Interesting. So ... Emperor Lorca? Empress Tilly? I wonder who will claim the throne of the Empire. I'm pretty sure the timeline for the MU just changed.
Why would it unless Georgiou uses Section 31 to attack it somehow?
On the other hand, she knows about the Burn and may set Section 31 to preventing it as a long term side goal (of course, that could be what causes the burn in the first place....). Or her actions may cause something to happen to the S3 DSC setting (though at this point I doubt it, CBS seems set on their generic quasi-Trek and the more or less post apocalyptic future gives them the freedom to do that).
The Emperor is dead and the Carl said Saru would go on to do great things in that universe. So unless it's a Mirror Mirror Universe ... the MU timeline just changed.
Just like there are hundreds of thousands of universes parallel to the Prime Universe in Parallels, there could be just as many Mirror Universes. However, this is the Guardian of Forever that required Kirk and Spock to go back in time to the 20th Century to stop Bones from saving a woman that would prevent the US from entering WW2 or else be stuck in a timeline where the Federation never existed. Also, the Guardian of Forever was forced into hiding to prevent some people from using it to erase their enemies from existence. So unless the Guardian of Forever intentionally sent Georgiou into an universe parallel to the Mirror Universe which we have not seen it exhibit those powers before, then Georgiou was sent into her past which created a new Mirror Universe timeline.
So is there any explanation for why didn't they use a similar gateway from TOS? This is one of the frequent complaints people have about the show, that they change things just to change things, and often the change makes no sense. Its hard to see an argument against it on this issue.
This brings back the goofy issue with Empress Blinky and her quantum issues makes no sense, as it changes the entire history of Trek and alternate universes/timelines from being a cogent one that is understandable with the concept of quantum uncertainty, to something ST:D is just pulling out of their behind.
And I say that deliberately because pulling something out of your behind is what humans do, as well as shedding dead skin, exhaling and the like. It is something else I thought of, and a major problem with this idea because being a biological creature, the Empress needs to eat, her cells divide, die, and expel waste. The PG that came to the ST:D universe is not the same bundle of atoms and molecules that went back. She has unquestionably been eating and drinking the current universe' stuff and getting rid of the old stuff. So as time goes on she should actually be more stable, not less, because her old MU bits are getting replaced as her body goes through normal life processes.
Well, after Burnham asks Carl who he really is, he says I AM THE GUARDIAN OF FOREVER, using voice samples from TOS. Then the doorway explodes into thousands of wood splinters, and then reforms itself in the classical Guardian stone archway. It mentions that, during the Temporal Wars, people kept trying to use it to kill other people, so it hid itself to avoid being exploited. It was disguising itself so people couldn't find it.
Okay, that's a little weird, but at least they used it again.
As for what you say about Phillipa, you are completely wrong. We have already seen from Voyager how frequent time travel can cause issues, up to and including insanity, and death. And we have never seen anyone get as temporally displaced as Phillipa, so her having extreme symptoms also makes sense. None of it contradicts, or conflicts, with past canon. The only other Trek characters to go through what she did are Nero, his crew, and Prime Spock, and they only went about 130 years displaced from their original time. And this would explain why Prime Spock died young(for a Vulcan) after jumping into the Kelvin timeline.
Eating food would just create energy for cell division for the creation of new skin and the like, and her cells are from the MU, so her divided cells would also be entangled to the MU as well. Past Trek has already established you have a uniquely identifiable quantum signature that makes you detectable if you jump universes. That never changes, no matter how much you eat, or shed skin. Worf was able to be detected as being from another universe due to quantum difference in his cellular RNA, which extended down to the subatomic level, in the TNG episode Parallels. Discovery is just following past canon there.
No, what you're suggesting is there is some magic force field around her cells that anything that goes in is changed from universe A to universe B, and if they leave they revert to the existing universe I guess. Nothing about that makes sense. Nothing about this concept ST:D introduced, at least what little I know of it, makes sense as a cogent idea, and nothing about it works with quantum uncertainty and the concept of quantum universes.
Burnham has been in the future for a year beyond the Discovery, and has had no ill effects, but PG who has been in a different universe for however long she has been on the show had no ill effects until she travels through time. Spock who traveled through time and universes had no ill effects, but he never goes back, he dies there, and then what?
Why would your matter care what time period you were in? The matter that exists today has existed since the Big Bang. My arm is made up of star dust, dinosaur meat, and caveman TRIBBLE. It has been all those things among many others at some point in time. If that dinosaur came from another universe, then I would be having serious problems right now, if I were in the ST universe. Think about the implications of that.
The Defiant that made the MU what it is at some point will long since been scrapped, but whatever parts are melted down and put into a new ship are at some point going to completely fail and disappear back into their own universe, by this logic. And how many other ships, critters, and whatever else has been imported from another universe?
I don't know how it works anymore since it has nothing to do with quantum uncertainty, but we know universe crossings can happen all the time. While we are typically shown things crossing and then sent back, there's no reason they have to go back. So what happens in 1000 years when whatever time+space threshold has been reached that cause them to break down? Would my arm just disappear or have chunks missing from it because it happened to have large numbers of mirror molecules in it from a thousand years ago?
Look this idea goes directly against the previously established and entirely cogent idea of quantum uncertainty, and fine they want to do that, great. It isn't well thought out though, not at all. It went from science fiction to plot magic.
Well now that we have the Guardian back, can we please get those Missions taken out of the Klingon War Arc revamped and returned to the game.
'But to be logical is not to be right', and 'nothing' on God's earth could ever 'make it' right!'
Judge Dan Haywood
'As l speak now, the words are forming in my head.
l don't know.
l really don't know what l'm about to say, except l have a feeling about it.
That l must repeat the words that come without my knowledge.'
Keep in mind that how time travel works is entirely dependent on the particular episode and writer. Trek doesn't have one consistent theory of temporal mechanics, which is one reason why Miles O'Brien hates the topic so.
No, what you're suggesting is there is some magic force field around her cells that anything that goes in is changed from universe A to universe B, and if they leave they revert to the existing universe I guess. Nothing about that makes sense. Nothing about this concept ST:D introduced, at least what little I know of it, makes sense as a cogent idea, and nothing about it works with quantum uncertainty and the concept of quantum universes.
No one suggested anything like that. All that was suggested was what was stated back in TNG. Everyone has a unique quantum signature, that extends down to the subatomic level, and connects them to the specific universe they were created in.
That much can be taken for granted and isn't at issue or relevant here.
Burnham has been in the future for a year beyond the Discovery, and has had no ill effects, but PG who has been in a different universe for however long she has been on the show had no ill effects until she travels through time. Spock who traveled through time and universes had no ill effects, but he never goes back, he dies there, and then what?
A. Burnham didn't travel between universes.
B. Spock made a significantly less extreme jump backwards. And still died fairly young, for a Vulcan, in the Kelvin timeline.
C. Phillipa only started having problems because of how long of a jump she made after having already crossed universes.
But this is the issue, there is some arbitrary line where you have no problems despite jumping time and universes and when you do. PG was in the prime universe for however long with no problems till she jumped time. Burnham jumped the same time with no problems after a year. Spock jumped shorter times and across universes with no problems. Why is the issue only with PG? Arbitrary plot device. And again, in spite of the nature of a biological creature to eat and replace their matter over time.
Why would your matter care what time period you were in? The matter that exists today has existed since the Big Bang. My arm is made up of star dust, dinosaur meat, and caveman TRIBBLE. It has been all those things among many others at some point in time. If that dinosaur came from another universe, then I would be having serious problems right now, if I were in the ST universe. Think about the implications of that.
Quantum harmonic resonances, and other technobable. Its like asking why would matter care if it was suddenly thrown into an anti-matter universe. Because its fundamentally different, and causes issues if it comes into contact. Its specifically mentioned by Data in Parallels that these quantum signatures are unchangeable by any means, and are the very foundation of existence itself.
An antimatter universe is not remotely appropriate for an analogy here. Quantum universes are not fundamentally different from one another. In fact they are more alike than not because the only difference is spawned from a single Shroedinger's cat event. In one universe the cat is dead, in the other it is alive because a particle either did or did not get released to ultimately kill the cat. Now from that point they may have many more divergent events, each spawning its own pair of universes, and end up being very different due to the butterfly effect but nothing about the fundamental constitution of their matter or energy is any different.
To try and illustrate this, consider an example. Someone is driving a car down the road. A cosmic ray has a quantum event where it impacts their radio. Now in universe 1 the ray impacts the electronics in just the right spot to short it out or cause static or something, in the other, it impacts harmlessly. Now the driver in universe 1, glances to the radio, taking eyes off the road just long enough to miss the car in front as it hits the brakes and an accident happens. Nothing of interest has happened in universe 2.
Now in universe 1, the driver is in critical condition. Another cosmic ray impacts. In universe 1-1 it happens to hit a critical cell, breaking the bonds of one of the molecules in it, killing it, pushing the body beyond its ability to recover. Ultimately the driver dies. In universe 1-2, the ray hits a cell already damaged from the accident, and the driver lives.
What ST:D wants us to believe is that transporting that driver's mother through time from universe 1, far into any of the futures of those other universes would kill her as the matter in her body rebels or something. Why? And what if she was from universe 0, the universe that existed before the quantum event that spawned universe 1 and 2? Can she exist in either of those universes?
Why does time even come into this? That doesn't even make sense now. If PG dies in the prime universe back in the original ST:D time, her molecules from the other universe are still there. They don't go anywhere. Bury her and she makes food for worms and bacteria and whatever else that feasts on her corpse. The sack of H2O that she is ends up going into the natural water cycle of whatever planet she's buried on. A thousand years later wherever her atoms and molecules end up starts destabilizing? You would have children dying because they ate corn that was watered with some of PG's mirror universe H2O molecules, and fertilized with some other long ago decayed remnants of her corpse.
