With the number of historical blemishes between Star Trek Enterprise and the rest of the series- could it be possible that the Suliban annihilate themselves from history with all the temporal meddling, thereby undoing a bit of Star Trek History written within Enterprise, and allowing it to follow the course established in the other series.
Possible? Plese discuss.
Posted by The_Tom (Member # 38) on :
Has Been. Maybe. Perhaps. Let's See.
Posted by MinutiaeMan (Member # 444) on :
I'm convinced that all of ENT, right from the beginning, exists in an alternate timeline from the other four series.
First, we know that people have been meddling with the past beginning at a point before the beginning of "Broken Bow." Therefore, some events wouldn't take place as we know it.
For instance, I'm certain that the Klingon first contact as seen in "Broken Bow" was premature. Klaang crashed on Earth as a result of Suliban interference, and the Suliban were chasing Klaang at the direction of people from the future.
Without Klaang's crash, the Humans wouldn't have encountered the Klingons for years or even decades to come.
In fact... I'm going to take the argument to a bit of an extreme here, but it's my personal belief and reasoning for excluding ENT from the established Trek history. Consider this with a grain of salt.
We know that there are "evil" people from the future passing on information and technology to the Suliban in order to achieve their aims in this time period. Who's to say that the other side, whoever that may be, isn't secretly providing information as well? For instance, the final creation and launch of the Warp 5 Engine could have been achieved thanks to little hints that were dropped from the future. (The people that Daniels was working for -- a future Starfleet?)
Anyway, my point is that since Berman and Braga are frelling with the timeline, there's not necessarily any real consistency between what we've seen and what was previously established.
Posted by MIB (Member # 426) on :
Your theroy is sound, Jeff. I would like note that I've been saying this on the boards for over a month now!! Whenever I bring it up, I get a small flaming from Bernd. Posted by TSN (Member # 31) on :
Why the hell does everyone assume that, in the TOS/TNG/DS9/VOY timeline, there was no time-meddling in the 2150s? Everyone keep saying things like "Well, since FutureGuy and Daniels are changing history, it must be an alternate timeline.". But this "altered" timeline is almost certainly the one that continues on to the other series. If we saw the timeline where FutureGuy and Daniels didn't change things, it would be totally different from TOS/TNG/DS9/VOY.
Posted by Aban Rune (Member # 226) on :
I think either theory could work, but since I doubt that the writers and producers are going to try and say "This is the beginning of Star Trek, but it isn't really...", I'm going to stick with trying to make it fit with the other series.
Otherwise, I'll feel like I'm dealing with a 30-year episode of "Year of Hell"...and that episode just wasn't that good...
[ December 14, 2001: Message edited by: Aban Rune ]
Posted by OnToMars (Member # 621) on :
Please, TSN. It's all relative semantics. Don't get your panties in such a bunch.
People are using the phraseology they are because TOS/TNG/DS9/VOY came FIRST and are actually STAR TREK. Neither statement can be made for ENT.
Posted by The Mighty Monkey of Mim (Member # 646) on :
quote:Originally posted by OnToMars: People are using the phraseology they are because TOS/TNG/DS9/VOY came FIRST and are actually STAR TREK. Neither statement can be made for ENT.
Poppycock.
While there isn't enough info yet to tell, I sincerely doubt that (in spite of their reputations) Berman and Braga have the intent to wipe out the established timeline. The events of ENT could easily be what always took place.
Since there's never BEEN any history established in TOS/TAS/TNG/DS9/VGR (apart from a few one-line verbal references which can be interpreted a number of different ways) about the 22nd century and its events, ENT can't really contradict anything.
That's a big reason why TPTB chose this timeframe for ENT. We know almost nothing about it. the slate is mostly blank. All they're doing is filling stuff in. And so far, despite the shouts and cries of "Continuity error!", I have seen virtually nothing that clashes in any major way with previously established shows. And certainly, NOTHING that suggests to me that there is any kind of alternate timeline involved.
As for saying ENT is not Star Trek, that is the epitome of lunacy.
-MMoM
[ December 14, 2001: Message edited by: The Mighty Monkey of Mim ]
Posted by MinutiaeMan (Member # 444) on :
No, I admit that there's nothing specific so far to blatantly contradict eatablished canon. (Well, aside from that Xyrillian cloaking device...)
However, I believe that the entire "feel" of the series is wrong. It's too cool, too advanced, too "fresh" for a series that's just getting into space travel within the past 100 years. All of the usual bits of technology are still there, just in slightly mutated form. The transporter, the replicators, the shuttles, the sickbay. They've only paid lip service to the technological limitations and relative primitive development of the era. It doesn't "feel" that much different from the 24th century.
