrow. They end up joining forces with Memory Omega and the Galactic Commonwealth's navy in Oblivion's Gate.
• Mis-blamed: Again, in-universe Rear Admiral Kaud Idyn holds Picard responsible for the late Admiral Dougherty's downfall and death in Insurrection (and the near-ruination of his own career when Dougherty's aides and associates got tainted with the fallout). While Picard bringing the Enterprise-E into the Briar Patch certainly contributed to Dougherty's death, Idyn's conveniently ignoring the fact that Ru'afo lied to Dougherty and that Starfleet almost became unwitting accessories in the Son'a's blood feud against the Ba'ku.
• Mood Whiplash: Deliberately done in the first half of Moments Asunder, with the Enterprise-E characters happy and facing new, exciting life challenges...before all hell breaks loose...
• Morton's Fork: The central, terrible crux of Oblivion's Gate. To defeat the Devidians and stop the Temporal Apocalypse, our heroes have to retroactively erase the entire Novel Verse timeline — and by extension, themselves. If they don't do it, or if they fail, then the Devidians will still kill all of them anyway in the next 29 hours — and with that final power boost, they'll finally be able to attack the Prime Reality and then there will be no stopping them.
• Multiple-Choice Past: In Oblivion's Gate, when Picard realises that the Borg Queen has no knowledge of the Caeliar or the history he learnt of in his timeline, he speculates that the Borg have manipulated history so much they have various other origins and even they may not know where they come from any more.
• The Mutiny: Riker accuses Troi, Vale, and Ree of this when they try to relieve him of duty in Oblivion's Gate. He still doesn't believe Picard's temporal psychosis warnings and has them arrested by loyalist members of the Titan on 'charges of mutiny'. Ironically, Riker's own increasingly erratic actions finally end up provoking an actual mutiny by Dalit Sarai and the remaining senior staff.
• Mythology Gag: In The Ashes of Tomorrow, Jake Sisko's working on a new novel based upon his experiences aboard the tramp freighter Even Odds early on in the DS9 Relaunch. His working title is Crossings, but his wife Korena proposes Rising Son as an alternative. This, of course, is the title of the S.D. Perry novel that originally chronicled Jake's Gamma Quadrant (mis)adventures.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Rene Picard in Oblivion's Gate after Wesley is captured by the Devidians. He goads Mirror Picard into taking the Commonwealth task force into intertime to save him — something which Wesley explicitly told them not to do when he sent his distress call. The flotilla fares about as well as you'd expect. This also forces Picard and company, who arrive afterward on the Defiant, to revise their now-obsolete final assault plan on the fly.
  • YMMV on the hero part, but the psionic fragment of the alternate Riker who takes control of Will's body in the second and third novels. He's trying to stop the Temporal Apocalypse as much as Picard and the others. But the trauma of his death and the destruction of his timeline has left him broken and insane. So his response to the crisis hampers and undermines Picard and his allies. In particular, his pursuit and attacks on the C.S.S. Enterprise nearly ruins their mission to locate the Devidians' intertime base in time so they can execute The Plan.
  • Played with in Oblivion's Gate when Picard goes to confront the 2373-A Borg Queen. His failed attempt to invoke the history he learned in Destiny prompts the Queen to probe his mind and learn of the Caeliar. She is understandably very keen on locating them and adding them to the Collective. It's, however, subverted as Beverly shoots and kills the Queen and this timeline is erased with the Novel Verse before the Collective can act on the intel.

• "Not So Different" Remark: As detailed under History Repeats Itself, Sam Bowers is promoted to acting captain of the Aventine after Ezri's death in the climax of Moments Asunder. He bitterly observes that this is exactly how Ezri had become the ship's captain back during Destiny. He even thinks Ezri would be joking about the irony if she was still alive.
  • Sam also seeks out Picard's counsel not just because he's a senior captain, but because Picard's also been through this exact situation when he had to take command of the Stargazer over 50 years earlier.
  • At the end of The Ashes of Tomorrow, Riker compares Bowers to himself during "The Best of Both Worlds": An XO having been thrust into the center seat after losing his captain in the middle of a major crisis. Unlike with Picard and Bowers in the first book, though, it's deliberately played for drama rather than heartwarming as a furious Riker is holding Bowers equally responsible for the Bajoran disaster.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: Worf and Riker in The Ashes of Tomorrow following the setup in Moments Asunder. They're both acting distracted and erratic. Will in particular becomes increasingly hostile and paranoid and keeps misremembering how many children he has. It's eventually revealed that both men are suffering from a kind of temporal psychosis being triggered by the deaths of their parallel universe counterparts. By the end of the book, Worf's gotten better thanks to help from Spock while Riker's getting worse.