The Defiant that made the MU what it is at some point will long since been scrapped, but whatever parts are melted down and put into a new ship are at some point going to completely fail and disappear back into their own universe, by this logic. And how many other ships, critters, and whatever else has been imported from another universe?
I don't know how it works anymore since it has nothing to do with quantum uncertainty, but we know universe crossings can happen all the time. While we are typically shown things crossing and then sent back, there's no reason they have to go back. So what happens in 1000 years when whatever time+space threshold has been reached that cause them to break down? Would my arm just disappear or have chunks missing from it because it happened to have large numbers of mirror molecules in it from a thousand years ago?
Probably, but that would be like over 1,000 years into the future. Its unlikely those bits of material would still be in use after such a long time. They are far more likely to have been destroyed entirely. And given that Yor was the only known person, before Phillipa, to cross both universes and time.... very little.
Why would the matter making up the Defiant ever be destroyed entirely? We don't even know of any process capable of destroying matter/energy, and I don't think ST has ever invented one. And no, M/AM or similar reactions do not destroy anything, they convert it to energy, E=mc^2.
Look this idea goes directly against the previously established and entirely cogent idea of quantum uncertainty, and fine they want to do that, great. It isn't well thought out though, not at all. It went from science fiction to plot magic.
Except it doesn't. This idea is entirely consistent with what Data said in the TNG episode Parallels regarding quantum signatures.
Again, having a quantum serial number is wildly different from whatever ST:D is calling this problem. Even if we take it as true that some sort of instability happens at an arbitrary time for no apparent reason, it completely ignores the fact that a biological creature is not comprised of the same molecules they were a year ago.
No, what you're suggesting is there is some magic force field around her cells that anything that goes in is changed from universe A to universe B, and if they leave they revert to the existing universe I guess. Nothing about that makes sense. Nothing about this concept ST:D introduced, at least what little I know of it, makes sense as a cogent idea, and nothing about it works with quantum uncertainty and the concept of quantum universes.
No one suggested anything like that. All that was suggested was what was stated back in TNG. Everyone has a unique quantum signature, that extends down to the subatomic level, and connects them to the specific universe they were created in.
Burnham has been in the future for a year beyond the Discovery, and has had no ill effects, but PG who has been in a different universe for however long she has been on the show had no ill effects until she travels through time. Spock who traveled through time and universes had no ill effects, but he never goes back, he dies there, and then what?
A. Burnham didn't travel between universes.
B. Spock made a significantly less extreme jump backwards. And still died fairly young, for a Vulcan, in the Kelvin timeline.
C. Phillipa only started having problems because of how long of a jump she made after having already crossed universes.
Why would your matter care what time period you were in? The matter that exists today has existed since the Big Bang. My arm is made up of star dust, dinosaur meat, and caveman TRIBBLE. It has been all those things among many others at some point in time. If that dinosaur came from another universe, then I would be having serious problems right now, if I were in the ST universe. Think about the implications of that.
Quantum harmonic resonances, and other technobable. Its like asking why would matter care if it was suddenly thrown into an anti-matter universe. Because its fundamentally different, and causes issues if it comes into contact. Its specifically mentioned by Data in Parallels that these quantum signatures are unchangeable by any means, and are the very foundation of existence itself.
The Defiant that made the MU what it is at some point will long since been scrapped, but whatever parts are melted down and put into a new ship are at some point going to completely fail and disappear back into their own universe, by this logic. And how many other ships, critters, and whatever else has been imported from another universe?
I don't know how it works anymore since it has nothing to do with quantum uncertainty, but we know universe crossings can happen all the time. While we are typically shown things crossing and then sent back, there's no reason they have to go back. So what happens in 1000 years when whatever time+space threshold has been reached that cause them to break down? Would my arm just disappear or have chunks missing from it because it happened to have large numbers of mirror molecules in it from a thousand years ago?
Probably, but that would be like over 1,000 years into the future. Its unlikely those bits of material would still be in use after such a long time. They are far more likely to have been destroyed entirely. And given that Yor was the only known person, before Phillipa, to cross both universes and time.... very little.
Look this idea goes directly against the previously established and entirely cogent idea of quantum uncertainty, and fine they want to do that, great. It isn't well thought out though, not at all. It went from science fiction to plot magic.
Except it doesn't. This idea is entirely consistent with what Data said in the TNG episode Parallels regarding quantum signatures.
There is nothing in any of the traditional Treks that indicate some weird mechanism that would drag molecules "back to their own time". And nothing that indicates that such a process would speed up depending on the distance of the time displacement either.
Braxton was trapped for three decades almost nine centuries in his past without his molecules getting pulled home. Georgio went not much further than that into her future and started having trouble within a few weeks or maybe months at most. That is a very steep curve so Picard, who travelled 3.77 BILLION years into the past should have gotten zapped before Q even opened his mouth in All Good Things. In fact, if anyone was going to get time whiplash it would have been Picard, but he didn't and neither did anyone else until DSC S3.
And again, Fox is right about the quantum stuff. In the wishy-washy way they are used in Trek "timeline" and "universe" are just words, on a quantum theory level they are not so easy to separate. That is especially true since details of universal laws can seemingly change even on "timelines", such as the fact that the grandfather (and possibly predestination) paradox(s) cannot exist in the Kelvin universe since any time travel just causes branches instead of paradoxes (though Parallels shows that it is probable that all of them cause the branching and paradox timeline changes are just an illusion in TOS and the others and they are really crossing between quantum timelines instead.
In fact, the "paradox level" that was giving Braxton's crew and Seven so much trouble could have been (unbeknownst to them) some kind of chronal energy potential artifact of the number of timeline split nodes they were tapped into at once or whatever.
There is nothing in any of the traditional Treks that indicate some weird mechanism that would drag molecules "back to their own time". And nothing that indicates that such a process would speed up depending on the distance of the time displacement either.
Braxton was trapped for three decades almost nine centuries in his past without his molecules getting pulled home. Georgio went not much further than that into her future and started having trouble within a few weeks or maybe months at most. That is a very steep curve so Picard, who travelled 3.77 BILLION years into the past should have gotten zapped before Q even opened his mouth in All Good Things. In fact, if anyone was going to get time whiplash it would have been Picard, but he didn't and neither did anyone else until DSC S3.
And again, Fox is right about the quantum stuff. In the wishy-washy way they are used in Trek "timeline" and "universe" are just words, on a quantum theory level they are not so easy to separate. That is especially true since details of universal laws can seemingly change even on "timelines", such as the fact that the grandfather (and possibly predestination) paradox(s) cannot exist in the Kelvin universe since any time travel just causes branches instead of paradoxes (though Parallels shows that it is probable that all of them cause the branching and paradox timeline changes are just an illusion in TOS and the others and they are really crossing between quantum timelines instead.
In fact, the "paradox level" that was giving Braxton's crew and Seven so much trouble could have been (unbeknownst to them) some kind of chronal energy potential artifact of the number of timeline split nodes they were tapped into at once or whatever.
A. Braxton didn't jump universes like Phillipa did, he only went back in time. He also suffered from extreme temporal psychosis due to it, which matches what Kovich said about time travel making people sick. You keep ignoring that Kovich specifically mentioned Phillipa is having issues due to jumping both through time, and across universes... probably because you know you don't actually have a real counter to it.
B. Picard was being moved around by Q, the closest thing to a literal god in the Star Trek universe. Q wouldn't let him die like that during the test. Same thing with Voyager going back to the Big Bang due to Quinn. Not to mention, that, once again, they didn't cross universes like Phillipa did. They only moved through time, and only very temporarily.
C. Your argument about timeline and universe is 100% headcanon, and contradicts actual Trek canon on the subject. Real world science doesn't mean anything in Star Trek, where timelines, and universes, have been treated as different things.
D. We already know paradoxes exist in the Kelvin timeline, since Enterprise happens before Nero's Incursion. Enterprise has Daniels, an agent of the Federation from the year 3050, go back in time to help Archer on his mission. Had he not done so, the Federation wouldn't exist in the first place, as Archer would have died without Daniels help. The entire existence of the Federation is a paradox. Not to mention other paradoxes like
The Assignment Earth paradox, where the Enterprise goes back in time, and helps Gary Seven create the timeline it originally came from.
The Future's End paradox, where Henry Starling ends up starting Earth's computer age using technology he got from a future Federation ship... which wouldn't have existed unless he started Earth's computer age in the first place.
Both of which happen both before, and after, the timeline split. Meaning they would still have to happen in the Kelvin timeline also. As without them the Kelvin timeline would have never gotten to the point it did before Nero's Incursion.
The Star Trek timeline, both Prime and Kelvin, is a series of nested paradoxes, each needing all the others to continue. Which is why its functionally impossible to actually change history in Star Trek, and any attempts to do so get erased, or mitigated. As we constantly see throughout Trek, and was hinted by both Annorax in "Year of Hell" and by Prime Spock in a line cut from the 2009 Trek movie, but retained in the novelization and comic book adaption.
Also the Kelvin timeline is a separate quantum universe, not just a timeline branch of the Prime universe. Kovich even specifically mentions that its another universe in Discovery(something originally stated by STO as well). So your entire argument about that is wrong also.
Once again, you make literally no effort to get anything right, and get everything wrong in the process.
A. Braxton may not have been suffering temporal phychosis, just the garden-variety kind. "Relativity" showed that he went nuts at about the same age, even when he was NOT trapped nine hundred years in the past. That strongly hints of bad brain wiring, a psychotic response to too much stress of any kind, not some magical temporal nonsense.
