posted
O.K., I rewatched Future's End last night and noticed a couple of oddities.
1. Rain Robinson (yummie) apparently knows more about ET life than she's letting on. Somehow, she has a small model of a Talosian (from the original Trek pilot) on her desk. O.K., actually it's just the little playmates figure.
2. While there is no mention of the Eugenics Wars (which should be raging at this point in history) there is evidence that, in that timeline, humanity has reached a level of tech that allows for sleeper ships. Rain has a model of the DY-100 type ship somewhere in her office.
3. Janeway tells Chakotay that she has no idea what her ancestors were doing in the late 20th century. Yet,in the ep. "11:59" she seems to remember (or at least thinks she remembers) alot about her ancestor from 2001.
Any thoughts or comments about this stuff?
------------------ "A gathering of Angels appeared above my head. They sang to me this song of hope, and this is what they said..." -Styx
posted
Well, only #3 HURTS them. #1 is just an inside loke which I thought was kinda cool, and #2 is actually a nice tie-in. One could assume that the Eugenics Wars are confined to Europe at this point. Although it would've been really nice to have heard mention of them.
------------------ "A gathering of Angels appeared above my head. They sang to me this song of hope, and this is what they said..." -Styx
#2 can be easily explained that the Eugenics Wars were a EurAsian thing (which is, to be honest, one of the possible impressions I got from TWOK and "Space Seed" before I saw "Future's End").
posted
Well, personally, I think the Eugenics Wars didn't happen in that timeline. However, this goes back to the arguement over whether or not the timeline was restored at the end of the ep...
------------------ "To make the merry-go-round go faster, so that everyone needs to hang on tighter, just to keep from being thrown to the wolves." -They Might Be Giants, "They Might Be Giants"
posted
Didn't the DS9 episodes that involved the Gabriel Bell arc imply that the Eugenics Wars either didn't happen or didn't affect North America? I haven't seen the eps in question, but the Chronology makes that comment. Is there any dialogue from Space Seed or TWOK that contradicts this?
------------------ Dane
"Mathematicians have long held that a million monkeys banging on a million keyboards would eventually reproduce the collected wisdom of the human race. Now, thanks to the internet, we know this is not true." -- Robert Silensky
posted
The encyclopedia suggests that the Eugenics Wars evidently left cities like LA and San Francisco relatively uneffected since little (if any) evidence of this event is seen in any of the episodes that deal with that general time period. We do know that the Eugenics Wars have not been eradicated from the time line since the Admiral in "Doctor Basir, I presume" mentions the infamous Khan Singh. The Wars may have been put off for a while in a new time line though, or happened in a different form. Let's face it, none of this could be attributable to writer/creator errors, since the staff of Voyager simply don't make those kind of mistakes...
*removes tongue from cheek and puts it in his pocket*
I will again point to the DY-100 ship model in Rain's office. I suggest that this is not an in-joke, but rather a representation of society's technological advancement at that point in history in Rain's timeline. Instead of having a model of a space shuttle, she has a model of a sleeper ship.
------------------ "A gathering of Angels appeared above my head. They sang to me this song of hope, and this is what they said..." -Styx
posted
Well, the encyclopedia just says that because they needed to explain away their screw-up, and they didn't want to actuallt think about it. As for "Past Tense", it was twenty-some years after the Eugenics Wars. Things would have been rebuilt by then.
------------------ "To make the merry-go-round go faster, so that everyone needs to hang on tighter, just to keep from being thrown to the wolves." -They Might Be Giants, "They Might Be Giants"
posted
Original time line: solid-state electronics, or whatever breakthrough Starling was responsible for in the alternate timeline, is invented, leading to a tech revolution, eventually leading to Starfleet, leading to both Voyager getting lost and Timefleet in the 29th century. Some timeship (possibly piloted by Braxton himself, which might fit into his hatred of Janeway in some convoluted way) from after the point in the 29th century when the temporal explosion occured in alternates 1 and 2, for whatever reason, crashes on Earth.
