She also lost several other crew, she couldn't save them all for various reasons. She couldn't stop the ship from avoiding the Caretaker array, or else Tuvok and the Maquis would be stranded, she couldn't enter the Barzan Wormhole before the Ferengi did, because they wouldn't be able to save Seven, the Equinox survivors, or Icheb and the other Borg children. And if the ship got home too soon they'd be thrown into the Dominion War and who knows how many casualties they'd take then.
Go back too far, you undo the good they did. Don't go back far enough, it's too late to save the people she could.. Also the simple fact that there wasn't really a point where she could pop in and say "Here's a way home." The Borg transwarp Nexus was the best point to hit.
Some of the best dialog in all of Star Trek at the opening of Trials and Tribble-ations when Sisko is interrogated by agents from the Department of Temporal Investigations: DULMUR: Captain, why did you take the Defiant back in time? SISKO: It was an accident. LUCSLY: So you're not contending it was a predestination paradox? DULMUR: A time loop. That you were meant to go back into the past? SISKO: Erm, no. DULMUR: Good. LUCSLY: We hate those. So, what happened? SISKO: This may take some time. DULMUR: Is that a joke? SISKO: No. LUCSLY: Good. DULMUR: We hate those too.
She was allowed to join the Ent C with her 24C Starfleet uniform and sidearm, with no orders to pretend to be just another ENT C crew member in case of capture. Any 24C medical procedures done routinely on her as a Starfleet officer might be reverse engineered by Romulan doctors should she literally ”be put under the microscope".
But Picard was intentionally sending her back to die in battle, so no one expected her to survive just have a more "meaningful death" and the "ramifications" were ones that could never have been foreseen so how could that be "reckless" at all?
The thing about Janeway is that she has always considered seven as her daughter of sorts. In a way, the story is pretty realistic. Many parents never recover from losing their child and many of them develop mental illnesses and such as a result. Living in a world that gives the option of time travel could easily lead a parent to the sort of steps Janeway went to to save Seven.
Yeah, like annorax in the year of hell 2 parter, drastically changing the timeline to get his wife back. Or bishop when he was chasing cable and hope summers throughout the timeline in the x-men "messiah" crossover trilogy. The difference is that those guys are the bad guys. They are the villains of their stories.
To be fair, Janeway also took the opportunity to bring back a bunch of future anti-borg weapons to blow up that massive borg transwarp hub and infect the hive mind with malware. Soo... technically her plan wasn't just to make things slightly better for her crew, but also to deal a crippling blow the borg collective at a point in time where they would be vulnerable (and also get her crew back early). Not sure if that makes it any less reckless, though.
I disagree. I think that was a part of her plan all along. Her plan hinged on using the transwarp conduit of the borgs to dump voyager right on Earth's doorstep. It actually makes sense that she does that. Why let a dangerous enemy keep the ability to just show up right at the heart of the Federation whenever they damn well please?
They created a paradox, did Voyager infact ever get back? After all, if they did get back in the end then there's no reason for Janeway to travel back in time to bring Voyager back home so Voyager is never actually rescued by a future Janeway and remains in the Delta Quardrant.
@@4TheRecord Yes and no. By our understanding of logic and physics? Yes. By the Star Trek "universes" understanding? No. Like Captain Janeway said, "Temporal Mechanics gives me a headache".
@@4TheRecord that is actually not an issue in this scenario because future janeway did interact with present janeway and thus present janeway knows which actions she must take in order to prevent a potential paradox.
Also, despite the fact that Star Trek ignored it in future movies, she retrofitted Voyager with future tech that was powerful enough to destroy Borg Cubes in one shot. There's no way that Starfleet is so altruistic that they just torched the tech in the name of the Temporal Prime Directive. Likely tipped the balance of power in the Alpha/Beta quadrants for quite some time.
It has to be Janeway. The one that time travelled to save a couple of her crew members but not all of them. You can't even imagine how many people she wiped out of existence through that sheer arrogance.
5:58 You completely ignored the fact that in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, McCoy gives pills to an elderly female dialysis patient in the hospital awaiting a transplant which cause her to grow *A NEW KIDNEY!*
lol, that makes me think of the episode of Doctor Who with the medical ship fixing people wrong. "Doctor (not that doctor, the MD working at the place), when I came here I had one leg. Now I have two." "Are you sure you didn't miscount?"
On " The Voyage Home", Chekov tosses a Klingon weapon at a security officer after it malfunctions. Also Chekov wears 20th century hospital gown, while his 23rd century clothes are left behind.
Janeway is a solid second place, but we don't even know how many species - yes whole species - Annorax has erased from history. Dialog in the episode suggests that they've been doing it for so long that even they don't know anymore.
Speaking of species (off topic), how many species and cultures have the Borg assimilated, essentially wiping out their culture? I don't see the Borg acting on any culture but their own: not designating any of the hive to continue such culture, though connected to the give mind. If the hive mind connected all the being-ness of the individuals but allowed the assimilated cultures to be expressed, now that would be an impressive feat. And then the Borg would be interesting to me and not merely an instrument of destruction. They would be the epitome of diversity. The cultures would persist, yet every one would be aware of all the other cultures that have been collected. How would you like to be fluent in your own language but automatically can speak the whistling language of Sylbo, simply because the culture was preserved in another group in the collective? Or be an isolated agrarian culture yet know exactly how space travel works and the history of it on other planets? Or knowing the dying cultures and having them kept alive and available for contact and interrelationships as if they thrived natively?
@@ginnyjollykidd Yes, the terrible thing about the Borg is that they force everyone to become just another identical drone to serve their further conquest.
@riddimann when Voyager destroyed Anorax's time ship, all the species he wiped out were restored as if the time incursion tech was never built. Witness how, at the end of The Year Of Hell Pt 2, Voyager meets a patrol ship from a local race whose captain tells Janeway that "the region is contested". His whole species had been wiped out by Anorax in the middle of the 2-parter, then restored at the time ship's destruction.
Chris Schembari Even if Annorax wasn’t successful in the end, he was definitely the most reckless time traveler in Star Trek, hands down. He was willing to go to any lengths, wipe out entire civilizations, to accomplish his goal. Old Janeway wanted to avoid the borg and sneak voyager through.
I'm so glad you did and Captain Archer, _Enterprise_ / Doctor Beckett, _Quantum Leap_ joke. I know it's low hanging fruit, but sometimes that low fruit is just _so_ sweet.