B. True, Q would not let him die of it, but it fits Q's sense of humor to let at least a little of it through to make things just a bit harder for Picard. I'll give this one to you though since it is a bit of an outlier.
C. You are wrong about that, Roddenberry actually used a lot of the real scientific theories of the time (or at least the pop-sci version of them) when creating Star Trek. Some of the theories, like the chromotherapy lights, turned out to be wrong and they had to pull a few things out of their backsides to solve production problems (like inventing transporters because the expense of showing the ship or even a shuttle landing every week would have been too much of a budget drain, and coming up with different weapons than the needlers that Roddenberry was going to use because NBC did not want anything to do with drugs), but at least they tried to keep it as scientifically reasonable as possible while still meeting the needs of the story.
So real world science DID mean something though that aspect has degraded somewhat as first the Paramount movie division was put in the drivers seat then other creative teams with other ideas produced the following series (and finally CBS drove it over the cliff into pure fairytale land).
D. Actually we don't know that any of those paradoxes happened in Kelvin because they never show them and the creators specifically said no paradox, time only branches period. The way Star Trek handles it, paradox can be thought of a little like a DOC file that stores edits as well as the main text, it is reasonable to assume that Kelvin is like a copy-paste where only the main text is copied and pasted into a new document (or in this case timeline) and the edit history is not.
Gary Seven probably just completed his mission without interference which would have produced the same results. Sure, the warhead might have exploded slightly sooner, or Roberta Lincoln could have gotten suspicious on her own and hit him over the head by surprise like she did in TOS and delayed the detonation to the same altitude as Kirk and company did.
And we don't know that the events in ENT played out exactly the same way in the Kelvin timeline as it did in ENT, especially in light of the fact that one of the creators mentioned that the branch sent out ripples in both directions. We are told in the TOS episode Metamorphosis that Cochrane was from the Alpha Centauri colony and invented warp drive there, not an old missile silo in Montana, it is possible that the Kelvin ripples were part of the events that set the stage for First Contact to go down as it did on Earth instead if some of those ripples leaked over into the original timeline before separation was complete.
The Futures End paradox could have been resolved in a number of ways, possibly from someone finding advanced tech from some other incursion, including possible devices Gary Seven's predecessors may have had in their possession at the time of their fatal car wreck which we already know officially happened. Henry Starling could have just as easily found a crashed Orion, Andorian, Nausican, or any number of other alien race's ship or shuttle and got LSI semiconductor tech out of it.
For that matter, if he was hiking around near Carbon Creek instead of further west he could have found something the Vulcans missed in their cleanup of T'Pol's great grandmother's ship back in 1957, it would not take much if he realized what he was looking at. It is even possible that Mestral would see some need to introduce the idea of large scale integrated circuits, the same way that T'Mir introduced Velcro.
On top of that, in Space Seed we are shown what the technology of the 1990s was like without the Starling paradox. According to dialog the ships used transistors (and probably low to medium scale integrated circuits since they existed already in the 1960s) which is not as high tech, but on the other hand their biological and nuclear drive tech like genetics, cryogenics, and early impulse drive tech were more advanced than what was shown in Futures End. The Federation did not depend on Starling's "breakthroughs", it just shifted the focus of research a little bit and Cochrane would have invented the human version of warp drive at Alpha Centauri on the TOS schedule instead of Montana as happened in First Contact.
So yes, those paradoxes happened before the split but would not have to have happened after it as the past got copy-pasted or whatever.
And come to think of it, those paradoxes could have even happened exactly the same way as they did in the episodes anyway without violating the no-grandfather-paradox rule of the Kelvin "timeline" since the downstream ("future") end of those temporal incursions happened in the original timeline which would make them a misaligned crosstime incursion from the point of view of the Kelvin universal rules, not the impossible-in-Kelvin linear time fold along the same timeline. That would make the formerly paradox events just events.
Its explicitly stated Braxton had Temporal Psychosis.
Trek has used SOME real world science yes, but the overall universe its explicitly not based on real world science. TOS was easily the most "magical" of all the Trek shows, with them running into literal gods(Apollo), or god like beings, whose powers could only be described as magic, far more often then any other Trek series. Not to mention the TAS episode where they literally run into Satan in a parallel universe of magic people. TNG and later shows had their god-like beings for sure, but but they spent far more time trying to give a scientific reason behind it compered to TOS. And brought the universe down from the fairy-tale land of TOS, into something more "realistic" in the process. Discovery puts more effort in giving scientific explanations behind things then even many TNG/DS9/VOY episodes did.
The Kelvin film makers never said anything about no paradoxes. And other Trek, both before and after the Kelvin films contradicts that even if they did.
Gary Seven wouldn't have been able to complete his mission without the Enterprise's help, something even he admits to in the end of the episode, and it made clear by the episode itself.
Metamorphosis says
KIRK: Zefram Cochrane of Alpha Centuri, the discoverer of the space warp?
Zefram Cochrane could have moved to Alpha Centuri before he left on his final trip, and became known as being "of there" as a result. Its also never stated he invented warp travel there.
Sure, He could have found something different in Future's End, but nothing suggests he did. So, as far as canon goes, it happened the same way as in the Prime Timeline. The fact that Yor is using TNG uniforms, and is from the Kelvin timeline, suggests that the timeline went back to being close to the Prime one later on down the line. Which would fit with Annorax's comment about time fighting back against attempts to change it, and Prime Spock's comment about time attempting to repair the damage caused by Nero's incursion.
Carbon Creek happens a decade before Future's End. And it happens in Pennsylvania rather then California.
Trying to take into account the long since retconed level of tech from TOS is something of a fool's gambit at this point. What we see in TOS is the same timeline created by Sterling's use of future tech. There is no difference between the two. Any TOSisms in regards to primitive tech in episodes like Space Seed is an artifact since they had no idea what someone would do in Voyager decades later.
Also, again, the Kelvin Timeline is another Quantum Universe, not a simple timeline divergence. I'm sure you are going to keep ignoring that fact, much like you have Phillipa's condition being caused by both time and universe hopping, because its inconvenient for you. But the argument of "those paradoxes got copied over" doesn't work.
True, they did say Braxton had temporal psychosis, but diagnosis can be wrong. That or he was just too fragile for the time cop division since he goes crazy whether he is trapped in the past or not.
And calling TOS "the most magical" because of "god like beings" is quite amusing in light of the fact that TNG and most of the later series featured even more of them than TOS did, and Q (the hands down top of the heap in that category) was even a frequently recurring character. The Organians, the top contenders from TOS, are barely second string compared to the Q.
And in TOS most of the "magic" using types turned out to actually be using technology (as in Clark's third law), like for instance Apollo with his ultra-high-tech "temple" and an implant to control it. The exceptions were a few ascended species who developed beyond the need for a physical form (as well as a few who were almost there but not quite) like the Orgainians and the Thasians but they were not unique to TOS either.
The reason Roddenberry even had those "god like beings" was that he was a fan of the old trickster style folktales, where the protagonist is up against someone that they cannot just ignore or pound the tribble out of so they have to get clever and trick the antagonist instead. Which brings up the biggest difference between traditional Trek and NuTrek, the fact that the new stuff most often goes by the action movie motto of "if the plan doesn't work the first time, use a bigger hammer".
And what was Roddenberrys first rule of Star Trek? That the heroes are never to win using nothing but brute force...
As for the Kelvin thing, weren't you listening to the interviews during the runup hype for the movie? Ironically, it was Kurtzman in his role of official public mouthpiece for the project who said that time worked differently in the new branch and travelling back to change things did not change one's own timeline, it just caused another branch.
I don't remember offhand if he used the exact word "paradox" but whether he did or not is irrelevant since what he described was that paradoxes could not exist there (just branches). I don't know if the idea was Kurtzman's or Orci's (I suspect the latter though considering DSC is drowning in linear time travel) but that was the official word when the movie came out.
No, Gary Seven did nothing of the sort, what he said was:
SEVEN: And in spite of the accidental interference with history by the Earth ship from the future, the mission was completed.
SPOCK: Correction, Mister Seven. It appears we did not interfere. The Enterprise was part of what was supposed to happen on this day in 1968.
(Suddenly Isis has transformed from a black cat to a dark haired woman in a black outfit.)
KIRK: Our record tapes show, although not generally revealed, that on this date, a malfunctioning suborbital warhead was exploded exactly one hundred and four miles above the Earth.
SEVEN: So everything happened the way it was supposed to.
And if you watch the episode you will find that his mission was to make the platform explode near the minimum safe distance of 100 miles, the four mile difference is irrelevant (and if it had been exactly 100 miles it might have looked suspicious anyway).
Sure Cochrane could in theory have been born on earth and moved to Alpha Centauri after inventing warp drive, but that is not the impression in the show. Also, why would he be thought of as from Alpha Centauri if his great discovery was made on Earth when he was pushing middle age? And there are other discrepancies, like the TOS version disappeared in 2117 while the dedication recording in Broken Bow has him still on Earth as late as 2119.
Also, TOS makes it obvious that impulse drive was invented well before warp drive, yet First Contact seems to have it the other way around, or that they were invented about the same time.
As I pointed out in my previous comment, as far as pre-split paradoxes are concerned they could have actually happened exactly as depicted without violating the no-paradox thing since the incursions came from PRIME, not the post-split KELVIN timeline. That means they were crosstime incursions as far as the temporal mechanics of the Kelvin "timeline" is concerned, they would not trigger a new branch since they are not a paradox like they would have been if, say the Kelvin version of the Voyager (assuming there is one in the future) went back instead of the prime one.