Alternate timeline 1: Someone finds the crashed timeship. Said person, let's call him Berlinghoff Rasmussen, causes no changes to his immediate timeframe by finding the ship. Rasmussen takes his timeship forward in time, causing a temporal explosion in the 29th century and somehow bringing Voyager's debris along for the ride. Braxton comes back in time to destroy Voyager, thinking it'll fix things, and so begins the episode. The temporal explosion wiped out the mission that sent the original timeship back in time in the first place, but Aeon goes back and takes a similar role, causing the changes to the timeline we saw in Future's End. Keep in mind that we never actually saw this timeline. It's simply nesecary to setup the second alternate.
Alternate timeline 2: Henry Starling finds the Aeon, causing a technological revolution at approximately the same time it occured in the Original timeline. Thus the future of this timeline is not significantly different from the Original. Janeway of the alternate timeline naturally doesn't realize that the electronics revolution would have still happened without Starling, since she never experienced a timeline without him. Voyager prevents Starling from causing another temporal explosion, and Braxton returns them to their proper location in space/time.
In the timeline we now watch, the solid-state revolution still occured on schedule, but because the 24th century of both Original and Alternate 2 are not significantly different, it's impossible to tell which we're currently watching.
Of course, if time travel made any sense at all, the entire episode would never have happened. But I've had one too many episodes that never happened for my taste. A third part that took place before the first one that explored alternate 1 would have been nice.
------------------ You are wise, witty, and wonderful, but you spend far too much time reading this sort of trash.
------------------ "To make the merry-go-round go faster, so that everyone needs to hang on tighter, just to keep from being thrown to the wolves." -They Might Be Giants, "They Might Be Giants"
posted
I like Omega's timeline, with some slight variations. We need not postulate a Berlinghoff Rasmussen (which immediately raises the question of whether this is the great-grandfather or perhaps great-grandson of the antagonist in "A Matter of Time ). Rather, the crash could have been identical in all occasions, and Henry Starling always the person to find the ship.
Minor random variations would then decide whether Starling sits in the cockpit of the ship, presses the wrong button and accidentally launches himself to the future, blowing up the 29th century Earth, or whether Starling sits in the cockpit of the ship, presses the right button and unravels the secrets of the ship and creates an electronics empire.
And to avoid confusion, the "original" timeline in Omega's description would be one we never saw - the adventures of Kirk, Spock and McCoy, as well as those of Cochrane and Gabriel Bell and other past characters, happened in "alternate timeline 2", which is the proper timeline of all Trek adventures after 1996.
posted
Perhaps we could even say that the "original timeline" is the one you and I exist in right now. The electronics and computer industries are certainly booming. We have things like bar code readers, and Palm Pilots, but I've never heard of Chronowerx or Henry Starling.
------------------ "A gathering of Angels appeared above my head. They sang to me this song of hope, and this is what they said..." -Styx
posted
I'd like to suggest a concept I once read in a cheezy sci-fi book: the "Elastic Timestream".
I goes like this: throughout history are a number of important historical events; say you kill Hitler before the war, then the future will undoubtedly change. But if you just bump into him to make him miss a war meeeting, then history will probably "correct" itself. He'll probably call another meeting or simply call his generals on the phone, and the future won't be altered.
The Star Trek universe seems to have a lot of these situations, although it has never been explicitly described as such. "Trials and Tribbles-ation" is one of these. The past HAS changed but the future hasn't.
As to how that applies to "Future's End", well huh, I don't really know...
I take the whole episode like this: Starling's past IS the real ST past. There was a causality paradoxe (I think that's what it's called when an event triggers itself in some way) and Janeway just happened to get out ot it when it was convenient. I feel no obligation to apply real temporal mechanics seeing as how the writers obviously don't.
------------------ -If you took that broomstick out of your tail-pipe once in a while, you might have some FUN for a change! *Rattrap - Beast Wars*
-Let the Fates land where they may! *Megatron - Beast Machines*
Topic Closed
). Rather, the crash could have been identical in all occasions, and Henry Starling always the person to find the ship. 
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