  • Ironically, Riker cites this very trope regarding Picard's (to Will's perspective) bizarre behavior. From his perspective, Picard's being more arrogant than usual, aggressive, and going go far as to advocate willful temporal violations. He begins to think Picard's delusional, responding to PTSD from Rene's situation, or possibly even (in a deliberate bit of dramatic irony) compromised by some alien influence.
• Once an Episode: Whether it was intentional or not, Wesley, or at least a Wesley, dies in each installment of the trilogy.
• Our Wormholes Are Different: Given the focus of the Deep Space Nine cast in The Ashes of Tomorrow, the Bajoran wormhole unsurprisingly plays a major role. The Devidians have been using it as their primary entry point into this reality thanks to its artificial construction and non-linear nature. Destroying the wormhole (with the blessing and urging of the Prophets) is tragically necessary to stop the Devidian incursion and cut them off from the Novel Verse timeline.
• Outside-Context Problem: Even with all the time travel and parallel reality shenanigans they've been caught up in over the years, the sheer scale and scope of the Temporal Apocalypse is far beyond anything Picard or the others have ever encountered. This is also part of why Starfleet Command and the Federation president aren't taking the crisis seriously enough in The Ashes of Tomorrow. They know there's a crisis underway and they are trying to respond. But they also genuinely don't understand or are in denial about just how bad it really is and what may be required to stop it and it's hobbling that response.
• Our Vampires Are Different: The Devidians want neural energy enough to devour entire universes.
• P.O.V. Sequel: Oblivion's Gate gets to do this when the Defiant returns to the alternate 2373 from First Contact. Picard and company (and the reader) arrive in time to watch the Enterprise-E entering the temporal vortex to 2063 from a different perspective.
• The Paranoiac: Riker increasingly becomes one throughout The Ashes of Tomorrow as the manhunt for Picard leads to more and more of their former crewmates and friends defecting to his side. Riker starts getting suspicious of anyone who has any connections or past loyalties to Picard, be it Vale or even his own wife.
• Patrick Stewart Speech: Wesley admits in The Ashes of Tomorrow that he's missed hearing Picard's legendary speeches while he's been traveling.
• Plot Armor: Averted hard in Moments Asunder with the Guardian of Forever, Juel Ducane, Ezri Dax, and Taurik to demonstrate that not even characters who originated on television or the films are protected from the Temporal Apocalypse.
• Point of Divergence: Oblivion's Gate reveals the events of First Contact (specifically the creation of the alternate 2373 timeline) was the in-story divergence point between the Prime Reality and the Novel Verse.
• Previously on…: As the trilogy's the finale of the Novel Verse (and to mitigate Archive Panic as best as possible), each book opens with a recap of the most relevant events from the early days of the DS9 Relaunch through the final pre-trilogy novel (the TNG Relaunch's Collateral Damage).
• Properly Paranoid: Akaar, Riker, and Starfleet Intelligence in The Ashes of Tomorrow. They monitor Picard because, knowing him as well as they do, Riker and Akaar correctly anticipate he's going to go rogue. Unfortunately for them, Picard and his allies also embrace this trope. They also correctly anticipate the surveillance (and that Picard's last-ditch attempt to get Will onboard will fail) and plan their opening moves accordingly.
• Pyrrhic Victory: Sisko speculates early on in Oblivion's Gate that this was one reason why the Devidians hijacked the Bajoran wormhole. Aside from being their primary staging ground intho this reality, Sisko thinks they knew how important it was to the Federation in general and the Bajorans in particular and that they knew destroying it would exact a necessary, horrific cost from their enemies.
  • The ending of the triogy is also ultimately one in a sense. Our heroes successfully stop the Temporal Apocalypse and save the Prime Reality and the rest of the Trek multiverse from the Devidians. But the cost of victory is the erasure of the Novel Verse from existence.
  • Ultimately, it's Spock who sums it up best.
  Spock:Nothing we do or fail to do at this point will prevent the imminent demise of our cosmos. The only questions that remain before us now are: Shall we cling to selfishness and die in vain? Or shall we take up the mantle of heroes, and die so that others may live? Any questions beyond those are now, I fear, entirely moot.
  • The ending of Moments Asunder reveals this is the inevitable outcome of the Temporal Apocalypse for the Devidians if they're not stopped. They're gorging themselves on the neural energies of countless timelines and will never have enough to sate their appetites. But their campaign is weakening space-time as they move from newer alternate timelines to older, more stable timelines and realities. Their avarice will end up collapsing all of time and existence and will destroy both their food sources and themselves.