But this thread is supposed to be about Jeff's theory. Sorry for setting it off track.
I think it's an interesting and somewhat ironic idea, that the Suliban get annihilated through their own temporal meddling. It'd be a little like "Year of Hell," maybe, but it might make for an interesting conclusion to the temporal arc.
But somehow I don't think that B&B would come up with anything that interesting.
Posted by OnToMars (Member # 621) on :
I never said a goddamn thing about ENT violating establishing continuity.
I said that TOS/TNG/DS9/VOY came before ENT, production wise. You want to debate that?
I also said that TOS/TNG/DS9/VOY are Star Trek. As in Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Voyager, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. It is not Star Trek: Enterprise. It is just Enterprise.
That is all that I said.
Posted by The_Tom (Member # 38) on :
Of course, the Xyrillians didn't have a cloaking device. They had stealth technology. Which, as we've already seen several times in 24th century Star Trek, can exist in a visually similar but completely technologically different and inferior form to cloaking devices (the frickin' Kazon had it.)
quote:I think it's an interesting and somewhat ironic idea, that the Suliban get annihilated through their own temporal meddling. It'd be a little like "Year of Hell," maybe, but it might make for an interesting conclusion to the temporal arc. But somehow I don't think that B&B would come up with anything that interesting.
You might want to have a look at the writer's byline for that episode sometime.
Getting back on topic, I think punching the mother-of-all-reset-buttons and having ENT in an alternate timeline to an "actual" 22nd century that preceeded the TOS/TNG/DS9/VGR etc. narrative is certainly an option that the producers have, but I have a hunch based on their commentary in interviews that they don't want to exercise it. I'm satisfied that the powers that be have taken enough care around the issue of continuity that the only violations are likely to be incredibly obscure ones (ie Bernd's math on the Moab IV colony and the transporter) which we never in a million years could have expected any writer be they JMS or Aaron Sorkin or David E Kelley to catch. Besides, like the Moab IV example, the obscure ones can usually be easily explained-around. So, barring a universe-wrecking continuity SNAFU of a scale never before seen on Trek ever before, I think one would need to be an uber-fanboy to find the almighty timeline "polluted" enough by the end of the show's run to demand a reset and nothing less.
Posted by Malnurtured Snay (Member # 411) on :
I'm with TSN on this one. I'm really tired of the "OMG! They used time travel in this episode! It's now set in an alternate reality!" that I've been hearing for every episode of TNG, DS9, and VOY that utilizes time travel ...
YEEEESH!
Posted by OnToMars (Member # 621) on :
Way to edit your post, MMoM.
And Enterprise has no Star Trek in its name. It is not Star Trek in the same sense as TNG/DS9/VOY by the admission of the producers. Please, this is getting ridicilous.
Posted by The Mighty Monkey of Mim (Member # 646) on :
Umm, dude...
I didn't edit my post. I edited a few seconds after I posted it, after seeing that I had forgotten the 't' ant the end of 'contradict.' That's it. I didn't change anything else.
And just because "Star Trek" isn't in the title don't mean it ain't Star Trek. Is "Raiders of the Lost Ark" not an Indiana Jones movie because it's not called "Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark"?
And, as I said, it really makes little difference that the other shows came first. Those other shows took place in a timeframe nowhere even close to that of ENT. And again, there's been virtually nothing established about ENT's century. So how can you say they're contradicting something that hasn't been established yet?
-MMoM Posted by MinutiaeMan (Member # 444) on :
Here's a probable continuity violation: "Balance of Terror" establishes that they didn't have viewscreen technology during the Earth-Romulan War. (It was why they didn't know what the Romulans looked like.) And Spock said that their level of tech "allowed no quarter to be asked for or given." Yet the way we've seen ENT tech is hardly different from later years, even the TOS era.
Okay, so this is minor, but little details like that are the things that gave the timeline a sense of progress and advancement. But I think that ENT has very little tech difference from the others. What kind of "advancements" are they going to make between ENT and TOS?
Posted by OnToMars (Member # 621) on :
Mim,
First off, I could've sworn that that last bit wasn't in there the first time I read your post. If I was mistaken, I apologize.
Now, go back and reread my posts very carefully. Nowhere did I start claiming that Enterprise has violated continuity this way or that way. I really wish that people would stop assuming that anti-Enterprisers automatically resort to bitching about continuity. As has already been concluded, TPTB have been very careful about avoiding technical violations of continuity.
Posted by The_Tom (Member # 38) on :
quote:Originally posted by MinutiaeMan: Here's a probable continuity violation: "Balance of Terror" establishes that they didn't have viewscreen technology during the Earth-Romulan War. (It was why they didn't know what the Romulans looked like.) And Spock said that their level of tech "allowed no quarter to be asked for or given." Yet the way we've seen ENT tech is hardly different from later years, even the TOS era.