I know were and when Carbon Creek was set, however they have already established that advanced technology can sit out in the elements or in a cave or whatever for centuries and still function, a decade in the open would probably not be a problem. And there is still the possibility that Mistral found it necessary to intervene like I said before, even though neither of those would have to happen because of the crosstime factor making what were paradoxes on the prime timeline not paradoxes in Kelvin.
As for the "long retconned" thing, that just exists in your head. Until a show goes back and explicitly changes something the original remains, and they never did that. Almost everything they show that contradicts TOS, like the stuff in Futures End and First Contact, have been the result of time travel paradoxes. Paradox is not a retcon since it makes it a quantum situation where both versions are true in a weird sort of way.
You do realize that when Fox pointed out that what they sloppily call "timeline" and "universe" are just quantum universes you were arguing against that idea don't you? If you have come around to accepting the idea that it is all quantum phenomena you should see that the arbitrary difference DSC tries to make does not make sense (and yes, DSC could probably fix it with clever writing even at this late date, but that seems to be beyond them judging from their track record, and they will probably just leave it as fairytale magic).
Some sort of galaxy wide, undetectable shockwave that doesn't obey the inverse square law, which has some mystical connection with dilithium that has magic properties we've never seen it have before, that kills millions if not billions and destroys the Federation and other interstellar civilizations, all because some kid got a one in quadrillion magic mutation and lost his mother, is in no way similar or even on the same level as anything in TOS.
It is contrived and absurd. It totally obliterates the suspension of disbelief.
Some sort of galaxy wide, undetectable shockwave that doesn't obey the inverse square law, which has some mystical connection with dilithium that has magic properties we've never seen it have before, that kills millions if not billions and destroys the Federation and other interstellar civilizations, all because some kid got a one in quadrillion magic mutation and lost his mother, is in no way similar or even on the same level as anything in TOS.
It is contrived and absurd. It totally obliterates the suspension of disbelief.
Not nearly so realistic as, say, a supernova shockwave that obeys neither the inverse square law nor the speed of light, which destroys an entire interstellar empire because it manages to wipe out one planet, and which threatens at least a quarter of the galaxy but can all be sucked into precisely one singularity...
...or a barrier of energy, undetectable by even the Federation sensors of the 23rd century, which surrounds our entire galaxy and prevents anything from leaving, while also turning humans (and only humans) into psychic powerhouses...
...or a godlike being living in the center of the galaxy, a region noted for its supermassive black hole and unstable stars, which is sequestered there by a similar undetectable barrier, which can traverse space under its own power but still needs a ship for inadequately explored reasons...
...or - but let's be honest, if we're going to pick apart all the times Trek ignored physics and realism for the sake of a story, we'll be here all day, and I've got things to do.
Some sort of galaxy wide, undetectable shockwave that doesn't obey the inverse square law, which has some mystical connection with dilithium that has magic properties we've never seen it have before, that kills millions if not billions and destroys the Federation and other interstellar civilizations, all because some kid got a one in quadrillion magic mutation and lost his mother, is in no way similar or even on the same level as anything in TOS.
It is contrived and absurd. It totally obliterates the suspension of disbelief.
Not nearly so realistic as, say, a supernova shockwave that obeys neither the inverse square law nor the speed of light, which destroys an entire interstellar empire because it manages to wipe out one planet, and which threatens at least a quarter of the galaxy but can all be sucked into precisely one singularity...
...or a barrier of energy, undetectable by even the Federation sensors of the 23rd century, which surrounds our entire galaxy and prevents anything from leaving, while also turning humans (and only humans) into psychic powerhouses...
...or a godlike being living in the center of the galaxy, a region noted for its supermassive black hole and unstable stars, which is sequestered there by a similar undetectable barrier, which can traverse space under its own power but still needs a ship for inadequately explored reasons...
...or - but let's be honest, if we're going to pick apart all the times Trek ignored physics and realism for the sake of a story, we'll be here all day, and I've got things to do.
True, though notice how the more recent ones are so much worse than the older ones. "Center of the galaxy" could have actually meant as close as they could get to it instead of the literal center for instance.
And the really neat thing with the TOS one is that the barrier seems to have been more localized to that one side of the galaxy directly between the Milky Way and Andromeda, which by chance has extra meaning nowadays since it could be spun as an effect related to the collision between the two galaxies that scientists recently discovered was happening.
Both the TOS Enterprise and the TNG one exit the galaxy in other directions without encountering the barrier, though admittedly neither one did it in normal warp drive. The TOS one made a sort of hyperspace jump that the Medusan ambassador had to navigate them back from, and the TNG one rode the Traveller's modifications out to one of the Magellanic cloud galaxies. The only times they hit the barrier in TOS was in the second pilot and when the Kelvans took over the ship and modified it to increase speed and survive the barrier.
That brings up a nice precedent for the TOS, Kelvin, and DSC era ships btw, the Kelvans in By Any Other Name boosted the Enterprise to TNG-scale 9.9 using only the resources available on the Enterprise and whatever they could scavenge from their life pods and an uninhabited world, in their attempt to return to the Andromeda galaxy. And not just for a few minutes, the conversion that took only a day or so at most was a solid enough upgrade to hold for at least the three centuries the trip would take, which makes the old movie era ships they pull out of mothballs and whatnot quite feasible for STO era service with very little fuss.
The most unrealistic part of that episode was why didn't the Federation trade something for the information on how to do that themselves. Of course, it is possible that Scotty could have noticed a few things and worked them into the improved engines and shields of the movie era.
Praxis was where it got really stupid, though they could have done it slightly different to make it more obvious that it was a subspace explosion (possibly trilithium waste going critical, judging by a Voyager plot point) rather than a material-dimension one (depending on novelizations to clean up screenwriter's mess is unconscionable laziness). They could have used most of the same action as in the teaser but have space look completely normal until Sulu calls for a subspace view on the mainscreen (instead of just an outside view) or something along those lines. Since so much Trek technology uses subspace transtators that shockwave could have had little or no effect on normalspace stuff but ships and other tech could be hard hit like shown and crash the Klingon economy like it did.
Hobus was obviously a misunderstanding of the Praxis subspace explosion taken to idiotic levels, especially the rehash of it in PIC. It is only surpassed in unbelievability by the magic tantrum in DSC s3.
Discovery was the first series in over 50 years to jetison the entire TOS aesthetic and tell more "realistic" stories, only to outdo the craziest things in it.
So...baby X-Men Kelpian wannabe throws a wobbler and billions die, the Federation falls and an already inert moderator element, becomes...more inert? and somehow all goes boom far far faster than Hobus. Which took so long to threaten Romulus the VSA had time to build a ship and send Spock in the time from it exploding to hitting ch'Rihan, or if you believe Picard, months to cross about 1 AU from Eisn now.
And they had to take time off all of this to have a two parter where the Guardian of Forever forgives Space Hitler, who slew hundreds of billions of sapients, kept treating it as causually as using fly spray, kept telling the morons around her she'd gladly gut them and keep them as trophies, and meant it, a bigger monster than Control was going to become, and sends her back in time to do more evil.
I just...who hit their head and how hard to come up with more horse hucky than they shovelled off the London streets in a decade in just a few episdoes.
And Vance is marginally less obvious as a shady villain than Lorca, but he's not above board, someone is helping the Chain. And isn't is super super convinient that Zora only assets her intelligence to chose movies or help space Hitler, she's becoming quite the troll. Maybe the crew abandon her to save the Federation.
True, though notice how the more recent ones are so much worse than the older ones.
The older ones are significantly worse because they make no attempt to explain it with science. They just go "it just works" and expect the viewer to take that at face value. Discovery at least puts in minimum levels of technobabble to explain it with some sort of science. At least science as it exists in Trek that allows for things like Q, Gary Mitchell, Charles Evans, The Traveler, etc. to exist, and do what they do.
And the really neat thing with the TOS one is that the barrier seems to have been more localized to that one side of the galaxy
No it doesn't. At no point in TOS do they even imply its a localized phenomena. And the various maps produced, such as the star Trek Star Charts, put it around the whole galaxy. Hence the Galactic Barrier, and not just a barrier.
Both the TOS Enterprise and the TNG one exit the galaxy in other directions without encountering the barrier
Except in the TOS episode "Is There in Truth No Beauty?" they do encounter, and mention, the barrier. And in TNG, at the speed they were going due to The Travelers powers, they wouldn't have had time to even notice it.
That brings up a nice precedent for the TOS, Kelvin, and DSC era ships btw, the Kelvans in By Any Other Name boosted the Enterprise to TNG-scale 9.9
Also incorrect. In TNG, Geordi says that it would take, at maximum warp of a Galaxy class ship, 300 years to get back. A Galaxy Class, in early TNG, was only rated to go up to Warp 9.2 normally, and if they pushed it into overdrive Warp 9.6. It could theoretically go up to Warp 9.8, but there was a chance of that destroying the ship. Even if Geordi was talking about going speeds that would destroy the ship, which is unlikely, it would still only be warp 9.8. More likely, it was around Warp 9.2.
The most unrealistic part of that episode was why didn't the Federation trade something for the information on how to do that themselves
Same reason why we never see any development on the tech from the Shore Leave Planet that can make thoughts into reality, or the android duplicator from Exo III, or the spatial projection tech that could push ships 900LY in seconds on the Kalandan Outpost, or the anti-grav tech from Stratos...
Praxis was where it got really stupid, though they could have done it slightly different to make it more obvious that it was a subspace explosion (possibly trilithium waste going critical, judging by a Voyager plot point) rather than a material-dimension one (depending on novelizations to clean up screenwriter's mess is unconscionable laziness).