I was waiting for Al to appear in the last episode, telling Sam that he had saved/created the Federation. But, due to the extended time in the future, Sam could not leap home. These are the voyages of Dr. Sam Beckett, time agent #1...
Why hasn't anyone else done: Krughe = Chris Lloyd and Klingon Bird of Prey (scoutship) = De Lorean (automobile)? Or Kruge: BoP as Doc Brown: De Lorean??? Back to the Future movies anyone? Anyone?
You may never see this comment now, but I just had a horrible realization after watching DS9 S4 Ep2 - The visitor, that Jake Sisko is actually the most reckless time traveler - who erases over 60 years of history, costs Jadzia her life, Nog his legs and sparks the entire Dominion war.
Janeway is too obvious a choice. My money on too reckless is alternate timeline Tasha Yar. Leads to clone Tasha, Spock-Romulan relationship, and ultimately new Trek. Yar is responsible for the destruction of Vulcan because she wants to be with her time boyfriend.
Ms Yar never struck me or was convincing as wanting a boyfriend . Hell she didn't even ACT live she was interested in me. Except to maybe kill or out butch them
Given the chance and theoretical physics being as it is at the moment, I'd go and the back of my hand to the future. Anyone's. According to the "The Many World's" theory, the past mat not, probably want be the past you're trying to get to. As such if you could return to the "present" it would certainly be different. The proposal is that everyone's worldlline has an infinite number of possibilities. By reciprocity, the past worldlines has to have infinite possibilities. At any rate if given a chance everyone should go. It's not likely you're going to fuck up things in the here and now. This is the short regular people's version. The geekage has a lot of math and requires non intuitive thinking. So go step on that moth, push McCoy into that pastry, grab a hot date with your Grandma X nth. Keep in mind of the conservation of information theory: information like energy cannot be destroyed. All knowledge and energy exists at this point. As the Christian Bible says: there is nothing new under the sun.......or was that The Bard????
Still one of my favorite lines from all of Trek. And say what you will, but the Enterprise arc about that was fun and made it feel like a part of the rest of the Trek universe.
I glad the writers went that route. An explanation for why the Klingons looked so different is one of things that could have stopped the episode dead for several minutes while Worf explained it. I think a non-answer was the best way to handle it in that particular case.
Holy crap, I'm completely with you when you pause and wonder how the heck did time go by so quickly. I remember watching TNG premiere as a child! Good Lord!
I remember Star Trek : TOS 2 years after it came out . LoL . I'm 50 in June. 5 - 10 year periods doesn't sound long and believe me , I think alot about how there's more days behind me ( and Picard )than there are ahead .
Q is the best written character of any written work of art I've ever encountered. John de Lancie did a masterful job on his performance. The humor, the wit, the sarcasm, the vulnerability, the yearning for true friendship. Q is the misunderstood troll of the Star Trek universe. All hail Q!
Nope. That was secondary and even tertiary as a goal. And it’s pretty clearly deicted that the Federation was kicking the shit out of the borg in the future having reached a tech level that gave them a big advantage, and for all we know Janeway may have undid that with what she changed.
Hmmm... I think what made time travel so risky in ST IV was the fact they were doing it in a damaged Klingon ship where several characters mentioned or showed a dubious mastery of the Klingon control systems. Oh and Scotty did change the timeline... we have transparent aluminum now.
And let's not forget the crew got themselves back to their time pretty casually at the end of First Contact. As long as the ship was intact, the threat of being stranded didn't seem to cross their minds.
That hat paradox reminds me of another object centered paradox in a time travel movie entitled "Somewhere in Time" starring Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour. In it, a young character played by Reeve is given a watch by an old woman played by Seymour. Years later, Reeve's character manages to travel decades into the past, finds the Seymour character, who is now much younger than when they first met, and gives her that same watch. A watch with no apparent origin.
Much the same could be said for the reading glasses McCoy gave Kirk in ST:TVH, which he had to pawn to get the money he passed out to the crew in past San Francisco, so that McCoy could buy them for him centuries later.
If their Heisenberg Compensaters go out of alignment, they could end up flying way into the future at relativistic sp- "Those are part of the transporters, idiot."
Hey, you forgot to mention that in Star Trek IV, Kirk was using Klingon Brown's Delorean of Prey, so time traveling to the 1980s shouldn't be too unexpected. GREAT SCOTT!
It could mean that the mid-1980's inherently contains some sort of cosmic significance. Almost as if it were the junction point for the entire fictional space-time continuum! On the other hand it could just be an amazing coincidence.
That is why is was so much more dangerous, because The Enterprise was a lot more able to handle the stress than a stolen Bird of Prey, so it was no wonder they barely made it back with all the extra mass of a whale tank
@@ArgonTheAware plus, Scotty didn't retrofit the Klingon Taxi with a Mr. Fusion reactor - the real reason why it almost ran out of power in San Francisco.
It's Janeway. I'm shocked. Who caused global warming? Janeway. Who shot JFK? Janeway. Who caused the Black Plague? Janeway. Who gave Thanos the Time Stone? Janeway. Who cancelled Firefly? Janeway. Who wrote Batman v Superman? Janeway. Who is Steve's mom? Okay, things make sense now.
Time-trek, it’s bound to be a spinoff series sometime down the line. We already have two new series in the works, so why not tap into the established future presence of a time traveling branch of Starfleet?
I so want those two shows to be in the same universe. Like the TARDIS lands on the bridge of the Enterprise and Spock gives everybody a lesson on Gallifrey and Time Lords. Then the Doctor defeats the Klingons with a spoon.
They don't need to be in the same universe, just the same multiverse; The Doctor can travel to alternate universes/timelines as established in S2E5 of the new series (though he mentions that because the Time Lords aren't around anymore to fix things it's dangerous to damage the universe(s) in that way ¯\_(ツ)_/¯).
There's also the fact that it was supposed to be right after the episode where they accidentally get sent back in time and end up having to kidnpa that one fighter pilot because he got too close to the Enterprise as it limped back up to orbit but CBS messed with the order the episodes aired
@@MrGoesBoom Yeah, CBS just continued to mess everything up! They're probably rolling in their graves to where they can kick themselves in the A$$! ...and the upper echelon in charge is still making mistakes in regards to their ill-gotten gain! :-/
That is called a "back door pilot". It's kind of a scam to get the powers that be to pay for the production of a pilot, instead of the creators paying for it. I remember one in THE NANNY, and in an episode of MARRIED WITH CHILDREN. They just insert familiar characters from the current show briefly into the pilot. In the case of THE NANNY, the episode was all about some naive girl getting a job in a beauty shop. It became a short lived series. Can't remember the one from MARRIED too well. I think it was about a father & son living together. The father was scheming for the son to marry for money. I think it was a short lived series too.