Ew. Now that's anal-retentive. I think the going interpretation for decades has been that visual contact was not made impossible by a lack of viewscreens but by an unwillingness on the Romulan's part. There's no reason transmitting video will be any harder than transmitting audio between spaceships. The idea that viewscreens didn't come into widespread use until 200 years from now or later more than a little silly.
quote: But I think that ENT has very little tech difference from the others. What kind of "advancements" are they going to make between ENT and TOS?
Well, to be honest there aren't many tech differences between TNG and TOS, either. Aside from holodecks and replicators appearing, over the course of 100 years people still have type-1 and type-2 hand phasers and tricorders, the ship still has phasers (albeit fired using a slightly different system), photon torpedoes, shields, forcefields, tractor beams, transporters and shuttlecraft. One assumes that the vast majority of tech improvements between those series were "under the hood," so to speak: isolinear chips allowing for a computer system that's exponentially more powerful, a doubling of the warp speeds ships are capable of travelling at, more powerful shields, more powerful phasers etc.
So, looking at what'll change in the 115 years between 2151 and 2165, we can point to the addition of true functional phasers (howsoever they differ from phase pistols) and true tricorders to away teams, and the ship getting phaser emitters, photon torpedoes, forcefields, shields, a tractor beam, a safe and almost universally-trusted transporter system, and warp-capable shuttlecraft to replace shuttlepods (according to the Enterprise bible and barring a writing hiccough in "Shuttlepod One"). Mightn't sound like much, especially since most of the above functions have been filled by another device, but it's a lot more than TOS-to-TNG. "Under the hood," we can expect the computer system to canonically take a big leap with the invention of duotronics during that interval, along with a doubling in how fast the ship can go and presumably a variety of evolutionary rather than revolutionary changes: gravity plating to individual gravity generators, better sensors, better food synthesizers, etc.
Posted by The Mighty Monkey of Mim (Member # 646) on :
quote:Originally posted by MinutiaeMan: Here's a probable continuity violation: "Balance of Terror" establishes that they didn't have viewscreen technology during the Earth-Romulan War...
No, it establishes that there was no visual communuications between the Romulans and Earth forces during the war. Did you ever stop to think that it might mean the Rommies had a *lower* level of tech than we did? Maybe while our ships were capable of using viewscreens (as per ENT) theirs weren't??
This is what I meant in my first post. These one-liners can be interpreted to mean many different things, and there's always been room to wiggle through these so-called "continuity violations".
-MMoM Posted by TSN (Member # 31) on :
If you really want a technological continuity violation, just look at the fact that the ENT viewscreen can zoom in on a planet so far that you could take high-resolution snapshots of people's faces if you wanted. Somehow, this technology must be lost, and, by the late twenty-fourth century, they're still lucky when they can accurately detect the types of life-forms on a planet.
Posted by Sol System (Member # 30) on :
I'm sure I remember the Enterprise D playing the spy satellite of the far future card a few times.
Posted by Timo (Member # 245) on :
I can't bring myself to believe in this viewscreen thing. It seems utterly implausible that the writer of the episode could have meant anything even remotely like that - of course future spaceships will ALWAYS have viewscreens, and have always been going to have them (uh, see Douglas Adams: "Restaurant at the End of the Universe" for more proper temporal forms), ever since the 1930s.
And there's nothing in Spock's dialogue to establish a lack of viewscreens, only some musings about lack of visual contact. It's up to us viewers to figure out what the heck Spock *did* mean. But not having viewscreens is out of the question, and already was in the 1960s.
Timo Saloniemi
Posted by David Templar (Member # 580) on :
quote:Originally posted by MinutiaeMan: Okay, so this is minor, but little details like that are the things that gave the timeline a sense of progress and advancement. But I think that ENT has very little tech difference from the others. What kind of "advancements" are they going to make between ENT and TOS?
Mini-skirts and those blinking lights below the viewscreen. Buttons that go ZOOT! and BLING! when you press them. Painting starships white instead of ST:FC black. Starfleet's decision to stop recruiting members of the good ship Lollypop.
Orion (green) slave girls.
Posted by The Mighty Monkey of Mim (Member # 646) on :
quote:Originally posted by David Templar: Orion (green) slave girls.
I think the going interpretation for decades has been that visual contact was not made impossible by a lack of viewscreens but by an unwillingness on the Romulan's part. There's no reason transmitting video will be any harder than transmitting audio between spaceships. The idea that viewscreens didn't come into widespread use until 200 years from now or later more than a little silly.