• The Purge: The Devidians have been targeting anyone who can perceive or travel through space and time and who could thus seriously oppose them. They destroyed the Guardian of Forever, most of the Travelers have been wiped out and Wesley and Picard fear they've also hit other groups like the El-Aurians.
  • The Ashes of Tomorrow adds the Krenim and the Hirogen (who aren't temporal, but were trying to locate Borg temporal technology to aid them) to the Devidian purge list.
• Put on a Bus: Apart from Tuvok, Tom, and B'Elanna, the Voyager characters are still on their extragalactic exploration mission from the ending of the VOY Relaunch. Picard even laments in The Ashes of Tomorrow that if Janeway was still in the Milky Way Galaxy, he would've approached her for help when deciding to go rogue.
  • After the release of Ashes, James Swallow's indicated that he, Ward, and Mack did not want to use the Voyager characters in order to honor the conclusion of Kirsten Beyer's VOY Relaunch tenure.
• Race Against the Clock: The entire trilogy, obviously, but it naturally really hits critical mass in the final installment. Once the characters learn the Novel Verse is doomed no matter what they do, they've got 29 hours to ensure they can still 'win' by surgically demolishing their timeline and ensuring the retroactive erasure of the entire Apocalypse. If they can't hit this deadline, then they'll still be dead anyway...only the Devidians will have harvested them and the Novel Verse's timeline and used that final boost to finally begin assaulting the Prime Reality.
• Ramming Always Works: The Defiant penetrates the Devidian temporal collider this way in Oblivion's Gate, though it's effectively damaged beyond repair. The Titan likewise is sacrificed by its surviving crew this way (on Vale's orders) to damage the station and buy Riker and Picard the final crucial seconds they need to initiate the temporal recursion.
• Rapid Aging: How the Nagas kill people. We see several horrific examples. Rene Picard survives. Barely.
  • The terrible irony of Rene's situation, as Picard bitterly reflects afterwards, is that it's an exact inversion of what happened to him, Guinan, Keiko O'Brien, and Ro Laren back during "Rascals". And unlike that episode, this time there's no magic Transporter procedure that can undo it.
  • In The Ashes of Tomorrow, Ro Laren and Quark both suffer a similiar fate as Rene and are aged over a decade during the climax — though it's subverted in that this ultimately isn't what kills them. It's also ironically played as a bittersweet heartwarming moment, as both characters had admitted they wanted to grow old together — though Quark naturally lampshades that this wasn't quite what he meant.
  • In Oblivion's Gate, this is finally averted as the crew has been able to develop temporal disruptors to neutralize the Nagas' special abilites. The Devidians thus have to resort to killing Starfleet characters the old fashioned way instead of aging them into oblivion.
• Refused the Call: Meta example with The Ashes of Tomorrow. James Swallow has admitted he initially declined the invitation to work on the trilogy. As a fan, he didn't want to partake in the destruction of the continuity he'd both followed and contributed to during the last 20 years. It was David Mack who ultimately talked him into it.
• Remember the New Guy?: In the aforementioned Literary Treks podcast, Dayton Ward stated avoiding this trope was another factor in selecting the Devidians as the Big Bad. His, Swallow, and Mack's preference was to draw from the existing Trek mythology and rogues gallery rather than creating a new all-powerful villain from scratch.
  • Played straight in The Ashes of Tomorrow with Rear Admiral Kaud Idyn. He's an old Dougherty loyalist who's held a grudge against Picard for the events of Insurrection, but he's never been mentioned or seen before now.
• Renegade Splinter Faction: Picard, Sisko, and their allies have effectively become this by the end of The Ashes of Tomorrow between Starfleet not taking the Temporal Apocalypse seriously enough and their actions to try and stop it on their own.
• Resign in Protest: In a deliberate parallel to his live-action counterpart, Picard nearly tries this in The Ashes of Tomorrow to make Starfleet Command take the Devidian crisis seriously. Unlike the live-action Admiralty, though, Akaar sees it coming. He explicitly warns Jean-Luc that playing that particular trump card won't work here. He implores Picard to not make a rash decision he's only going to regret afterwards.
• Ret-Gone: The ultimate fate of the Novel Verse and its incarnations of the Star Trek characters and mythos by the end of the trilogy. As a consolation, they at least also get to Ret-Gone the alternate Borg timeline from First Contact on the way out the door.
  • The trope's also discussed extensively in-story during and after the decision to collapse the First Splinter timeline is made. Anybody alive prior to the Original Disruptive Event has the grim consolation of knowing that while the last 14 years of their lives will be erased if successful, their original Prime Reality selves and lives at least will still be intact (albeit with no guarantees their post-2373 lives will unfold the same way). But because of how the Novel Verse has diverged from the Prime Reality, characters who were either dead before 2373 (ex. Lal) or weren't even alive (e.g. Rene Picard and Natasha Riker) have no way of knowing if they'll even still exist (or will never have never existed at all) once the temporal recursion's initiated.