@@argonwheatbelly637 really? The Tet Offensive? Couldn't it be some other time in Vietnamese history, apart from its 20C wars? In that case, Phõ Q could be a Quantum Leap reference, too. The absolute one time that we saw a leap take Sam Beckett outside the USA, he lands in the Vietnam War, surrounded by Americans. What are the odds? I guess all of Sam's leaps into other lands where English is not often spoken occurred after the series finale, when the bartender/"God" character told Sam that the leaps would be getting harder from then on...
Honorable mention to Alternate Odo in "Children of Time," where the Defiant crew crash lands on a planet and discovers an entire civilization built by them being sent back further in time during an escape attempt. Sure there was no perfect answer, being forced to choose their old lives and families vs the 8,000 descendants they'd have on the planet, but Alt. Odo was so determined to keep Kira alive he defies the wishes of the crew, sends the Defiant back, and erases those 8k from ever existing. There wasn't a good solution but holy crap did that episode leave me messed up inside 0_0
6:01 Scotty"s just like, "Whatever, for all I know Arnold Ripner over here invented it. History, shmistory!" Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha, omg, that's funny!
Love the hat sequence at the end. No time travel story ever really stands up to much scrutiny. For _proof_ I refer you to Futurama, Bender's Big Score, Jurassic Bark etc...
So are we just going to forget the time that Kira went back in time for a fact-finding/soul-searching mission and then tried to kill Gul Dukat and her own mother? I guess so.
I always interpreted that as the Orb showing her what happened and it never had any risk of alteration because there's no reference to any changes that should have happened
Yes, I think the reason the bomb didn’t kill then wasn’t cuz of Kira’s change of heart, but because the orb experience meant that the orb was always gonna protect the timeline lol maybe
Although it's probably exactly what's going to happen, for some reason I think it would habe been funnier if Future!Steve responded with, "Oh, we totally took care of that. Not that it mattered in the end though…," and just looks off to the side with a look of remembering the horror only he know about.
This whole area would just be RETURNING to the sea, anyway. All of this used to be called...wait for it... 'The Great Ocean'! Yeah... The dinosaurs sucked at naming stuff.
I feel like Jake in The Visitor (DS9) is comparable to Harry in Timeless too? He lived a whole life without his father, then erased it all to get him back. Sure, it wasn't the best life, as he was obsessed with bringing his father back the whole time and pursued that rather than his other interests. But he still erased it when he could have simply let his life stand as it was.
I am commenting before I watch the video... I'm going to say Janeway is the most reckless time traveler. She has mentioned multiple times that temporal mechanics give her a headache and that she really doesn't care... Admiral Janeway said it's best to just ignore the temporal prime directive. The time police (whatever they are called) from the USS Relativity think that Voyager shows up in their sensors far too often. And our peeps from the 29th century have a point. Didn't Voyager have something like ~9 time travel plots across 7 seasons... 3 of those were in the first season (don't quote me on that).
Janeway was a captain for 7 years. She has a record of 14 violations, especially including the rather unfortunate incident at the end of the series. Yes. She was a very naughty captain.
It should also be known that Janeway is the only reason those 29th Century Time Police have the ability to have her show up on their sensors. As she is kind of time travel Prometheus.
One of the early Voyager books also involved a complex time travel arrangement, with a civilization that regularly rewound time to correct negative events. Somehow three of the Voyager crew wind up breaking one of their temporal laws, and get locked up. The authorities on the planet had to do several rewinds to thwart all of B'Elanna's escape attempts...
@@TheJadeFist exactly. Janeway and Tuvok never even *tried* to use the Array to fight off the Kazon ship attacking Voyager, maybe use its tractor beam to repulse the Kazon ship into the next star system, which would buy her all the time needed to figure out how to get Voyager AND the Array to the Alpha Quadrant, where it could be studied by Starfleet for years. It'd probably be as "simple" as deactivating any mechanism that tethers the Array to its current position in space, then locking the Array's tractor beam onto some object much more massive than the Array itself, like a star or a black hole, while tractoring Voyager along for the ride. The writers never gave us a reason why this couldn't be done.
I'm rather annoyed we never got to see the Temporal Investigations guys again. I actually think they could have had their own spin-off. Perhaps it wouldn't be in their MO to have them travelling in time, but they could be a sort of "CSI-Space-time" investigating temporal infractions and incursions.
@@woodgatejack Same. I haven't read them, but I believe there is a series of a few _Star Trek_ novels about the Department of Temporal Investigation. Really need to pick them up at some point.
@@woodgatejack funny. I always thought following the time agents woukd be a cool series, but also a sort of like ... Star Trek: JAG series could be cool too. I was rewatching Measure of a Man a few years ago, and just thought how interesting it woukd be gonna be a series exploring the decisions of all of these space explorers all the time - plenty of room for a wide variety of aliens and all that, but with that courtroom and investigation stuff that so many people like. Or if not strictly JAG, it could be Federation operations in general ... like a political series - they allude to tensions in the administrations in several series (I'm not sure about TOS), and despite how great Picard always says it is, I'm sure there are bad people in high places doing naughty things (Discovery seems to be fleshing that out more, but Discovery is also before the more cohesive Federation that TNG and on had established). There are really so many different kinds of Treks you could have 😃 They don't all have to be about space exploration, (though I'll still watch all of those too 😎). I've been curious about how civilians live and relate in this utopian society of the future since I was a kid 😏
I love your review of Star Trek time travel episodes. While I understand that some folks don't consider ST:TAS to be canon, I think the episode "Yesteryear" is an intriguing concept where Spock used The Guardian of Forever to go back in time to save himself as a child. Not reckless on Spock's part, but a great story IMHO.
I had a dream (probably after watching a lot of Doctor Who) in which my niece and I went back to 1997 to follow my past self. "What if he recognises you?" My niece asked "I shouldn't worry too much. He's very egotistical and self-involved. His self image is so askew, he wouldn't recognise himself if he saw himself from the outside, even if I walked into him." I replied as I scanned the crowded middle-distance for him (we were on Tottenham Court Road, London) "Hey! wasn't that him?" exclaimed my niece, indicating a sullen, 20-something man, in a black trench-coat, with already receding hair, who had just brushed past me, unnoticed. "Huh? Oh yeah!" I replied "See, I told you!"