Well it was both a subspace explosion and a material one, hence the Excelsior getting affected by it. And it was almost certainly a dilthium explosion.
Discovery was the first series in over 50 years to jetison the entire TOS aesthetic and tell more "realistic" stories, only to outdo the craziest things in it.
TMP says hi.
While it is true that Roddenberry hated excessive technobabble like what is used in TMP and later they did use some, but only where absolutely necessary and only enough to clue in the audience to what is going on without browbeating them with exposition. That is why Star Trek has (or at least had) the reputation of requiring to much thought, and it is a style I prefer over the CSI procedural style technobabble of TNG.
If you prefer the TV equivalent of the 1200 word essay on every technical plot point (what Heinlein called the "chickenplucker essay") style then the new stuff is right for you and somewhat tedious to me. And no, that is not an insult, it is just a matter of preferences, and for me at least it is yet another reason I am not wild about CBS Trek.
The only times in TOS that they mentioned the galactic barrier directly and unequivocally were the second pilot and By Any Other Name. The use of the word "barrier" in Is There in Truth No Beauty? could have been a reference to it, sure, but it is just as likely to be some other barrier such as the hyperspace transition point they were looking for. On the other hand, Enterprise was mostly on that side of the Federation in that season, so they could very well have shot past it in hyperspace or whatever if they were pointed at the edge of the galaxy on that side when the drive went bonkers whether it is around the whole galaxy or just the side being impacted by Andromeda.
As for the TNG speed reference, Geordie was probably rounding up to emergency speed as a point of emphasis, TNG scale warp factor 9.9 would be a three hundred and five year trip, but at 9.5 it would take close to eight hundred years. At 9.8 it would be about 450 years more or less and the curve is so steep at that point that that much error in a crude off the cuff estimate is not unreasonable.
Also, it would probably take more than just going fast in warp to penetrate the barrier, though it is possible that the Traveler bumped them up into hyperspace the same way the TOS Enterprise did, and took them out (at least more or less anyway) at the other end. That episode was an adaptation of The Wounded Sky and it is more or less what happened there (though it was an experimental drive instead of the Traveler (who was invented for the episode) that caused it).
Your point about them not picking up tech from other possible opportunities is true enough and always a sore point in series science fiction, though the antigrav tech Stratos used was simply an impressive engineering feat using technology the Federation already had. In fact they show antigrav lifters in several episodes, the most noticeable was in Obsession when they set the trap for the cloud creature. TNG even made it more mundane when they redefined impulse drive as working via "gravity impulse".
As for Praxis, it is true that there was both subspace and normalspace aspects, but it was the subspace wave that bounced the Excelsior around, not the physical one which devastated half of Qo'noS (though the subspace shockwave probably fried most of the tech on the planet too). The novelization clears up some of the questions though it is not exactly precise either (and as I said depending on a novel to explain things in a movie or series is just unforgivably bad no matter how you look at it).
As for what exactly caused the explosion they never say in either source, but Voyager already established that were you find dilithium you also usually have trilithium (which under the right conditions forms from dilithium deposits) to contend with, and trilithium is insanely dangerous unless you are very, very careful with it and can produce planet-wrecking explosions if there is enough of it around. Dilithium has been said to pick up and amplify charges from the environment so it is detectable even though it is not an energy source in of itself (sort of more like a capacitor than a battery).
The aesthetic change was even earlier than TNG actually, it started way back in the 2270s when they moved away from the style that was popular from at least as early as the 2240s and '50s and probably died out in the mid to late 2260s (the same way that the real world googie style TOS was based on started somewhere around the very late 1940s to early 1950s but died out in the late 1960s).
Some sort of galaxy wide, undetectable shockwave that doesn't obey the inverse square law, which has some mystical connection with dilithium that has magic properties we've never seen it have before, that kills millions if not billions and destroys the Federation and other interstellar civilizations, all because some kid got a one in quadrillion magic mutation and lost his mother, is in no way similar or even on the same level as anything in TOS.
It is contrived and absurd. It totally obliterates the suspension of disbelief.
Not nearly so realistic as, say, a supernova shockwave that obeys neither the inverse square law nor the speed of light, which destroys an entire interstellar empire because it manages to wipe out one planet, and which threatens at least a quarter of the galaxy but can all be sucked into precisely one singularity...
...or a barrier of energy, undetectable by even the Federation sensors of the 23rd century, which surrounds our entire galaxy and prevents anything from leaving, while also turning humans (and only humans) into psychic powerhouses...
...or a godlike being living in the center of the galaxy, a region noted for its supermassive black hole and unstable stars, which is sequestered there by a similar undetectable barrier, which can traverse space under its own power but still needs a ship for inadequately explored reasons...
...or - but let's be honest, if we're going to pick apart all the times Trek ignored physics and realism for the sake of a story, we'll be here all day, and I've got things to do.
Yes. Bad writing is bad writing. The difference here is orders of magnitude worse than some silly barriers.
It is actually really plausible to imagine someone trapped an evil entity behind a barrier at the center of the galaxy, whoever put it there hoping time would destroy it in a black hole. Now how they portrayed it all was rather silly.
The Hobus supernova or whatever it was in ST2009 remains unexplained in canon and still totally ludicrous, and has led to such terrible nonsense as ST:Picard.
The fact is, though, they are orders of magnitude less bad than a child crying destroying millions if not billions of lives because dilithium is now a magical psychic amplifier or something. "I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced."
Something like those barriers lasted for one episode or a movie and is never really explored again. It is forgotten until someone wants to figure out a way to breach or explore them and then they can be rewritten into something better, and it can be overlooked as they explore other things. Something like the Burn, however, is a massive, major plot point in this serialized show, and dramatically altered the galaxy if not the universe, and not in a way that can just be retroactively fixed without illegal time travel.
But I don't understand your point. We all know Trek has bad and goofy writing in the past. Are you suggesting that it should not be criticized?
While it is true that Roddenberry hated excessive technobabble like what is used in TMP and later they did use some, but only where absolutely necessary and only enough to clue in the audience to what is going on without browbeating them with exposition. That is why Star Trek has (or at least had) the reputation of requiring to much thought, and it is a style I prefer over the CSI procedural style technobabble of TNG.
This pretty much sums up the problem with your own mindset on things. Star Trek requiring thought would imply it was deep, and complex. That the stories has a lot of hidden meanings, or subtle undertones. What you just descried is the exact opposite of that. What you just described is a show that put in so little effort in trying make itself make sense, or follow any sort of internal logic, that people had to make up their own explanations to try to rationalize what was going on, even if they had seen previous episodes. That isn't thinking, that's just making things up to excuse poor writing. Aka fanon, aka headcanon. Those two things are not the same.
As usual you jumped to conclusions and got it totally backwards. Putting what I said in different words, Roddenberry believed that the audience was not so stupid that they needed to be spoon-fed the kind of long explanations that TNG got bogged down in so often. In other words, if it is written in an intelligent manner then the viewers should just get it from context and not not need a long explanation of the details unless it is extraordinarily convoluted and essential to the plot.
Usually a few words will do the trick, though Hollywood seems convinced that viewers are all idiots that need it all simplified and spelled out in dialog. A good example of Hollywood's weird belief on that is the Lost in Space movie where they turned the Jupiter 2 into a Star Wars thruster style ship because they were convinced that the viewers would not be able to understand the helicopter-like tipping movements the saucer would do on its magnetogravitic field effect drive.
If you prefer the TV equivalent of the 1200 word essay
This is a straw man. Asking for a basic, one or two line, technobabble explanation isn't asking for an essay.
They usually beat around the bush with technobabble a lot longer than one or two lines. Many times they had a scene in the conference room where they would flog the technobabble horse to death for instance.
The use of the word "barrier" in Is There in Truth No Beauty? could have been a reference to it, sure, but it is just as likely to be some other barrier such as the hyperspace transition point they were looking for.
Except no, it isn't just as likely to be something like that since at no point in the episode itself, or in previous episodes, did they ever mention, or imply, the existence of any other kind of barrier. That literally isn't how writing works at all.
What "other barriers"? I pointed out that the use of the word "barrier" in that episode did not necessarily refer to the galactic barrier they hit in the second pilot. They could have been talking about something else, including the interface between hyperspace and normalspace.
TNG scale warp factor 9.9 would be a three hundred and five year trip
This is incorrect as TNG had no actual set warp speed ratio. It was made up on a per episode basis, and contradicted itself episode to episode, and sometimes within the episode itself. The closest TNG had to an actual warp speed scale was from the TNG Technical Manual, which it self not canon by default, but also contradicted in the shows themselves, making it further not canon.
They actually used a formula for warp speed calculations, you can see the formula and some charts made from it on the Memory Alpha wiki using that official, straight-from-Paramount, formula or even use warp speed calculators that use that formula on other sites. You like to accuse others of using "head canon" and yet you are making things up yourself with your nonsense about TNG not having a warp speed formula (they did have a few errors in a few episodes, but errors are not making it up on an episode by episode basis like you claim).
As for Praxis, it is true that there was both subspace and normalspace aspects, but it was the subspace wave that bounced the Excelsior around, not the physical one which devastated half of Qo'noS
Except thats blatantly contradicted by whats seen on screen, where a real space shock wave hit the Excelsior, which it itself in real space at the time. Also, the shockwave didn't devastate half of Qo'nos, it dumped a lot of stuff into the planet's ozone layer, which caused oxygen depletion.