    • Indeed, as the readership knows all too well, the Prime Reality Lal will not be resurrected (nor will Data, though the copy of his memories he downloaded into B-4 will survive until its termination in 2399). Because the Prime Picard and Beverly never married, Rene will never be conceived — and instead, Jack Crusher Jr. will exist in his place, as encountered in the third season of Star Trek: Picard. And while the Prime Will and Deanna still have children, their daughter is ultimately Kestra Riker rather than Tasha.
• The Reveal:
  • Moments Asunder: A big one for longtime readers of the TNG Relaunch. The future (and previously classified) information Taurik uncovered from the Poklori gil dara back in Armageddon's Arrow is finally revealed: Among other things, it contained information that the Borg are somehow still active in the 25th Century ... which understandably shouldn't be possible with the Collective's defeat during Destiny. However, with the recovered intel on the Temporal Apocalypse, Starfleet and the DTI now realize that they had it wrong. The Poklori gil dara isn't from Starfleet's 25th Century, but from an alternate 25th Century. Their timeline was attacked by the Devidians and their time jump instead catapulted them across timelines rather than their original intended temporal destination.
  • The Ashes of Tomorrow: As was hinted in the previous book, the Devidians have indeed taken a page out of the Bajoran Prophets' playbook and are now operating from a nonlinear plane of existence (which Wesley classifies as intertime). This is revealed to be part of why DTI dropped the ball in their post-"Time's Arrow" surveillance of Devidia II and why the smaller-scale Devidian-related incidents they've dealt with in the interim didn't trigger any alarms. Operating from intertime has also allowed the Devidians to hijack the Bajoran wormhole (due to its own nonlinear nature/construction) and use it as their primary beachhead in the Novel Verse timeline.
  • Oblivion's Gate: The Novel Verse is revealed (at least in-story to the characters) to be an Alternate Timeline and not the Prime Reality as they'd thought. The 'First Splinter' timeline diverged from the Prime Reality during the time travel shenanigans of Star Trek: First Contact — and its unique creation and composition was what first attracted the attention of the Devidians and started this whole mess.
• Revision: Oblivion's Gate does one for First Contact. It's revealed the 2373-A Borg tried to attack the Enterprise-E with a chroniton weapon during its return from 2063. However, the attack failed and instead created a temporal fracture that birthed the Novel Verse and split it and the 2373-A timeline off from the Prime Reality. Because of this fracture, neither the Prime Reality or Novel Verse versions of Picard and company were even aware of what had happened. As far as they (and the audience) saw and knew, the timeline had been completely restored.
• Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory: The Department of Temporal Investigations' temporally-shielded records from their series ends up being a plot point in Moments Asunder. The Devidians' destruction of the Guardian of Forever occurred 14 years in the past...and the DTI records did not record the timeline alteration as they should have. DTI's reaction to the implication is grim: That the Devidians are causing so much damage to the timeline that DTI can't track them.
  • Memory Omega in Oblivion's Gate is also revealed to have their own temporally-shielded archives. This allows Mirror Saavik and her team to quickly verify Picard and company are telling the truth about the Temporal Apocalypse (as realities they had been monitoring have been erased and they had no idea because of the timeline alterations).
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: This is pretty much Bashir in The Ashes of Tomorrow. Learning of Ezri's death snaps Julian out of the catatonic state he's been in since the ending of Section 31: Control. Losing both Sarina Douglas and Ezri back-to-back has taken its toll on the Doctor and he's not going to let the universe take any more friends or loved ones. While he's going to ensure Ezri's death wasn't in vain, even Garak thinks this trope is in play when Bashir leaves Cardassia.
• Rule of Symbolism: The destruction of the Rio Grande in the climax of The Ashes of Tomorrow. It was the runabout that Sisko and Jadzia were piloting when they discovered the Bajoran wormhole back in "Emissary". It was also the last of the original three Danube-class runabouts offloaded by the Enterprise-D when Starfleet first took control of the original DS9. So it's tragically fitting that the Rio Grande is there for the end when the Bajoran wormhole and DS9 II are destroyed.
• Running Gag: A very dark one. As detailed under Once an Episode, and whether it was intentional or not, Wesley, or at least a Wesley, ends up dying in each installment.
• Sanity Slippage: Again, Riker and Worf (prior to his mind meld with Spock) due to their temporal psychosis during The Ashes of Tomorrow. Riker only gets worse during Oblivion's Gate before Deanna and company are finally able to treat him.