@@Goujiki She did, and if the writers were actually thinking, they would have made that her main motivation. Perhaps the galaxy of the early 25th century is slowly being overrun by the Borg Collective, and the transwarp hub of the episode was the best bet to screw them over and get rid of their chief means of travel to boot, with the salvation of Seven, Chakotay and the like being a perk. Maybe in the future timeline they could have had a line about the Romulans falling to the Borg or numerous frontier colonies going out, to up the stakes.
I hate to disagree Steve, but not sure "Star Trek has always had terrible continuity" is a great defense of Discovery. From TNG in 1987 to Enterprise in 2005 we've had 4 series and 5 movies that did try to stay in some sort of continuity / shared universe. Complaining about Discovery in this context does seem valid to me. I am a fan of Discovery, I just don't think that specific point is a great defense.
I'm a fan of Discovery too ... just not its idea of Klingons 😅 But yeah, pointing out the lack of consistency in the past isn't really an excuse for on-going or future inconsistencies. It's better to try and fix those inconsistencies, find a way to logic them together somehow ... or just try to pretend they don't exist and move past them 😏
Brian Ortiz It’s also the first Star Trek to get sued for copyright infringement because they didn’t want to use warp drive anymore and “make up” some crazy spore drive that has never been mentioned in any other series. Seriously, that show isn’t Star Trek - they were just afraid if they called it something else no one would watch.
The ending of Voyager was appropriate because it sealed the image of Janeway as a reckless captain who touts Federation ideals like the Prime Directive while violating those same ideals regularly.
4:23 I have a better answer: they were doing it in an unfamiliar ship. The crew had done time travel many times before on the Enterprise, a Constitution-class ship which they were familiar with. They worked on it literally all the time and they knew how to travel through time safely in it. In Star Trek IV though, they have to do it in a Klingon Bird of Prey, a ship that they have not flow man frequently before and which they have no idea how it will handle the time jump. It might not be able to handle it as good as the Enterprise could. There. In-universe explanation in why it’s seen as difficult
Plus one can assume the BoP was old and in a rough shape at the time unlike the Enterprise which, as flagship of Starfleet, was most likely the peak of Starfleet engineering.
How did time travel go from seemingly routine in "Operation Earth" to dangerous and uncertain in "The Voyage Home?" The former was done in his own Enterprise in which he had already gone back in time and Spock had worked out the details based on that. In the latter, he had to do it in a stolen Klingon ship to bring back an extinct whale.
@19:00, You're wrong. Less than half of the crew of Voyager made it home, most of the bridge crew survived, but they are a minority. Admiral Janeway couldn't live with the survivor's guilt. When she was confidant that the tech she had to share was enough to overpower the Borg, she went to the past. Reckless doesn't describe what she did.
LOL dude, this was beautiful. The layout and explanations was very well done and the periodic and escalating breakdown as you become aware of the passing of your own personal timeline was genius.
Wow, this episode was uploaded today, as in, like, TODAY. March 13th, 2019. And in one year from now, on March 13th, 2020, there'll be so many other comments that this one will be buried under a mass of electronic digital debris, and no one will ever know it existed. Great work, Steve!
There's a good reason the time travel in Star Trek 4 was harder. They weren't in a Federation ship. The Enterprise was a lot more capable, and had a lot of Scotty magic done to it. In 4 they were in a beat up old Klingon bird of prey that didn't have the warp power the Enterprise did. In addition, for the return trip, the dilithium was messed up which meant they couldn't get to the necessary warp speed. Spock was able to successfully compensate by altering their trajectory, but they weren't sure it would work.
You missed one. When Janeway (Admiral Janeway) travels back in time and provides the then Voyager with weapons and armor to combat the Borg. - Mind you, that would've made so much more sense if it had happened prior to them encountering Species 8472 (Undine).
Literally watched the Past Tense episodes the other day. It's literally one of the best pieces of art I've ever encountered. I show people those episodes if they've never seen Trek, and it has a 100% success rate of conversion.
Dude.... I like your videos, really enjoy them already.... but with that nudge to Quantum Leap at about before 3:00 you made me laugh so hard it's a wonder my neighbours didn't come down asking what's going on :-D Love it. And brilliantly delivered. :-)
+ And all the "Maquis" crewmembers would still be part of the Maquis (unless killed). She made them Voyager -- and therefore Starfleet -- crewmembers. That's a huge plus in my book. + All the experience and information she brought back from the Delta quadrant was another huge plus, probably the biggest. Among them: biological and medical data about dozens of civilizations, the extent of the Borg menace, at least half a dozen ways to travel thousands of lightyears (some of them capable of more if not for a few quirks), etc. + At least some among the crew were from the Delta quadrant. Neelix (possibly a negative), Icheb, 7of9 (debatable -- if you count her as human, she was brought back home). But there's another huge difference, and that's a negative: -- Using future technology against the Borg, which might give them a chance to adapt next time. The armor technology should be an easy one; the Borg were probably not used to any federation ship with significant armor. While the Defiant is heavily armored, the Borg cube that engaged in battle during First Contact could probably not transmit a lot of useful data back home. OTOH the Voyager encountered 100s of Borg vessels at one point, and many of them survived when the warp node collapsed. The Borg will rebuild, and bump the federation to the top of the threat list.
I didn't watch voyager, but I recently watched a retrospective on the events of the show. Janeway going back had a LOT of consequences, on par with the kelven timeline. But because getting the voyager crew home years early, giving the federation a massive leg up in technology-from-the-future, and crippling the borg queen is all to the benefit of our protagonists, be don't bother looking at the unused timeline.
It occurs to me that you may not be familiar with the bootstrap paradox. It featured prominently in a movie I saw. It worked like this: Elvis impersonator goes back in time to meet Elvis before he was famous. Elvis thinks he's his dead twin brother then a demon and tries to fight the Elvis impersonator. Elvis dies in the scuffle so the fake Elvis buries real Elvis and takes his place to make sure Elvis's music gets written. The question and paradox is this: If Elvis is dead before he writes all the songs and fake elvis only knows the songs because Elvis wrote them then who wrote the music? DS9 episode you mentioned where Sisko becomes Bell is a Bootstrap Paradox. Your hat sketch is a Bootstrap paradox.
