in the last episode of Star Trek, the Next Generation, there’s this antitime rupture, that gets bigger the more backwards in time it goes.
now, this rupture was created by three starship enterprises, all of which fired a beam at the same space-time co-ordinates. one of those three enterprises was in the furthermost future.
and it was the furthermost enterprise which closed the rupture. but how, after starting an antitime rupture which moves backwards through time, could the furthermost ship close the gap?
is this even a GQ? if not, apologies in advance. GD? CS, MPSIMS?
The implication is pretty nasty: go to a point in space and fire an energy beam. Come back to the same spot 7 years later and do it again. Come back 25 years after that and do it again, and you’ll destroy the universe. Puh-leeze.
it wasn’t three Enterprise-D’s that started the rupture. It was two early E’s and Capt. Bev Picard’s ship (USS Pasteur?) that started it.
the rupture also went forward in time, as the E+25 years saw it after they initially didn’t see it.
Someone’s written a book “The Nitpicker’s Guide to ST:TNG” that points out just about every little plot hole, production error, and extreme technobabble run-on in the whole series. It’s a fun read, and it’s also fun to watch re-runs and be on the watch for what the author had noted.
The nitpicker writer is Phil Farrand. I have three of his books. His writing style is a bit cornball, but amusing, and the books themselves are useful references for fanfic writers, especially in combination with the info at startrek.com.
That’s a little excessive. It was a fine episode, above & beyond the usual productions, which was hobbled (though not completely crippled) by its time travel plot hole. In all modesty, I believe I could’ve rewritten the script around the plot hole: Pasteur arrives to find a tiny, insignificant (infant) anomaly; they are skeptical of old Picard’s claim. Later, Enterprise returns to the site, scans the anomaly, and it disappears (or, is created in reverse. Something like that.
The more urgent plot hole is the fact that Q’s entire challenge was premised on the anti-time concept being almost beyond human comprehension. Well, maybe it’s beyond Brannon Braga’s comprehension, but it’s hardly the be-all, end-all of imagination.
Nah, it was lousy. It’s once of these “the stakes are so incredibly impossibly humungous that the only possible ending will be none of it ever happened.”
I find this was typical of Q episodes, and combining Q with time-travel is a sure ticket to it-was-all-a-dreamsville.
But even putting all that aside, the premise of the episode involved some seriously ridiculous techno-babble nonsense. Stories that say human actions can destroy the universe are hooey, just like pointless claims that World War 3 would destroy Earth. Gosh, that’s an arrogant belief. And it makes for lousy fiction.
First off, Bryan Ekers it wasn’t going to destroy the Universe. It was just going to stop life on Earth from ever coming about. Your little way of equating life on Earth with the Universe is what’s an arrogant belief, in my opinion.
And I think you maybe missed the point. The episode wasn’t about whether life on Earth could form or not. It was about Picard’s Odyssey and his ability to expand his mind, despite his debilitation. In that sense, it all did happen, because Picard remembered the events at the end.
I agree with AWB - I think it’s pretty clear that the rupture goes both ways. (That only makes sense to me, since it’s a time-antitime reaction.) They could have done a better job of explaining that, though.
I also agree with TheeGrumpy - the whole temporal paradox was not that hard to grasp. But at the same time, I think it’s a little unfair to expect a science fiction author to invent a concept that’s beyond the realm of human comprehension.
Release a giant reverse timehole that unravels and undoes everything in sight and it ONLY affects Earth? Now THAT’S arrogance. Maybe if the timehole had been near Earth (or at least where Earth was a billion years ago) the story might make a fraction of a hint of an inkling of sense.
But I doubt it. How did this thing affect the amino acids, anyway? Harsh language?
Discussing arrogance, it seems wildly arrogant to me to believe that a supergalactic entity with casual control over time and space could sustain an interest in humans, particularly Picard. Q always represented infantile wish-fulfillment; wave your hand and magic happens. Why would such a being care about human activity, unless humans were the most special, most important, most noble, bestest beings in the whole goshdarned uneeverse.