So you actually think the vacuum of regular space formed a faster-than-light tidal wave to shake up Excelsior? Ridiculous, especially in light of the fact that the people who made the movie explained it as a subspace shockwave. The Memory Alpha wiki agrees with you about the lack of blast damage to Qo'noS, so apparently the realspace part of the explosion was surprisingly wimpy considering the extreme amount of damage the moon shows.
As for what exactly caused the explosion they never say in either source, but Voyager already established that were you find dilithium you also usually have trilithium
Voyager didn't exist at the time of the Praxis explosion. The explosion couldn't have been caused by something no one had thought of for the series yet.
No, but it could have been fixed in Voyager after everyone and their dog pointed out to Paramount that dilithium was always used as an energy regulator in matter-antimatter reactions, not an energy source itself. The evidence is good enough to make the the speculation that trilithium was the culprit reasonable since TNG, DS9, and VOY all mentioned at one point or another that trilithium was the dangerous explosive form, not dilithium (though Voyager had the last, and most in-depth, word on it).
Firstly: Star Trek has always had weird and crazy Sci-Fi elements to it, like how in the Dominion War, Captain Sisko asked for a miracle from the aliens that live in the Wormhole and they "destroyed" an entire fleet of Dominion ships in a blink of an eye, or the dozens of God like beings that play around with the galaxy like a fidget spinner, or literally any of the Trek technology like the Universal Translator or the Transporter to name just two of the many examples, while Star Trek does include some realism, there's a reason it a Science Fiction show, and that's great, I personally like that Star Trek can come up with imaginative aliens, worlds, phenomenons and scenarios.
And secondly: not only do I like that the Burn was indeed cause by an unforeseeable accident rather than anything malicious, but that it seems to be building up to Captain Saru, Doctor Culber, and Adira Tal preventing the Burn from happening again through helping Su'Kal with facing his demons and bring him back to the real world, connecting with him on an emotional level rather than spouting technobabble at the problem, that's what I personally don't like which was a major issue in Star Trek Voyager, if Star Trek is going to have crazy science, don't spend half an episode trying to justify it with equally made up science sounding words, and then not show us the crazy science in action.
And the reveal of Su'Ka and his plight continues to play into season threes overall theme of reconnecting with people that are separated and bringing them together.
"I think, when one has been angry for a very long time, one gets used to it. And it becomes comfortable like…like old leather. And finally… it becomes so familiar that one can't remember feeling any other way."
- Jean-Luc Picard
Comments
Just like there are hundreds of thousands of universes parallel to the Prime Universe in Parallels, there could be just as many Mirror Universes. However, this is the Guardian of Forever that required Kirk and Spock to go back in time to the 20th Century to stop Bones from saving a woman that would prevent the US from entering WW2 or else be stuck in a timeline where the Federation never existed. Also, the Guardian of Forever was forced into hiding to prevent some people from using it to erase their enemies from existence. So unless the Guardian of Forever intentionally sent Georgiou into an universe parallel to the Mirror Universe which we have not seen it exhibit those powers before, then Georgiou was sent into her past which created a new Mirror Universe timeline.
Okay, that's a little weird, but at least they used it again.
No, what you're suggesting is there is some magic force field around her cells that anything that goes in is changed from universe A to universe B, and if they leave they revert to the existing universe I guess. Nothing about that makes sense. Nothing about this concept ST:D introduced, at least what little I know of it, makes sense as a cogent idea, and nothing about it works with quantum uncertainty and the concept of quantum universes.
Burnham has been in the future for a year beyond the Discovery, and has had no ill effects, but PG who has been in a different universe for however long she has been on the show had no ill effects until she travels through time. Spock who traveled through time and universes had no ill effects, but he never goes back, he dies there, and then what?
Why would your matter care what time period you were in? The matter that exists today has existed since the Big Bang. My arm is made up of star dust, dinosaur meat, and caveman TRIBBLE. It has been all those things among many others at some point in time. If that dinosaur came from another universe, then I would be having serious problems right now, if I were in the ST universe. Think about the implications of that.
The Defiant that made the MU what it is at some point will long since been scrapped, but whatever parts are melted down and put into a new ship are at some point going to completely fail and disappear back into their own universe, by this logic. And how many other ships, critters, and whatever else has been imported from another universe?
I don't know how it works anymore since it has nothing to do with quantum uncertainty, but we know universe crossings can happen all the time. While we are typically shown things crossing and then sent back, there's no reason they have to go back. So what happens in 1000 years when whatever time+space threshold has been reached that cause them to break down? Would my arm just disappear or have chunks missing from it because it happened to have large numbers of mirror molecules in it from a thousand years ago?
Look this idea goes directly against the previously established and entirely cogent idea of quantum uncertainty, and fine they want to do that, great. It isn't well thought out though, not at all. It went from science fiction to plot magic.
l don't know.
l really don't know what l'm about to say, except l have a feeling about it.
That l must repeat the words that come without my knowledge.'
That much can be taken for granted and isn't at issue or relevant here.
But this is the issue, there is some arbitrary line where you have no problems despite jumping time and universes and when you do. PG was in the prime universe for however long with no problems till she jumped time. Burnham jumped the same time with no problems after a year. Spock jumped shorter times and across universes with no problems. Why is the issue only with PG? Arbitrary plot device. And again, in spite of the nature of a biological creature to eat and replace their matter over time.
An antimatter universe is not remotely appropriate for an analogy here. Quantum universes are not fundamentally different from one another. In fact they are more alike than not because the only difference is spawned from a single Shroedinger's cat event. In one universe the cat is dead, in the other it is alive because a particle either did or did not get released to ultimately kill the cat. Now from that point they may have many more divergent events, each spawning its own pair of universes, and end up being very different due to the butterfly effect but nothing about the fundamental constitution of their matter or energy is any different.
To try and illustrate this, consider an example. Someone is driving a car down the road. A cosmic ray has a quantum event where it impacts their radio. Now in universe 1 the ray impacts the electronics in just the right spot to short it out or cause static or something, in the other, it impacts harmlessly. Now the driver in universe 1, glances to the radio, taking eyes off the road just long enough to miss the car in front as it hits the brakes and an accident happens. Nothing of interest has happened in universe 2.
Now in universe 1, the driver is in critical condition. Another cosmic ray impacts. In universe 1-1 it happens to hit a critical cell, breaking the bonds of one of the molecules in it, killing it, pushing the body beyond its ability to recover. Ultimately the driver dies. In universe 1-2, the ray hits a cell already damaged from the accident, and the driver lives.
What ST:D wants us to believe is that transporting that driver's mother through time from universe 1, far into any of the futures of those other universes would kill her as the matter in her body rebels or something. Why? And what if she was from universe 0, the universe that existed before the quantum event that spawned universe 1 and 2? Can she exist in either of those universes?
Why does time even come into this? That doesn't even make sense now. If PG dies in the prime universe back in the original ST:D time, her molecules from the other universe are still there. They don't go anywhere. Bury her and she makes food for worms and bacteria and whatever else that feasts on her corpse. The sack of H2O that she is ends up going into the natural water cycle of whatever planet she's buried on. A thousand years later wherever her atoms and molecules end up starts destabilizing? You would have children dying because they ate corn that was watered with some of PG's mirror universe H2O molecules, and fertilized with some other long ago decayed remnants of her corpse.
Why would the matter making up the Defiant ever be destroyed entirely? We don't even know of any process capable of destroying matter/energy, and I don't think ST has ever invented one. And no, M/AM or similar reactions do not destroy anything, they convert it to energy, E=mc^2.
Again, having a quantum serial number is wildly different from whatever ST:D is calling this problem. Even if we take it as true that some sort of instability happens at an arbitrary time for no apparent reason, it completely ignores the fact that a biological creature is not comprised of the same molecules they were a year ago.
There is nothing in any of the traditional Treks that indicate some weird mechanism that would drag molecules "back to their own time". And nothing that indicates that such a process would speed up depending on the distance of the time displacement either.
Braxton was trapped for three decades almost nine centuries in his past without his molecules getting pulled home. Georgio went not much further than that into her future and started having trouble within a few weeks or maybe months at most. That is a very steep curve so Picard, who travelled 3.77 BILLION years into the past should have gotten zapped before Q even opened his mouth in All Good Things. In fact, if anyone was going to get time whiplash it would have been Picard, but he didn't and neither did anyone else until DSC S3.
And again, Fox is right about the quantum stuff. In the wishy-washy way they are used in Trek "timeline" and "universe" are just words, on a quantum theory level they are not so easy to separate. That is especially true since details of universal laws can seemingly change even on "timelines", such as the fact that the grandfather (and possibly predestination) paradox(s) cannot exist in the Kelvin universe since any time travel just causes branches instead of paradoxes (though Parallels shows that it is probable that all of them cause the branching and paradox timeline changes are just an illusion in TOS and the others and they are really crossing between quantum timelines instead.
In fact, the "paradox level" that was giving Braxton's crew and Seven so much trouble could have been (unbeknownst to them) some kind of chronal energy potential artifact of the number of timeline split nodes they were tapped into at once or whatever.
A. Braxton may not have been suffering temporal phychosis, just the garden-variety kind. "Relativity" showed that he went nuts at about the same age, even when he was NOT trapped nine hundred years in the past. That strongly hints of bad brain wiring, a psychotic response to too much stress of any kind, not some magical temporal nonsense.
B. True, Q would not let him die of it, but it fits Q's sense of humor to let at least a little of it through to make things just a bit harder for Picard. I'll give this one to you though since it is a bit of an outlier.