The solution (or one proposed solution) to that paradox is divergent timelines, meaning Elvis wrote his music in one timeline, the impersonator created another as soon as he arrived. The thing is, in this scenario there is no fixing the timeline nor returning to your own. The future the time traveler may return to no matter what it looks like is not the one he came from. It always irked me a tiny bit that Trek couldn’t decide what rules applied in their universe. We clearly see parallel and divergent timelines, but it’s also shown that many characters at least think that they can restore timelines through simple linear time travel.
This would be a good concept for an episode. Crew stumbles into a Federation captain endlessly trying to go back in time and change things to create some impossibly perfect outcome.
I’d argue that Generations didn’t really feature time travel. They say you can exit the nexus at any point in time, but people seem to only exit after they entered. The only exception was how Picard opted barely jump back a few min.
Time traveling to the 1980's in a clunky old Bird of Prey would be considered pretty dangerous. I reckon Spock has no trouble time travelling the USS Enterprise cuz the ship is far more reliable.
"did so to correct temporal incursions, to restore history that had been altered. Archer wasn't being recklessly, he was striving to put right what once went wrong, hoping that each time his next leap...would be the leap home."
I wonder if McCoy saving Edith Keeler creates the mirror universe? Also, perhaps they just beamed up the items left behind by Chekov on their way out of San Fran?
@@dorianlindberg1662 A mirror universe like the one where Kirk, Uhuru, and McCoy meet an "anti - universe" containing a rather Klingon - style promotion system? Or when they encounter a man and his opposite where one wants to leave a connecting corridor open and the other moves to seal it shut to prevent the annihilation of both universes, both forms of the man grappling forever in that corridor.
Chekov's phaser didn't work, probably due to the radiation, so the spooks interviewing him assumed it was a Sci-fi Con prop reject and threw it in a junk drawer, never to be examined by any engineer. OR the spooks thought about what a report on the Russkie who penetrated a military nuclear facility and mysteriously escaped would do to their own careers, and buried it all.
I’d like to offer a counterpoint to your idea that, “routine time-travel is boring” in regards to the use of time travel in Star Trek IV. I will readily agree that if time travel is routine, it’s definitely not interesting, but I think the reason why they made it seem so difficult in Star Trek IV is the fact that they weren’t using federation technology or a starship, they were using a Klingon bird of prey. In the film, the crew routinely derides the type of technology that the Klingons had on the ship, and also readily acknowledged their unfamiliarity with some of the devices on board. It’s similar to federation technology, but it’s not exactly the same. So, to me, it would stand to reason that there would be some hesitance to use time travel because of their lack of familiarity with the technology. On top of that, the Klingon ship was also badly damaged and needed to be repaired by the Vulcans. So, you had a mishmash of Klingon technology and Vulcan technology, which would mean the compatibility would be a little bit off. On top of that, it’s pretty clear that the Bird of prey would not be accustomed to going at speeds beyond warp seven. I don’t recall offhand exactly what speed it took place, but after it hit warp seven, everything started to shake and a section exploded in Uhura’s face. Clearly, a Klingon bird of prey would not be able to handle speeds beyond that, to say nothing of whatever speed is necessary to break the time barrier. In general, I just believe that the usage of the Klingon ship added an extra level of concern for everyone involved.
I feel like you left out the part where Janeway's "recklessness" destroyed the ability of the Borg to have any real presence in Federation space by... IDK - blowing up the hyperspace conduits the Borg were using for FTL travel, even though that tech pre-dated the Borg and they couldn't possibly rebuild it - or something? She struck the most crippling blow to the most powerful enemy of the Federation, right? I haven't kept up with all the Trek since then. Did anyone ever do anything more badass than that?
Being a great Star Trek captain isn't about being "badass". It's about doing the right thing. Sometimes that means being badass. But as Steve points out, Janeway's feat is a story usually reserved for villains.
Borg ships have their own transwarp coils to travel faster than normal warp speeds. Voyager's crew tried to steal one. Also, since when did Starfleet have the justification of "it's ok to travel back in time so long as you SMITE THE ENEMIES OF THE FEDERATION!!!" Why not go back in time and destroy the Dominion?
Way back in '66 a television program that ran on ABC was "The Time Tunnel" that was about... well, time travel. It was not a bad show as I remember it.
Fucken paradoxes, man. I had the same argument with myself about a lighter. I argued if it’s the same lighter being passed down every 20 years then the lighter still ages/wears when I hand it back to myself.
4:32 Time Travel in a clapped-out Klingon Bird of Prey (which is lucky it can fly through space, let alone time!) MIGHT be just a tad more exciting than in a state-of-the-art Federation starship. 5:42 Sprichst du nicht deutsch? 12:19 Two months away from 39? I'm 9 months away from 69, bro. Cop a chill pill! 20:14 Not regular cast members ... they don't count (obviously!). 20:38 Which follows the example of someone else who "broke the rules" with the Kobayashi Maru test, though on a much larger scale and with considerably greater impact. 27:51 "Who's on first?" "What's on second?" "I don't know." "Third base!" So ... Ohio's on the East Coast 20 years from now? Here's hoping my place is on high enough ground! I think it is...
The bridge crew in the early seasons of TNG regularly discussed the risks of space exploration as their crewmates died, and they regularly came across starships that encountered the perils. If Janeway can't accept the very nature of atttrition in starfleet, then that teases other crews who might hope they can be time travelled back into existence if only their captains were more awesome.
Come for the Trek, stay for the crushing realization of mortality in the face of the inexorable creeping of time.
It's the fire in which we burn
@@bemasaberwyn55 That's what they say.
Speak for yourself, sir. I plan to live forever.
I think we all need a hug.
@@MeSoTrashed isnt that what the egyptians thought?
Janeway, going back in time to save the 3 crew members she really liked, instead of going back a few more years and saving all of them.
She also lost several other crew, she couldn't save them all for various reasons. She couldn't stop the ship from avoiding the Caretaker array, or else Tuvok and the Maquis would be stranded, she couldn't enter the Barzan Wormhole before the Ferengi did, because they wouldn't be able to save Seven, the Equinox survivors, or Icheb and the other Borg children. And if the ship got home too soon they'd be thrown into the Dominion War and who knows how many casualties they'd take then.
Voyager also brought back a way of defeating the Borg…
Go back too far, you undo the good they did. Don't go back far enough, it's too late to save the people she could..
Also the simple fact that there wasn't really a point where she could pop in and say "Here's a way home."
The Borg transwarp Nexus was the best point to hit.
Funny that you should mention the Dominion war, when they got back, it was if it had never happened.
@@KeithustusSo for 20 years they never found any new useful information?