• Scifi Writers Have No Sense Of Scale: Entire universes are being destroyed in order to feed the need of the Devidians, who are the inhabitants of only one planet.
  • Justified as the trilogy unfolds - Not just are the Devidians so in thrall to their avarice, gluttony, and greed in consuming that they simply don't care for sustainability, but the destruction of universes is as much a side effect of their method of obtaining their sustanance as anything else. And, again, in their gluttony, they simply don't CARE about the damage inflicted, so long as they get the meal that they want, considering all other forms of life as, at best, livestock waiting to be culled.
• Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right!: Many 24th century Starfleet characters in The Ashes of Tomorrow. They willingly ruin their careers and become fugitives because Starfleet isn't taking the Devidian crisis seriously enough.
  • Subverted with the now-insane Riker during Oblivion's Gate when he illegally commandeers Starfleet resources to hunt down Picard and defies direct orders to stand down from Akaar and President zh'Tarash. He certainly thinks he's doing this trope, but he's actually only making things worse.
  • Also features in Oblivion's Gate; while in the Mirror Universe, Spock makes a (by Vulcan standards) desperate appeal to the rulers of that world to help Picard, Sisko and the others in their plan to stop the Devidians even as he acknowledges that this will destroy their timeline either way. While most of those listening continue to try and find a way to save their own worlds, a group of ships led by M'k'n'zy of Calhoun of the Excalibur all respond to Spock's appeal. M'k'n'zy even unknowingly quotes Spock's old captain when he informs the ambassador "The word was no, but we're going anyway", each of them choosing to follow Spock's plan and die trying to make a difference.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: According to Wesley in Moments Asunder, this appears to have been the collective reaction of higher powers like the Organians, the Metrons, and even the Q to the Temporal Apocalypse. Wesley had previously sought out their assistance, only to discover they had moved on from this reality. However, Wesley's also afraid that the Devidians might have targeted them as they did the Travelers, but Geordi at least doesn't think so. If the Devidians had wiped out the aforementioned higher powers, they'd be bragging about it (as they were about the Traveler purge). After the release of Oblivion's Arrow, David Mack revealed that the real-world reason Q didn't appear in the trilogy was because they were barred from using the entity due to his role in Picard Season Two.
• Set Right What Once Went Wrong: Oblivion's Gate does an interesting variation on this as part of The Plan. Since the Novel Verse is revealed to have been born out of the events of First Contact, Picard and Sisko's team have to return to the alternate 2373 (which still exists, albeit seperate from the Prime Reality's timeline, due the unique way it and the Novel Verse were created). However, it's not a repeat of returning to 2063 and saving Zefram Cochrane. The goal this time around is instead to prevent the Original Disruption Event (the 2373-A Borg's attack on the Enterprise-E) as part of the larger, complex plan to collapse both timelines, end the Temporal Apocalypse, and all without endangering the Prime Reality.
• Shout-Out:
  • On the aforementioned Literary Treks Podcast, Ward reveals that Future Wesley was heavily inspired and influenced by Doctor Who (specifically the late John Hurt's War Doctor).
  • Ward stated that in his outline, Future Wesley was nicknamed Old Man Wesley.
  • In The Ashes of Tomorrow when Kira and O'Brien initiate the destruction of DS9 to collapse the Bajoran wormhole, the main computer warns them that they now have ten minutes to reach minimum safe distance.
  • In The Ashes of Tomorrow, a Starfleet ship is mentioned named the USS Orion, under the command of Captain McLane.
  • According to James Swallow, Picard and company going rogue and Riker and the others trying to bring them to justice in The Ashes of Tomorrow was directly inspired by Captain America: Civil War.
• Spanner in the Works:
  • Riker ends up being this for Picard and Wesley when they brief Starfleet Command on the Temporal Apocalypse in The Ashes of Tomorrow. They knew trying to get the Admiralty on board wasn't gonna be easy, but they were also understandably expecting Will would be one of their biggest advocates and allies (especially given he was there in "Time's Arrow" and has a better understanding of the Devidians than anyone else at Command). Instead, Will is off his game, distracted, and unsupportive.
  • Picard and Wesley were understandably expecting DTI would support them in this briefing given their involvement in the previous book. After all, if anyone at Starfleet can understand the scale and scope of the Temporal Apocalypse, it would be the Department of Temporal Investigations. To their surprise, DTI ends up taking a more neutral stance and while Picard knows it isn't over yet, he also knows the chances of convincing the Admirality without DTI's support have now just plunged significantly.
