StillPaisleyCat

Agree, there was an entire cornucopia of Chekhov’s guns in that script.

They left the possibilities wide open.

I love ‘they took the ship…’ too.

No references to Hemmer yet this season or specific follow up to Uhura’s experience of his apparent death. We’re only at episode three however and other cat have had their moments to shine.

Shared a photo of our Kelvin D7 last week here. Looks great.

My spouse seems to want to decorate every available spot with Klingon vessels. It’s hard to argue. …. Even when extra birds of prey mysteriously appear.

I understand your position.

One of the things I’ve been considering in relation to the Defiant’s database is whether we should consider the dates in there artifacts or translations.

When I was younger, I thought the reason for the existence of stardates was to account for relativistic effects when ships were travelling at sublight. Not exactly what they are supposed to be but the point is that Starfleet is aware that relativistic effects occur and adjusts for them in recording times and dates.

An artifact date in the Defiant’s historical database would be a record that has a fixed date that wouldn’t be adjusted by the computer or the universal translator. I think that’s what most of us assume it would have been when we see the graphics onscreen.

However, there’s a possibility that it was something else, a date that may have been translated or adjusted for some reason, either in relation to the war or in relation to the Defiant’s own continuity. That’s to say the ship may in itself not be a reliable narrator in its own continuity.

I agree however that we shouldn’t assume a shift in specific dates until and unless we get it onscreen - just that we should equally avoid going so far as to break the sequence of causality in order to respect a given date.

There are certainly cases like that.

The Guardian of Forever has also corrected the timeline in two cases we know.

But there have been causality loops such as in First Contact where time arguably pushed back on its own, with the Enterprise working to correct the incursion of the Borg.

They know what they’re doing dribbling these out week by week.

There are still a few we’re hoping will show up.

In the meantime, almost every available display spot has been spoken for.

A fixed point in time is literally called a ‘time crystal’ in physics.

Now that’s theory that developed after Dr Who put it out into the global conversation, much as Albucierre’s Warp theory and Star Trek. It doesn’t make it any less a completely valid science fiction explanation.

In terms of time pushing back, entropy comes into it. Pushing an essential event further down the time stream should be harder, but pushing it to an earlier date would be orders of magnitude harder. Eliminating the event altogether and forking the time steam into a new course will be much more difficult than either.

It can be argued that First Contact is classic example of time pushing back. While the Enterprise was able to ensure the first warp flight happened in the very narrow window, there were slippages in the details around the event regardless of the preservation of the date. The Prime Universe timeline was overwritten, just not as obviously as in a change of a calendar date.

But as we saw with the Discovery transiting back and forth to the MU (albeit via a radically different mechanism), the calendar was not aligned when they returned - days became 9 months.

So we have no reassuring whatsoever that the Defiant was in sync, or that their database was still in sync with the Prime Universe that carried on without them.

Addendum: Calendars are dependent on where they function and the speed of travel (as we are aware from relativity) unless insulated in a warp bubble or equivalent. Not sure why we expect the computer databases on starships to compensate accurately for unknown phenomena like falling through a vortex.)

I’m going to say that I am always dubious about relying on dates in the Mirror Universe to pin down the Prime Timeline.

There seems always to be slippage or error in correspondence between the two universes, and time spent in one doesn’t necessarily map one to one to the other (transit mechanics notwithstanding).

If we take Kovich’s point that there haven’t been interactions between the Prime Universe and Georgiou’s Mirror Universe for centuries, it seems that the two universes had already diverged so profoundly by the late 24th century, that DS9 offers us some of the last crossovers.

More generally, I’m comfortable with taking Sera’s statement as an approximation of speech. She’s not Vulcan. With that, I would put T+T+T as taking place no earlier than say 2021 but unlikely later than 2030.

As for the rest, I’m comfortable with time and events being overwritten somewhat within the Prime Universe as long as the major event marker points remain effectively in place. It’s these key events, and their casual relationships that are essential to maintain - not a date.

To me, it’s much more problematic that fans (and writers) tried to retcon a disconnect between the Eugenics wars and WW3 in order to respect Roddenberry’s direction that in the TNG pilot Encounter at Farpoint, WW3 was described as being in the mid 21st century.

Likewise, moving the development of space technology back from the late 90s, especially the first FTL flight, was key to placing Warp technology post WW3, but it takes a lot of selective interpretation to discount the statements in TOS.

For those of us who were already longstanding fans when TNG premiered, these were significant inconsistencies in the sequencing and causation..

For some, it was one of the major barriers in accepting TNG a as a continuation of the same universe. While many of us, myself included, rolled with it, it wasn’t all that different than many of the criticisms of Discovery and SNW in terms of changing the timeline.

I have also taken note that tie-in author Christopher L Bennet has been pondering (over in the comments on the TOR review of this episode), that there’s been a longstanding discontinuity (or rather shift) in the timeline between TOS and TAS and TNG.

I can see why, especially as their astrophysics consultant will back up the science of it, Goldsman as TOS fan since the 60s & 70s would want to clean up the sequencing of key events over the previously established dates in order to enable fans to view the Star Trek their possible future.

My own view?

If we use the major river of time analogy for events in the Prime Universe, we could think of the version of Eugenics wars, WW3 and Warp / First Contact of TOS in the 1990s and early 21st century as a kind of oxbow, an arc now cut off, but with the bend in the river replicated slightly further down the time stream.

I also like @khaosworks@startrek.website ’s notion of a palimpsest analogy where the incursions into the time stream over write past versions but there remain artifacts of the earlier versions.

We also have Kirk’s reference to being incarcerated in a Denobulan prison with a Vulcan.

It’s a matter of having enough posts and comments to have additional subs or communities.

The mod of this one @ValueSubtracted@startrek.website has replied to other similar questions that, as there is volume and interest, other communities (subs) can be added here.

(I previously posed the same question about establishing a Treklit or trekbooks one.)

There’s definitely and interest and an open invitation to mods of other Trek-related subreddits, to set up and find a home here.

For now, the three communities that exist cover the waterfront from more serious to humorous, with the general StarTrek one also being the meta discussion for the community.

This one’s about Paramount’s global strategy not Bell Media’s.

Since Paramount announced it’s global protocol of avoiding selling or renewing exclusive licences for Star Trek to other streamers, it’s been only a matter of time until Bell’s exclusive licence for the new shows ran out.

It’s one of the main reasons we’ve hung onto the CTV Sci-fi channel vs switching to Crave. (The other being that it has most of the SyFy shows.)