Some of the best dialog in all of Star Trek at the opening of Trials and Tribble-ations when Sisko is interrogated by agents from the Department of Temporal Investigations:
DULMUR: Captain, why did you take the Defiant back in time?
SISKO: It was an accident.
LUCSLY: So you're not contending it was a predestination paradox?
DULMUR: A time loop. That you were meant to go back into the past?
SISKO: Erm, no.
DULMUR: Good.
LUCSLY: We hate those. So, what happened?
SISKO: This may take some time.
DULMUR: Is that a joke?
SISKO: No.
LUCSLY: Good.
DULMUR: We hate those too.
Yeah, that was funny. You know they actually have a vid of that here on youtube. Don't remember were, but I watched it once.
I had forgotten that. That was good.
Yeah but you also got to love the ending. All the Tribbles.
@@qjo Wow. I never made that Scully and Mulder connection. Good one. Thanks.
True
You overlooked Yesterday’s Enterprise in TNG. Pretty reckless sending Tasha back - resulting in Seela’s birth and all the ramifications of that..
I was sure we were gonna see something about Tasha Yar. She's who I thought of with TNG.
She was allowed to join the Ent C with her 24C Starfleet uniform and sidearm, with no orders to pretend to be just another ENT C crew member in case of capture. Any 24C medical procedures done routinely on her as a Starfleet officer might be reverse engineered by Romulan doctors should she literally ”be put under the microscope".
Because there’s not that much of a difference in technology. It’s not like they gave TNG-era warp technology to TOS-era people.
Technically, that was an alternate version of Picard. Prime Picard never made that decision.
But Picard was intentionally sending her back to die in battle, so no one expected her to survive just have a more "meaningful death" and the "ramifications" were ones that could never have been foreseen so how could that be "reckless" at all?
The thing about Janeway is that she has always considered seven as her daughter of sorts. In a way, the story is pretty realistic. Many parents never recover from losing their child and many of them develop mental illnesses and such as a result. Living in a world that gives the option of time travel could easily lead a parent to the sort of steps Janeway went to to save Seven.
Yeah, like annorax in the year of hell 2 parter, drastically changing the timeline to get his wife back. Or bishop when he was chasing cable and hope summers throughout the timeline in the x-men "messiah" crossover trilogy. The difference is that those guys are the bad guys. They are the villains of their stories.
To be fair, Janeway also took the opportunity to bring back a bunch of future anti-borg weapons to blow up that massive borg transwarp hub and infect the hive mind with malware. Soo... technically her plan wasn't just to make things slightly better for her crew, but also to deal a crippling blow the borg collective at a point in time where they would be vulnerable (and also get her crew back early).
Not sure if that makes it any less reckless, though.
I disagree. I think that was a part of her plan all along. Her plan hinged on using the transwarp conduit of the borgs to dump voyager right on Earth's doorstep. It actually makes sense that she does that. Why let a dangerous enemy keep the ability to just show up right at the heart of the Federation whenever they damn well please?
They created a paradox, did Voyager infact ever get back? After all, if they did get back in the end then there's no reason for Janeway to travel back in time to bring Voyager back home so Voyager is never actually rescued by a future Janeway and remains in the Delta Quardrant.
@@4TheRecord Yes and no. By our understanding of logic and physics? Yes. By the Star Trek "universes" understanding? No. Like Captain Janeway said, "Temporal Mechanics gives me a headache".
@@4TheRecord
that is actually not an issue in this scenario because future janeway did interact with present janeway and thus present janeway knows which actions she must take in order to prevent a potential paradox.
Also, despite the fact that Star Trek ignored it in future movies, she retrofitted Voyager with future tech that was powerful enough to destroy Borg Cubes in one shot. There's no way that Starfleet is so altruistic that they just torched the tech in the name of the Temporal Prime Directive. Likely tipped the balance of power in the Alpha/Beta quadrants for quite some time.
"Janeway is audacious, and gutsy, and gets it done, but that doesn't mean she ought to have done it!"
You've done it! You've perfectly summarized VOY!
She is still the only reason I tolerate VOY. In comparison to DS9, VOY has so much cringe that it's really Kate Mulgrew that carries most of the show.
@@Reddotzebra I don't really have a problem with the actress but the writing, oof!
I haven't watched the video yet, but it's Janeway isn't it? How could it not be Janeway.
She drove a time cop insane. OF COURSE it's Janeway.
It's not hard to guess. He has an utter hatred of Janeway.
I would say kirk because no matter what he does he always goes way over the top :D
It has to be Janeway. The one that time travelled to save a couple of her crew members but not all of them. You can't even imagine how many people she wiped out of existence through that sheer arrogance.
Was there really any other choice?
5:58 You completely ignored the fact that in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, McCoy gives pills to an elderly female dialysis patient in the hospital awaiting a transplant which cause her to grow *A NEW KIDNEY!*
lol, that makes me think of the episode of Doctor Who with the medical ship fixing people wrong. "Doctor (not that doctor, the MD working at the place), when I came here I had one leg. Now I have two." "Are you sure you didn't miscount?"
What about Chekov leaving a phaser on the bridge of the aircraft carrier Enterprise?
On " The Voyage Home", Chekov tosses a Klingon weapon at a security officer after it malfunctions. Also Chekov wears 20th century hospital gown, while his 23rd century clothes are left behind.
Old Spock, and Nero passed through a black hole into an alternate universe apart from ours. However they screwed up its time line.
@@Tarvok She was too old to give birth to the next Hitler.
Janeway is a solid second place, but we don't even know how many species - yes whole species - Annorax has erased from history. Dialog in the episode suggests that they've been doing it for so long that even they don't know anymore.
Speaking of species (off topic), how many species and cultures have the Borg assimilated, essentially wiping out their culture? I don't see the Borg acting on any culture but their own: not designating any of the hive to continue such culture, though connected to the give mind. If the hive mind connected all the being-ness of the individuals but allowed the assimilated cultures to be expressed, now that would be an impressive feat. And then the Borg would be interesting to me and not merely an instrument of destruction. They would be the epitome of diversity. The cultures would persist, yet every one would be aware of all the other cultures that have been collected.
How would you like to be fluent in your own language but automatically can speak the whistling language of Sylbo, simply because the culture was preserved in another group in the collective?
Or be an isolated agrarian culture yet know exactly how space travel works and the history of it on other planets? Or knowing the dying cultures and having them kept alive and available for contact and interrelationships as if they thrived natively?
@@ginnyjollykidd
Yes, the terrible thing about the Borg is that they force everyone to become just another identical drone to serve their further conquest.