• Split Personality:
  • The Ashes of Tomorrow reveals this is more or less what's been afflicting Worf and Riker since Moments Asunder. Countless psionic fragments of their dead counterparts from other realities destroyed by the Devidians are bleeding into the Novel Verse's timeline and rooting themselves in Worf and Riker's psyches — and with them, all their pain and terror. Spock even characterizes it as a Temporal Personality Disorder.
  • In Riker's case, the dominant psionic remnant influencing him seems to be the alternate Captain Riker from Headlong Flight (whose demise our Riker witnesesed in his dreams in the previous book). It also appears that elements of Riker's Picard counterpart are also beginning to bleed through realities and timelines as well...
• Stable Time Loop: The existence of the Nagas and the avatars are revealed to be one in Oblivion's Gate. They're created from Traveler genetics the Devidians extracted from the captured Wesley and bonded to their ophidians. They then deployed their armies and weapons into the Temporal Apocalypse and set off the chain of events that brought Wesley to their doorstep and allowed them to capture him.
• Superman Stays Out of Gotham: See Screw This, I'm Outta Here!. Either way, both tropes seamlessly remove any Deus Ex Machina solutions for ending the Temporal Apocalypse.
• Taking the Heat: Picard offers to do this at the end of The Ashes of Tomorrow to protect his allies, but Riker vehemently refuses to give him that out. Riker was willing to do it earlier in the novel before things went too far. But after the cataclysm in the Bajor system, Riker is determined to make sure Bowers, Worf, Geordi, and the others all pay the price for their role in the crisis and for aiding Picard.
• Taking You with Me:
  • Nog, Ro, and Quark's deaths during The Ashes of Tomorrow in a nutshell.
  • Wesley and Bashir's deaths are likewise this during Oblivion's Gate.
• Take That!: The Ashes of Tomorrow has an arguable one towards Kirk. Earth Spacedock's revised security protocol to prevent a repeat of the hijacking of the Enterprise during The Search for Spock is explicitly named after Kirk. One might imagine the Spacedock command crew, like Styles and the Excelsior, were left humiliated by the incident and this was their small revenge.
• This Is Unforgivable!: Riker towards Picard at the end of The Ashes of Tomorrow. Riker holds Picard responsible for the cataclysmic events in the Bajor system and won't forgive him.
• Thousand-Yard Stare: Invoked in-universe by Picard throughout The Ashes of Tomorrow for the survivors of Moments Asunder and as the casualty list keeps going up.
• Timey-Wimey Ball: Similarly to the Borg's origin in the Destiny trilogy, Oblivion's Gate reveals the in-story origin of the Novel Verse is ultimately a complicated Timey-Wimey Ball. Ironically, the Borg were also involved in that one, too.
  • The Plan for ending the Temporal Apocalypse is also one. It's a, for all intents, complex and controlled demolition across multiple timelines and time periods. The temporal demolition also has to be perfectly executed to ensure the ensuing temporal paradoxes resolves themselves and don't feed back into the Prime Reality and cause further damage.
• Title Drop: Oblivion's Gate: Ancient Wesley reveals to the younger Wesley that this is the Devidians' name for their central ring portal used for devouring timelines.
  • Oblivion's Gate also does it in-story (and tongue-in-cheek) with the trilogy's title. Team Picard's final plan for erasing the First Splinter timeline is dubbed the 'Corrective Disruptive Action', or C.O.D.A.
• To Absent Friends: Sisko, Bashir, O'Brien, and Nog all toast Ezri's memory in The Ashes of Tomorrow.
• Took a Level in Badass: The Devidians have gone from being a nuisance in "TNG: Time's Arrow'" to being a multiverse-threatening danger.
  • Oblivion's Gate finally reveals what was the in-universe catalyst for this upgrade. The unique creation of the First Splinter timeline and its unstable quantum reality branches during First Contact attracted the attention of the Devidians. They began experimenting on the more unstable timelines, realized the harvesting potential, and upped their game accordingly — and thus set the Temporal Apocalypse in motion. This is also part of why retroactively erasing the First Splinter timeline is necessary: To remove that original source of cosmic temptation. Without it, the Devidians will remain the temporal carrion eaters we saw in "Time's Arrow" rather than upgrading into the multiversal threat they've become in the present.
• Took a Level in Jerkass: Riker in The Ashes of Tomorrow, though again it's justified because of the strain of the manhunt for Picard and his temporal psychosis.
