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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • There’s an argument to be made that an alternate timeline isn’t the same timeline, and therefore, the 24th century temporal prime directive would not apply. It may just be conventional application of the prime directive, as it applies to pre-warp civilisations. They’d likely try to get them back, and either give them the choices of keeping quiet, or having their memories of the future altered/erased, to avoid interfering with that iteration of Earth’s development.

    If there is no way of them going back, then they would likely get the standard time-displacement reintegration package. The circumstances are close enough, and it would hardly be the first time ancient humans from over 3 centuries ago would crop up.


  • True, but that can be said of a lot of atrocities in Star Trek history. Some of which are necessary for the preservation of the Federation as we know it.

    The Enterprise C incident, for example. The loss of the ship with all hands (presumably) helped prevent an escalation of the conflict between the Klingon Empire and the Federation.

    We also know that the Burn didn’t create issues wholesale. All it really did was exacerbate the existing dilithium shortage by dropping the number of ships, but the underlying problems were likely going to happen either way. The Chain had the advantage of the Courier network, while the Federation was still using warp-drive ships trundling along at low speeds.

    The only notable thing that did happen is the loss of functioning ships, straining Federation resources further, and that N’var believed that their experimental stargate network caused the Burn, so they stopped developing it, but the former would have likely happened anyway, especially if the Federation was to get into conflict with the Chain.


  • How likely is it that Discovery went to a mutable future, just one of many, especially with the Temporal Cold War, Carl, Q, Trelane, Janeway, the HMS Bounty, and any number of other temporally active agents out there in time? How locked in is the 32nd Century?

    About as locked in as any of the Time Travel in the 23rd and 24th centuries.

    Star Trek time travel can be inconsistent, but usually, it tends to stick with there only being one timeline that alterations shift back and forward, something that isn’t really helped by the Time War.

    The only time that we’ve seen anything approaching an alternate timeline like that is with the creation of the Kelvin timeline from the Narada incursion, which resulted in bidirectional effects that separated it into a new, independent timeline, but events like that are more the exception than the rule.

    Though, normally, Trek time travel rules would suggest that anything lasting longer than a season (or into the next episode) is usually here to stay, if it’s not reverted at the end of a multi-parter. Data’s head remained centuries older than his body, for example, and the crew of the Bozeman are still rattling about the 24th century, having jumped 70 years into the future.



  • im not sure how one is slapped across the face with normalcy but if you’re saying discovery didnt go far enough with the barely-disguised left wing messaging we usually see in star trek i agree wholeheartedly

    In fairness, that messaging has taken rather a back seat ever since Trek became big, probably because the networks see it as a cash cow, and no longer give it liberty to take the same risks.

    DS9 only got as far as they did pushing the boundary because Voyager had most of the attention, for example.

    You don’t really see any new Trek show pushing the boundary quite like TOS did back in the day, to the point where it was very nearly cancelled outright due to the outrage it produced. Roddenberry even wanted to add an LGBT character to it at some point, but it was shot down by the other producers. Compared to TOS, Discovery’s representation and messaging is almost contemporary, with relatively little boundary-pushing.

    Compare to that to the Orville, which doesn’t have that baggage by virtue of being new, and relatively unknown, so they can get away with more on-the-nose messaging a good bit more without getting into trouble. There’s no established IP and format that the network would prefer that they keep to, or stay uncontroversial so it’s still palatable to wider audiences.


  • Disco had a lot of flaws, and most of them were the same flaws we saw in Picard: the writers just couldn’t write full season plot arcs that were satisfying and believable. This is made worse because each season had to raise the stakes, to the point where it just got kinda exhausting. Meanwhile the show just took itself way too seriously, without really earning my emotional investment.

    Some of the were exacerbated by the production issues that happened in the early seasons of the show, too.

    They went through a bunch of different showrunners/producers in that time, and it shows. Much of Seasons 1 and 2 of Discovery felt like four different shows all overlapping with each other, which did not help in the slightest. It started to find its footing in Season 3, but after that was also when CBS took it off of Netflix, which also made it harder to watch, unless you were willing to subscribe to another service (that might not even be available in your country) for the one show.

    It might have been more interesting if it had stabilised itself and found its footing early on, but alas. On the other hand, it being what was basically an experimental testing-ground for a bunch of different concept gave us the short treks, Strange New Worlds, and a few other shows besides, so can’t fault it that badly.