@@sailordolly
Really, the Borg are missing such great potential.
@riddimann when Voyager destroyed Anorax's time ship, all the species he wiped out were restored as if the time incursion tech was never built. Witness how, at the end of The Year Of Hell Pt 2, Voyager meets a patrol ship from a local race whose captain tells Janeway that "the region is contested". His whole species had been wiped out by Anorax in the middle of the 2-parter, then restored at the time ship's destruction.
Chris Schembari Even if Annorax wasn’t successful in the end, he was definitely the most reckless time traveler in Star Trek, hands down. He was willing to go to any lengths, wipe out entire civilizations, to accomplish his goal. Old Janeway wanted to avoid the borg and sneak voyager through.
In 20 years time you're gonna have to come back to this video again.
Not because you told him to, but because that's just what he does then.
And the brand new cap he gives himself will be 20 years old when he gives it to himself...
In 20 years the answer will still be the crew of Voyager. They did a lot of meddling with time.
I'm so glad you did and Captain Archer, _Enterprise_ / Doctor Beckett, _Quantum Leap_ joke. I know it's low hanging fruit, but sometimes that low fruit is just _so_ sweet.
When he made that joke, I immediately stopped working to thumbs up the video!
At the end of the very first episode of Enterprise I was waiting for him to randomly say "Al, I saved the Klingon, why haven't I lept yet?"
When Archer first usted the transporter i was just specting him to mutter "oh boy!"
@@luisarturoorduna2098 and sparkle blue all over?
I was waiting for Al to appear in the last episode, telling Sam that he had saved/created the Federation. But, due to the extended time in the future, Sam could not leap home.
These are the voyages of Dr. Sam Beckett, time agent #1...
It's interesting to think that in Star Trek 4, the crew traveled in time in a vehicle previously owned my Christopher Lloyd.
What? owned my Christopher Lloyd...? WTF does that even mean?
@@kafkatrap6812 He meant "by" Christopher Lloyd. Lloyd played the Klingon captain in STIII.
@@kafkatrap6812 and he played Dr. Emmett Brown in "Back To The Future"
Love that parallel!
Lloyd was also responsible for creating the patter of Klingon speech, too!
Why hasn't anyone else done: Krughe = Chris Lloyd and Klingon Bird of Prey (scoutship) = De Lorean (automobile)? Or Kruge: BoP as Doc Brown: De Lorean??? Back to the Future movies anyone? Anyone?
"Thanks to Kirk and Spock, we're not speaking german." *pregnant pause*
thanks, got a good laugh out of me
That made me laugh too
You may never see this comment now, but I just had a horrible realization after watching DS9 S4 Ep2 - The visitor, that Jake Sisko is actually the most reckless time traveler - who erases over 60 years of history, costs Jadzia her life, Nog his legs and sparks the entire Dominion war.
On the one hand, you could argue he was correcting a time anomaly that started 60 years ago
Janeway is too obvious a choice. My money on too reckless is alternate timeline Tasha Yar. Leads to clone Tasha, Spock-Romulan relationship, and ultimately new Trek. Yar is responsible for the destruction of Vulcan because she wants to be with her time boyfriend.
Dan Brown Oh yeah, put that immediately behind Janeway
Huh. That's… actually a strong chain of events that I never tied back to Yar before. Interesting. I'm goning to have to think about that.
Dan Brown
Tasha expected that she would die. It is not her fault she survived.
Ms Yar never struck me or was convincing as wanting a boyfriend . Hell she didn't even ACT live she was interested in me. Except to maybe kill or out butch them
Given the chance and theoretical physics being as it is at the moment, I'd go and the back of my hand to the future. Anyone's. According to the "The Many World's" theory, the past mat not, probably want be the past you're trying to get to. As such if you could return to the "present" it would certainly be different. The proposal is that everyone's worldlline has an infinite number of possibilities. By reciprocity, the past worldlines has to have infinite possibilities. At any rate if given a chance everyone should go. It's not likely you're going to fuck up things in the here and now. This is the short regular people's version. The geekage has a lot of math and requires non intuitive thinking. So go step on that moth, push McCoy into that pastry, grab a hot date with your Grandma X nth. Keep in mind of the conservation of information theory: information like energy cannot be destroyed. All knowledge and energy exists at this point. As the Christian Bible says: there is nothing new under the sun.......or was that The Bard????
"We do not discuss it with outsiders".
- Lt. Worf.
Still one of my favorite lines from all of Trek. And say what you will, but the Enterprise arc about that was fun and made it feel like a part of the rest of the Trek universe.
Technically, he was Lt. Cmdr. Worf at that point. He was promoted in _Generations_ and retained that rank throughout his time on DS9.
I glad the writers went that route. An explanation for why the Klingons looked so different is one of things that could have stopped the episode dead for several minutes while Worf explained it. I think a non-answer was the best way to handle it in that particular case.
I knew some nit picky geek would make the rank correction
Holy crap, I'm completely with you when you pause and wonder how the heck did time go by so quickly. I remember watching TNG premiere as a child! Good Lord!
I remember Star Trek : TOS 2 years after it came out . LoL . I'm 50 in June. 5 - 10 year periods doesn't sound long and believe me , I think alot about how there's more days behind me ( and Picard )than there are ahead .
Q is the best written character of any written work of art I've ever encountered. John de Lancie did a masterful job on his performance. The humor, the wit, the sarcasm, the vulnerability, the yearning for true friendship. Q is the misunderstood troll of the Star Trek universe. All hail Q!
"that was... 7 years ago?"
Yes, Steve, when one gets to 40-ish, time suddenly goes Warp 9.5.
Future me to past me: "Buy Amazon stock."
Past me to future me: I don't have enough money to buy stocks, man.
Buy TH-cam and Facebook stock
Janeway did not travel back in time to save a couple of lives and get Tuvok treatment... She did it to defeat the Borg!
Nope. That was secondary and even tertiary as a goal. And it’s pretty clearly deicted that the Federation was kicking the shit out of the borg in the future having reached a tech level that gave them a big advantage, and for all we know Janeway may have undid that with what she changed.
That's what I thought
Hmmm... I think what made time travel so risky in ST IV was the fact they were doing it in a damaged Klingon ship where several characters mentioned or showed a dubious mastery of the Klingon control systems. Oh and Scotty did change the timeline... we have transparent aluminum now.
Spock having to calculate time travel on the fly after being resurrected may not have helped matters much.