• Tyrant Takes the Helm: In a sense, the now-insane Riker during Oblivion's Gate after Earth and Starfleet Command are destroyed. He assumes de facto command of what's left of Starfleeet and devotes all their resources and energies to finding Picard and the Defiant at all costs — including arresting his own wife and Captain for 'mutiny' or posting bounties on his former shipmates.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: The Ashes of Tomorrow reveals the Bajoran Prophets are indirectly responsible for the Temporal Apocalypse, or at least for the Devidians' incursion into the Novel Verse timeline. The creation of the Bajoran wormhole and its unique artificial/non-linear aspects have allowed the Devidians to hijack it as their primary beachhead in this reality.
  • Oblivion's Gate reveals that the true culprits behind the Temporal Apocalypse are not the Devidians, but none other than Picard, the Enterprise-E crew, and the Borg Collective (albeit mostly the Borg). As we learn, the Novel Verse was accidentally born out of the temporal shenanigans of First Contact. When Picard pursued the Borg sphere back to 2063, he got the attention of the 2373-A Borg on the assimilated Earth. These Borg then attempted to destroy the Enterprise with a chroniton surge during its return trip back through the temporal vortex. Their intent was to create an anti-time event that would prevent their timeline from being erased and would still supersede the Prime Reality's timeline. Instead, they created a temporal fracture that birthed the Novel Verse's timeline and its own unstable quantum reality branches — all of which then got the attention of the Devidians and set off this whole mess.
• We Used to Be Friends: By the end of The Ashes of Tomorrow, Picard and Riker's friendship has been sundered over their respective responses to the Temporal Apocalypse. Riker certainly feels so and openly states he regrets ever letting his friendship with Picard cloud his judgement. For his part, Picard recognizes that Will's being influenced by temporal psychosis and isn't in his right mind. Once Will's psychosis is cured in Oblivion's Gate, he and Picard quickly and easily recouncile in the middle of the final battle.
  • Geordi and Data are also still on uncertain ground after their falling out back during The Light Fantastic. They too finally recouncile in Oblivion's Gate before their mutual deaths.
• Wham Line:
  • Moments Asunder: "It's a triolic energy signature". Picard, and anyone versed in TNG, instantly realizes the identity of the Temporal Apocalypse's architects: The Devidians.
  • The Ashes of Tomorrow: "Like a shadow at your shoulder." This statement from Riker during the standoff between the Titan and the Aventine is one for Worf. After Spock helps treat his temporal psychosis later on, Worf realizes that Riker has also fallen victim to the same affliction and this is what's driving his erratic behavior and hostility.
  • The Ashes of Tomorrow: Bashir's closing line: "It's only when you have nothing left to lose that you can truly know yourself. And here we are. There is somewhere we can go where Riker won't follow. Beyond all this...and into the mirror."
  • Oblivion's Gate: "We are the First Splinter. Every moment we have lived since the Enterprise-E returned from its mission to 2063 Earth has transpired in this new temporal reality.'' The secret origin of the Novel Verse is finally revealed to characters and readers alike.
  • Oblivion's Gate: "Locutus?" Picard realizes the 2373-A Borg are aware of him — and that they know damn well who he is thanks to intel from surviving Borg from First Contact.
    • Ironically, Picard then tries an in-story Wham Line by addressing the alternate Borg Queen as Sedín (in a callback to the Destiny Trilogy) to try and rattle her. It's quickly subverted, though, as she has no idea who the hell's he talking about. Picard grimly realizes that because of how the Novel Verse has diverged from the Prime Reality, the Borg's origin he and the others learned in Destiny is not the same as their Prime Reality counterparts.
  • Oblivion's Gate: "September 8, 1966". The setting of the epilogue, and Benny Russell's new chronicles of the Prime Reality, is the date the very first episode of classic Trek ("The Man-Trap") premiered.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Vale at the end of The Ashes of Tomorrow after she finally has had enough of Riker's erratic behavior. She gets even more pissed when Riker openly questions her loyalty to him and Starfleet.
  • Sisko towards Picard in Oblivion's Gate once it's revealed the Novel Verse has to be destroyed to stop the Devidians. He did not join Picard's mission to kill his loved ones and existence — although he very reluctantly comes around once he understands there's no other way to defeat the Devidians.
• What You Are in the Dark: A central theme of Oblivion's Gate. Upon learning that the Novel Verse is doomed no matter what and they're all going to die, Picard and the others have to choose between giving into despair and nihilism, or rising to the occasion as Starfleet's finest one last time — even if no one else in the Multiverse will ever know it.
  Spock: Nothing we do or fail to do at this point will prevent the imminent demise of our cosmos. The only questions that remain before us now are: Shall we cling to selfishness and die in vain? Or shall we take up the mantle of heroes, and die so that others may live? Any questions beyond those are now, I fear, entirely moot.