It may not have been TNG’s finest moment (best of both worlds I and Yesterdays Enterprise) but it was a far cry better than Generations. Plus, seeing the Future E (nickname from the ST:CCG) take out the Future Klingon ship made it well worth the money (free). Plus the Finale hooked into the pilot, just like the DS9 finale, and the…well, the DS9 finale only, i guess. Roddenberry’s reasoning for Q being interested in mankind IIRC was that mankind had the potential to become more powerful than the Q, but for now they could be played with.
There were no major plot holes in the explanation of the antitime anomaly. The anomaly was created in the futuremost time visited by Picard. Initial scans of that region by the future ships found nothing because the anomaly was too small to be detected by the long range scans of ships from outsided the Neutral Zone. When the Pasteur arrived, Data’s modified sensors reported the anomaly as being six hours old. Six hours after that, the conjunction of the three inverse tachyon beams from the three Enterprises created the anomaly. However, before the anomaly was created, Picard figured out how to collapse the anomaly. Because he had figured out the puzzle, he altered the timeline, altering the course of history. The anomaly did not go forward in time after its creation, Picard collapsed the anomaly before it was created.
This is possible because the anomaly grew backwards in time, i.e., the further back in time you follow it, the bigger it is. At the point in the past when life on Earth was about to be created, the anomaly was so big that it stretched across the entire Alpha Quadrant and was big enough to interfere with the creation of life on Earth. Nothing more, nothing less.
How could there be a conjunction of the three inverse tachyon beams from the three Enterprises (actually, I think the “future” beam was from the Pasteur, not Riker’s future-Enterprise) when those three Enterprises are years apart? Just because the scene keeps shifting between Present, Present-7 and Present+25 doesn’t make the word “meanwhile” relevant.
Besides, it begs the question: fire an inverse technobabble, err, tachyon beam, wait 7 years, fire it again, wait 25 years and fire it again, and you can undo the past? Cool. As for why the alteration would only be on Earth… that remains a mystery. Maybe the Universe Temporal Repair Association got so pissed off at all the tachyon beaming that they found out the species of the person who inspired it and targeted his home planet on purpose, sparing all others. I still don’t see how an “anti-time anomaly” is supposed to interfere with amino acid bonding, a fairly straightforward biochemical process.
Braga and Moore made the stakes implausibly high. They may as well have written a subplot in which Data’s cat Spot coughs up a hairball that could tear a hole in space-time continuum. The only solution is to run an anti-graivton pulse through Data’s postronic matrix, but this risks creating an alternate dimension in subspace.
The only saving graces were the focus on Patrick Stewart, arguably the best Trek actor, and the future-Enterprise in battle, when someone finally realized “Hey, space has three dimensions!”
By the way, the DS9 finale wasn’t nearly as bad, though their choice of music (“Just the Way You Look Tonight” playing as Bashir contemplates losing his friendship to O’Brien? EWWWWW! O’Brien is married, Bashir. O’Brien don’t swing that way) was downright bizarre. “We’ll Meet Again” would have been much more appropriate, and it was also a wartime song.
Er… not that it matters… but that was Future D. 1701 is the TOS series, A is the Movie, B is… god, I forget, C is the one Tasha goes on, and D is the TNG one. E is the TNG-Movie one.
I call it the Future E because the card name is Future Enterprise. It was the only Ultra rare in that game for a few years, and whenever it was played, people were like “Oooooohhhh!!” (yes, i have one)
I beg to differ. IIRC, the anamoly was supposedly created by three Enterprises in three time periods. It was actually created by two Enterprises and the Pastuer. This could easily have been explained in throw-away dialog that said the Pasteur had the Enterprise’s old deflector dish. Also, After the Pasteur stopped doing it’s dish thing, we saw no anamoly, which is consistant. but then, they leave, and then go back, and suddenly the anamoly is there, so it ahs to go forward to grow sizable enough to go in reverse. That could also have been explained away in one line of dialog, but was ignored completely and left as a plot hole. Anyone who has watched the episode lately feel free to correct me, I’ll have to dig thru my tapes to see it again.
Fixed yer link, Tars. Not that I’m reading a Trekkie thread, mind you… ahem… --Alpha
and why the focus on an earth-based primorial goop? hadn’t TNG already established that all (or most) intelligent humanoid life was in fact seeded by a super-race?