C. You are wrong about that, Roddenberry actually used a lot of the real scientific theories of the time (or at least the pop-sci version of them) when creating Star Trek. Some of the theories, like the chromotherapy lights, turned out to be wrong and they had to pull a few things out of their backsides to solve production problems (like inventing transporters because the expense of showing the ship or even a shuttle landing every week would have been too much of a budget drain, and coming up with different weapons than the needlers that Roddenberry was going to use because NBC did not want anything to do with drugs), but at least they tried to keep it as scientifically reasonable as possible while still meeting the needs of the story.
So real world science DID mean something though that aspect has degraded somewhat as first the Paramount movie division was put in the drivers seat then other creative teams with other ideas produced the following series (and finally CBS drove it over the cliff into pure fairytale land).
D. Actually we don't know that any of those paradoxes happened in Kelvin because they never show them and the creators specifically said no paradox, time only branches period. The way Star Trek handles it, paradox can be thought of a little like a DOC file that stores edits as well as the main text, it is reasonable to assume that Kelvin is like a copy-paste where only the main text is copied and pasted into a new document (or in this case timeline) and the edit history is not.
Gary Seven probably just completed his mission without interference which would have produced the same results. Sure, the warhead might have exploded slightly sooner, or Roberta Lincoln could have gotten suspicious on her own and hit him over the head by surprise like she did in TOS and delayed the detonation to the same altitude as Kirk and company did.
And we don't know that the events in ENT played out exactly the same way in the Kelvin timeline as it did in ENT, especially in light of the fact that one of the creators mentioned that the branch sent out ripples in both directions. We are told in the TOS episode Metamorphosis that Cochrane was from the Alpha Centauri colony and invented warp drive there, not an old missile silo in Montana, it is possible that the Kelvin ripples were part of the events that set the stage for First Contact to go down as it did on Earth instead if some of those ripples leaked over into the original timeline before separation was complete.
The Futures End paradox could have been resolved in a number of ways, possibly from someone finding advanced tech from some other incursion, including possible devices Gary Seven's predecessors may have had in their possession at the time of their fatal car wreck which we already know officially happened. Henry Starling could have just as easily found a crashed Orion, Andorian, Nausican, or any number of other alien race's ship or shuttle and got LSI semiconductor tech out of it.
For that matter, if he was hiking around near Carbon Creek instead of further west he could have found something the Vulcans missed in their cleanup of T'Pol's great grandmother's ship back in 1957, it would not take much if he realized what he was looking at. It is even possible that Mestral would see some need to introduce the idea of large scale integrated circuits, the same way that T'Mir introduced Velcro.
On top of that, in Space Seed we are shown what the technology of the 1990s was like without the Starling paradox. According to dialog the ships used transistors (and probably low to medium scale integrated circuits since they existed already in the 1960s) which is not as high tech, but on the other hand their biological and nuclear drive tech like genetics, cryogenics, and early impulse drive tech were more advanced than what was shown in Futures End. The Federation did not depend on Starling's "breakthroughs", it just shifted the focus of research a little bit and Cochrane would have invented the human version of warp drive at Alpha Centauri on the TOS schedule instead of Montana as happened in First Contact.
So yes, those paradoxes happened before the split but would not have to have happened after it as the past got copy-pasted or whatever.
And come to think of it, those paradoxes could have even happened exactly the same way as they did in the episodes anyway without violating the no-grandfather-paradox rule of the Kelvin "timeline" since the downstream ("future") end of those temporal incursions happened in the original timeline which would make them a misaligned crosstime incursion from the point of view of the Kelvin universal rules, not the impossible-in-Kelvin linear time fold along the same timeline. That would make the formerly paradox events just events.
True, they did say Braxton had temporal psychosis, but diagnosis can be wrong. That or he was just too fragile for the time cop division since he goes crazy whether he is trapped in the past or not.
And calling TOS "the most magical" because of "god like beings" is quite amusing in light of the fact that TNG and most of the later series featured even more of them than TOS did, and Q (the hands down top of the heap in that category) was even a frequently recurring character. The Organians, the top contenders from TOS, are barely second string compared to the Q.
And in TOS most of the "magic" using types turned out to actually be using technology (as in Clark's third law), like for instance Apollo with his ultra-high-tech "temple" and an implant to control it. The exceptions were a few ascended species who developed beyond the need for a physical form (as well as a few who were almost there but not quite) like the Orgainians and the Thasians but they were not unique to TOS either.
The reason Roddenberry even had those "god like beings" was that he was a fan of the old trickster style folktales, where the protagonist is up against someone that they cannot just ignore or pound the tribble out of so they have to get clever and trick the antagonist instead. Which brings up the biggest difference between traditional Trek and NuTrek, the fact that the new stuff most often goes by the action movie motto of "if the plan doesn't work the first time, use a bigger hammer".
And what was Roddenberrys first rule of Star Trek? That the heroes are never to win using nothing but brute force...
As for the Kelvin thing, weren't you listening to the interviews during the runup hype for the movie? Ironically, it was Kurtzman in his role of official public mouthpiece for the project who said that time worked differently in the new branch and travelling back to change things did not change one's own timeline, it just caused another branch.
I don't remember offhand if he used the exact word "paradox" but whether he did or not is irrelevant since what he described was that paradoxes could not exist there (just branches). I don't know if the idea was Kurtzman's or Orci's (I suspect the latter though considering DSC is drowning in linear time travel) but that was the official word when the movie came out.
No, Gary Seven did nothing of the sort, what he said was:
And if you watch the episode you will find that his mission was to make the platform explode near the minimum safe distance of 100 miles, the four mile difference is irrelevant (and if it had been exactly 100 miles it might have looked suspicious anyway).
Sure Cochrane could in theory have been born on earth and moved to Alpha Centauri after inventing warp drive, but that is not the impression in the show. Also, why would he be thought of as from Alpha Centauri if his great discovery was made on Earth when he was pushing middle age? And there are other discrepancies, like the TOS version disappeared in 2117 while the dedication recording in Broken Bow has him still on Earth as late as 2119.
Also, TOS makes it obvious that impulse drive was invented well before warp drive, yet First Contact seems to have it the other way around, or that they were invented about the same time.
As I pointed out in my previous comment, as far as pre-split paradoxes are concerned they could have actually happened exactly as depicted without violating the no-paradox thing since the incursions came from PRIME, not the post-split KELVIN timeline. That means they were crosstime incursions as far as the temporal mechanics of the Kelvin "timeline" is concerned, they would not trigger a new branch since they are not a paradox like they would have been if, say the Kelvin version of the Voyager (assuming there is one in the future) went back instead of the prime one.
I know were and when Carbon Creek was set, however they have already established that advanced technology can sit out in the elements or in a cave or whatever for centuries and still function, a decade in the open would probably not be a problem. And there is still the possibility that Mistral found it necessary to intervene like I said before, even though neither of those would have to happen because of the crosstime factor making what were paradoxes on the prime timeline not paradoxes in Kelvin.
As for the "long retconned" thing, that just exists in your head. Until a show goes back and explicitly changes something the original remains, and they never did that. Almost everything they show that contradicts TOS, like the stuff in Futures End and First Contact, have been the result of time travel paradoxes. Paradox is not a retcon since it makes it a quantum situation where both versions are true in a weird sort of way.
You do realize that when Fox pointed out that what they sloppily call "timeline" and "universe" are just quantum universes you were arguing against that idea don't you? If you have come around to accepting the idea that it is all quantum phenomena you should see that the arbitrary difference DSC tries to make does not make sense (and yes, DSC could probably fix it with clever writing even at this late date, but that seems to be beyond them judging from their track record, and they will probably just leave it as fairytale magic).
It is contrived and absurd. It totally obliterates the suspension of disbelief.
...or a barrier of energy, undetectable by even the Federation sensors of the 23rd century, which surrounds our entire galaxy and prevents anything from leaving, while also turning humans (and only humans) into psychic powerhouses...
...or a godlike being living in the center of the galaxy, a region noted for its supermassive black hole and unstable stars, which is sequestered there by a similar undetectable barrier, which can traverse space under its own power but still needs a ship for inadequately explored reasons...
...or - but let's be honest, if we're going to pick apart all the times Trek ignored physics and realism for the sake of a story, we'll be here all day, and I've got things to do.
True, though notice how the more recent ones are so much worse than the older ones. "Center of the galaxy" could have actually meant as close as they could get to it instead of the literal center for instance.
And the really neat thing with the TOS one is that the barrier seems to have been more localized to that one side of the galaxy directly between the Milky Way and Andromeda, which by chance has extra meaning nowadays since it could be spun as an effect related to the collision between the two galaxies that scientists recently discovered was happening.
Both the TOS Enterprise and the TNG one exit the galaxy in other directions without encountering the barrier, though admittedly neither one did it in normal warp drive. The TOS one made a sort of hyperspace jump that the Medusan ambassador had to navigate them back from, and the TNG one rode the Traveller's modifications out to one of the Magellanic cloud galaxies. The only times they hit the barrier in TOS was in the second pilot and when the Kelvans took over the ship and modified it to increase speed and survive the barrier.
That brings up a nice precedent for the TOS, Kelvin, and DSC era ships btw, the Kelvans in By Any Other Name boosted the Enterprise to TNG-scale 9.9 using only the resources available on the Enterprise and whatever they could scavenge from their life pods and an uninhabited world, in their attempt to return to the Andromeda galaxy. And not just for a few minutes, the conversion that took only a day or so at most was a solid enough upgrade to hold for at least the three centuries the trip would take, which makes the old movie era ships they pull out of mothballs and whatnot quite feasible for STO era service with very little fuss.
The most unrealistic part of that episode was why didn't the Federation trade something for the information on how to do that themselves. Of course, it is possible that Scotty could have noticed a few things and worked them into the improved engines and shields of the movie era.