• Whole-Plot Reference:
  • The Trilogy's premise is for all intents Star Trek doing its own riff on Crisis on Infinite Earths. Like the DC Comics heroes, the 24th Century crews are all joining forces to stop a cataclysm that has the potential to wipe out all of existence. Wesley Crusher is serving as the story's Mar Novu (which is even funnier when you remember Wil Wheaton's cameo role in Crisis on Infinite Earths (2019)). The Devidians and their Nagas are playing the role of the Anti-Monitor and the Shadow Demons. Hell, even what happens to Rene Picard is reminiscent of Earth-3's Alexander Luthor.
    • Ironically, Ward admitted in the aforementioned Literary Treks podcast that while he's aware of Crisis, he was more influenced by the Last Great Time War from Doctor Who.
  • The Ashes of Tomorrow and the basic setup for Oblivion's Gate bear similarities to The Avengers (Jonathan Hickman). Like Tony Stark and the Illuminati, Picard and his allies have gone rogue to stop the Temporal Apocalypse (and arguably also, like the Illuminati, arrogantly believe their way is the right one and only they can stop this). Like Steve Rogers during Time Runs Out, Riker is leading the manhunt for the fugitives — and like Steve's pursuit of Tony, Riker is less focused on actually solving the crisis threatening all of existence and more hellbent on punishing Picard and bringing him to justice at any and all costs. Finally, the Devidians operating from outside of time also mirrors the Beyonders.
    • Oblivion's Gate has further parallels to Time Runs Out as our heroes, like the Avengers and the Incursions, realize there's no way to stop the Temporal Apocalypse and they're all going to die. Like the various Avengers factions, the Starfleet characters are faced with the choice of giving into that despair and nihilism, or rising to the ocassions as heroes in the face of annihilation — and even if it won't matter. Finally, like Valeria Richards' advice to her father, the Starfleet heroes essentially realize that while they can't win, they instead have to figure out how not to lose.
  • As mentioned before, Swallow has stated, The Ashes of Tomorrow was influenced by Captain America: Civil War. Like the MCU Avengers, a crisis splits the familiar Starfleet heroes right down the middle. Like Steve Rogers, Picard leads a splinter faction of Starfleet officers who are loyal to him or who are angry at the government response to the current crisis. Like Tony Stark, Riker leads loyal officers to bring them to justice (and like Tony and Steve, Riker doesn't believe Picard's warning about what's really happening with the crisis). Like Tony, Riker also becomes increasingly (even irrationally) determined to bring his elder colleague to justice and ignore the larger crisis. Finally, like the MCU Avengers, the bitter rift between the Starfleet characters isn't healed by the end of the installment and the Big Good's team have fled into the ether to avoid capture and incarceration.
  • While not directly invoked, when Picard learns that the Borg of the 2373-A timeline have no knowledge of the Caeliar, his speculation that the Borg have twisted their own history so much that they no longer remember their true origin is reminiscent of the history of Legion of Super-Heroes foe the Time Trapper, who in recent storylines has been described as a "sentient timeline" whose origin changes to make him a possible future of various different parties.
• The Worf Effect:
  • The Guardian of Forever is destroyed just to show the threat means business.
  • Worf commanding the Aventine against Riker and the Titan in The Ashes of Tomorrow. It should be an even match, but instead, Worf botches the engagement and nearly jeopardizes their entire mission. It's a justified instance, though, because Worf is suffering from temporal psychosis in the middle of the battle and is thus off his game.
• Worf Had the Flu: Almost literally, in the case of Worf commanding the Aventine against the Titan in The Ashes of Tomorrow, due to his aforementioned temporal psychosis.
• Worth It: Geordi during Oblivion's Gate after joking to Worf that Mirror K'Ehleyr's a keeper. Despite Worf giving him a Death Glare for the remainder of the mission, Geordi feels it was absolutely worth it just to see the priceless look on the Klingon's face.
• You Have GOT to Be Kidding Me!: Picard and Wesley's reactions when they realize that Starfleet Command and the president aren't taking the Devidian crisis seriously enough despite the evidence and arguments they've presented. Picard in particular can't believe that diplomatic options with the Devidians are even being proposed. As Picard reminds them, he already tried that approach back in the previous book, let alone twenty years earlier during "Time's Arrow", and it didn't work either time. The Devidians, like the Borg, aren't going to stop and they can't be negotiated or reasoned with.
• You Look Familiar: In-universe example during The Ashes of Tomorrow. Wesley briefly mistakes Tom Paris for Nicholas Locarno. Paris even lampshades it, admitting he gets this a lot.
• You Need to Get Laid: Mirror-K'Ehleyr more or less tells Worf this during their Glad-to-Be-Alive Sex.