Praxis was where it got really stupid, though they could have done it slightly different to make it more obvious that it was a subspace explosion (possibly trilithium waste going critical, judging by a Voyager plot point) rather than a material-dimension one (depending on novelizations to clean up screenwriter's mess is unconscionable laziness). They could have used most of the same action as in the teaser but have space look completely normal until Sulu calls for a subspace view on the mainscreen (instead of just an outside view) or something along those lines. Since so much Trek technology uses subspace transtators that shockwave could have had little or no effect on normalspace stuff but ships and other tech could be hard hit like shown and crash the Klingon economy like it did.
Hobus was obviously a misunderstanding of the Praxis subspace explosion taken to idiotic levels, especially the rehash of it in PIC. It is only surpassed in unbelievability by the magic tantrum in DSC s3.
So...baby X-Men Kelpian wannabe throws a wobbler and billions die, the Federation falls and an already inert moderator element, becomes...more inert? and somehow all goes boom far far faster than Hobus. Which took so long to threaten Romulus the VSA had time to build a ship and send Spock in the time from it exploding to hitting ch'Rihan, or if you believe Picard, months to cross about 1 AU from Eisn now.
And they had to take time off all of this to have a two parter where the Guardian of Forever forgives Space Hitler, who slew hundreds of billions of sapients, kept treating it as causually as using fly spray, kept telling the morons around her she'd gladly gut them and keep them as trophies, and meant it, a bigger monster than Control was going to become, and sends her back in time to do more evil.
I just...who hit their head and how hard to come up with more horse hucky than they shovelled off the London streets in a decade in just a few episdoes.
And Vance is marginally less obvious as a shady villain than Lorca, but he's not above board, someone is helping the Chain. And isn't is super super convinient that Zora only assets her intelligence to chose movies or help space Hitler, she's becoming quite the troll. Maybe the crew abandon her to save the Federation.
While it is true that Roddenberry hated excessive technobabble like what is used in TMP and later they did use some, but only where absolutely necessary and only enough to clue in the audience to what is going on without browbeating them with exposition. That is why Star Trek has (or at least had) the reputation of requiring to much thought, and it is a style I prefer over the CSI procedural style technobabble of TNG.
If you prefer the TV equivalent of the 1200 word essay on every technical plot point (what Heinlein called the "chickenplucker essay") style then the new stuff is right for you and somewhat tedious to me. And no, that is not an insult, it is just a matter of preferences, and for me at least it is yet another reason I am not wild about CBS Trek.
The only times in TOS that they mentioned the galactic barrier directly and unequivocally were the second pilot and By Any Other Name. The use of the word "barrier" in Is There in Truth No Beauty? could have been a reference to it, sure, but it is just as likely to be some other barrier such as the hyperspace transition point they were looking for. On the other hand, Enterprise was mostly on that side of the Federation in that season, so they could very well have shot past it in hyperspace or whatever if they were pointed at the edge of the galaxy on that side when the drive went bonkers whether it is around the whole galaxy or just the side being impacted by Andromeda.
As for the TNG speed reference, Geordie was probably rounding up to emergency speed as a point of emphasis, TNG scale warp factor 9.9 would be a three hundred and five year trip, but at 9.5 it would take close to eight hundred years. At 9.8 it would be about 450 years more or less and the curve is so steep at that point that that much error in a crude off the cuff estimate is not unreasonable.
Also, it would probably take more than just going fast in warp to penetrate the barrier, though it is possible that the Traveler bumped them up into hyperspace the same way the TOS Enterprise did, and took them out (at least more or less anyway) at the other end. That episode was an adaptation of The Wounded Sky and it is more or less what happened there (though it was an experimental drive instead of the Traveler (who was invented for the episode) that caused it).
Your point about them not picking up tech from other possible opportunities is true enough and always a sore point in series science fiction, though the antigrav tech Stratos used was simply an impressive engineering feat using technology the Federation already had. In fact they show antigrav lifters in several episodes, the most noticeable was in Obsession when they set the trap for the cloud creature. TNG even made it more mundane when they redefined impulse drive as working via "gravity impulse".
As for Praxis, it is true that there was both subspace and normalspace aspects, but it was the subspace wave that bounced the Excelsior around, not the physical one which devastated half of Qo'noS (though the subspace shockwave probably fried most of the tech on the planet too). The novelization clears up some of the questions though it is not exactly precise either (and as I said depending on a novel to explain things in a movie or series is just unforgivably bad no matter how you look at it).
As for what exactly caused the explosion they never say in either source, but Voyager already established that were you find dilithium you also usually have trilithium (which under the right conditions forms from dilithium deposits) to contend with, and trilithium is insanely dangerous unless you are very, very careful with it and can produce planet-wrecking explosions if there is enough of it around. Dilithium has been said to pick up and amplify charges from the environment so it is detectable even though it is not an energy source in of itself (sort of more like a capacitor than a battery).
The aesthetic change was even earlier than TNG actually, it started way back in the 2270s when they moved away from the style that was popular from at least as early as the 2240s and '50s and probably died out in the mid to late 2260s (the same way that the real world googie style TOS was based on started somewhere around the very late 1940s to early 1950s but died out in the late 1960s).
Yes. Bad writing is bad writing. The difference here is orders of magnitude worse than some silly barriers.
It is actually really plausible to imagine someone trapped an evil entity behind a barrier at the center of the galaxy, whoever put it there hoping time would destroy it in a black hole. Now how they portrayed it all was rather silly.
The Hobus supernova or whatever it was in ST2009 remains unexplained in canon and still totally ludicrous, and has led to such terrible nonsense as ST:Picard.
The fact is, though, they are orders of magnitude less bad than a child crying destroying millions if not billions of lives because dilithium is now a magical psychic amplifier or something. "I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced."
Something like those barriers lasted for one episode or a movie and is never really explored again. It is forgotten until someone wants to figure out a way to breach or explore them and then they can be rewritten into something better, and it can be overlooked as they explore other things. Something like the Burn, however, is a massive, major plot point in this serialized show, and dramatically altered the galaxy if not the universe, and not in a way that can just be retroactively fixed without illegal time travel.
But I don't understand your point. We all know Trek has bad and goofy writing in the past. Are you suggesting that it should not be criticized?
As usual you jumped to conclusions and got it totally backwards. Putting what I said in different words, Roddenberry believed that the audience was not so stupid that they needed to be spoon-fed the kind of long explanations that TNG got bogged down in so often. In other words, if it is written in an intelligent manner then the viewers should just get it from context and not not need a long explanation of the details unless it is extraordinarily convoluted and essential to the plot.
Usually a few words will do the trick, though Hollywood seems convinced that viewers are all idiots that need it all simplified and spelled out in dialog. A good example of Hollywood's weird belief on that is the Lost in Space movie where they turned the Jupiter 2 into a Star Wars thruster style ship because they were convinced that the viewers would not be able to understand the helicopter-like tipping movements the saucer would do on its magnetogravitic field effect drive.
They usually beat around the bush with technobabble a lot longer than one or two lines. Many times they had a scene in the conference room where they would flog the technobabble horse to death for instance.
What "other barriers"? I pointed out that the use of the word "barrier" in that episode did not necessarily refer to the galactic barrier they hit in the second pilot. They could have been talking about something else, including the interface between hyperspace and normalspace.
They actually used a formula for warp speed calculations, you can see the formula and some charts made from it on the Memory Alpha wiki using that official, straight-from-Paramount, formula or even use warp speed calculators that use that formula on other sites. You like to accuse others of using "head canon" and yet you are making things up yourself with your nonsense about TNG not having a warp speed formula (they did have a few errors in a few episodes, but errors are not making it up on an episode by episode basis like you claim).
So you actually think the vacuum of regular space formed a faster-than-light tidal wave to shake up Excelsior? Ridiculous, especially in light of the fact that the people who made the movie explained it as a subspace shockwave. The Memory Alpha wiki agrees with you about the lack of blast damage to Qo'noS, so apparently the realspace part of the explosion was surprisingly wimpy considering the extreme amount of damage the moon shows.
No, but it could have been fixed in Voyager after everyone and their dog pointed out to Paramount that dilithium was always used as an energy regulator in matter-antimatter reactions, not an energy source itself. The evidence is good enough to make the the speculation that trilithium was the culprit reasonable since TNG, DS9, and VOY all mentioned at one point or another that trilithium was the dangerous explosive form, not dilithium (though Voyager had the last, and most in-depth, word on it).
Yes, I misread that one.
Firstly: Star Trek has always had weird and crazy Sci-Fi elements to it, like how in the Dominion War, Captain Sisko asked for a miracle from the aliens that live in the Wormhole and they "destroyed" an entire fleet of Dominion ships in a blink of an eye, or the dozens of God like beings that play around with the galaxy like a fidget spinner, or literally any of the Trek technology like the Universal Translator or the Transporter to name just two of the many examples, while Star Trek does include some realism, there's a reason it a Science Fiction show, and that's great, I personally like that Star Trek can come up with imaginative aliens, worlds, phenomenons and scenarios.
And secondly: not only do I like that the Burn was indeed cause by an unforeseeable accident rather than anything malicious, but that it seems to be building up to Captain Saru, Doctor Culber, and Adira Tal preventing the Burn from happening again through helping Su'Kal with facing his demons and bring him back to the real world, connecting with him on an emotional level rather than spouting technobabble at the problem, that's what I personally don't like which was a major issue in Star Trek Voyager, if Star Trek is going to have crazy science, don't spend half an episode trying to justify it with equally made up science sounding words, and then not show us the crazy science in action.
And the reveal of Su'Ka and his plight continues to play into season threes overall theme of reconnecting with people that are separated and bringing them together.
- Jean-Luc Picard