I came here to say the same thing! A bird of prey is basically an attack sub, nowhere near as sturdy as a Constitution-class vessel.
Also the fact that after the first 2 times the Enterprise probably got upgrades to protect it.
And let's not forget the crew got themselves back to their time pretty casually at the end of First Contact. As long as the ship was intact, the threat of being stranded didn't seem to cross their minds.
"thanks for Kirk were not speaking German" I kinda wished for that joke a second before it came. very nice.
Funny and terribly sad at the same time, lol
That hat paradox reminds me of another object centered paradox in a time travel movie entitled "Somewhere in Time" starring Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour.
In it, a young character played by Reeve is given a watch by an old woman played by Seymour.
Years later, Reeve's character manages to travel decades into the past, finds the Seymour character, who is now much younger than when they first met, and gives her that same watch.
A watch with no apparent origin.
The watch was in the movie, not the book. So blame the screenwriter
Much the same could be said for the reading glasses McCoy gave Kirk in ST:TVH, which he had to pawn to get the money he passed out to the crew in past San Francisco, so that McCoy could buy them for him centuries later.
They're all time travel episodes, just most of the time, they're traveling in the same direction at the same rate.
And also they are all set in the future for us. That's time travel to the viewers.
If their Heisenberg Compensaters go out of alignment, they could end up flying way into the future at relativistic sp- "Those are part of the transporters, idiot."
Except that one episode where Kes goes back in time, and "all good things" from the Next Generation.
Upvoted to 100, just because I like round numbers. 100% disagree with your comment though.
Oh! Haha, that's funny!
Hey, you forgot to mention that in Star Trek IV, Kirk was using Klingon Brown's Delorean of Prey, so time traveling to the 1980s shouldn't be too unexpected. GREAT SCOTT!
Dear god, I never wven realized that!
It could mean that the mid-1980's inherently contains some sort of cosmic significance. Almost as if it were the junction point for the entire fictional space-time continuum! On the other hand it could just be an amazing coincidence.
That is why is was so much more dangerous, because The Enterprise was a lot more able to handle the stress than a stolen Bird of Prey, so it was no wonder they barely made it back with all the extra mass of a whale tank
@@ArgonTheAware plus, Scotty didn't retrofit the Klingon Taxi with a Mr. Fusion reactor - the real reason why it almost ran out of power in San Francisco.
It's Janeway. I'm shocked.
Who caused global warming? Janeway.
Who shot JFK? Janeway.
Who caused the Black Plague? Janeway.
Who gave Thanos the Time Stone? Janeway.
Who cancelled Firefly? Janeway.
Who wrote Batman v Superman? Janeway.
Who is Steve's mom?
Okay, things make sense now.
Rest in peace Firefly... You died too young.
"Who controls the British Crown?
Who keeps the metric system down?
Janeway! Janeway!"
"where did the time go?" - I wonder the same thing every time I look at my kid - also "where the hell did that thing come from?".
Watching this in 2024 is. A trip.
For real.
I know why they never made time trek. Because they already have Doctor Who
Time-trek, it’s bound to be a spinoff series sometime down the line. We already have two new series in the works, so why not tap into the established future presence of a time traveling branch of Starfleet?
I so want those two shows to be in the same universe. Like the TARDIS lands on the bridge of the Enterprise and Spock gives everybody a lesson on Gallifrey and Time Lords. Then the Doctor defeats the Klingons with a spoon.
@@gregm766 Or giving Worf a Jelly Baby
What is Doctor Who? I'm joking. He's that owl from Whinnie the Pooh, right?
They don't need to be in the same universe, just the same multiverse; The Doctor can travel to alternate universes/timelines as established in S2E5 of the new series (though he mentions that because the Time Lords aren't around anymore to fix things it's dangerous to damage the universe(s) in that way ¯\_(ツ)_/¯).
"Assignment Earth"'s time travel was just an excuse to let Roddenberry make his Gary Seven pilot by shoving the Star Trek people into it.
Yup! That would have qualified as a "Time Trek" show, in my opinion.
There's also the fact that it was supposed to be right after the episode where they accidentally get sent back in time and end up having to kidnpa that one fighter pilot because he got too close to the Enterprise as it limped back up to orbit but CBS messed with the order the episodes aired
@@MrGoesBoom Yeah, CBS just continued to mess everything up!
They're probably rolling in their graves to where they can kick themselves in the A$$!
...and the upper echelon in charge is still making mistakes in regards to their ill-gotten gain! :-/
@@MrGoesBoom NBC ran the original "Star Trek," not CBS
That is called a "back door pilot". It's kind of a scam to get the powers that be to pay for the production of a pilot, instead of the creators paying for it.
I remember one in THE NANNY, and in an episode of MARRIED WITH CHILDREN.
They just insert familiar characters from the current show briefly into the pilot.
In the case of THE NANNY, the episode was all about some naive girl getting a job in a beauty shop. It became a short lived series.
Can't remember the one from MARRIED too well. I think it was about a father & son living together. The father was scheming for the son to marry for money. I think it was a short lived series too.
Off the hop... was that "Thank you" or "Thank Q"?
Bless Q
It was from the never-aired "Phở Q", a time-traveling episode, where the ship is thrown back to the Tet Offensive as a Continuum test.
@@argonwheatbelly637 really? The Tet Offensive? Couldn't it be some other time in Vietnamese history, apart from its 20C wars? In that case, Phõ Q could be a Quantum Leap reference, too. The absolute one time that we saw a leap take Sam Beckett outside the USA, he lands in the Vietnam War, surrounded by Americans. What are the odds?
I guess all of Sam's leaps into other lands where English is not often spoken occurred after the series finale, when the bartender/"God" character told Sam that the leaps would be getting harder from then on...
"Hallowed are the Q, aye."
Honorable mention to Alternate Odo in "Children of Time," where the Defiant crew crash lands on a planet and discovers an entire civilization built by them being sent back further in time during an escape attempt. Sure there was no perfect answer, being forced to choose their old lives and families vs the 8,000 descendants they'd have on the planet, but Alt. Odo was so determined to keep Kira alive he defies the wishes of the crew, sends the Defiant back, and erases those 8k from ever existing. There wasn't a good solution but holy crap did that episode leave me messed up inside 0_0
6:01 Scotty"s just like, "Whatever, for all I know Arnold Ripner over here invented it. History, shmistory!"
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha, omg, that's funny!
Love the hat sequence at the end. No time travel story ever really stands up to much scrutiny. For _proof_ I refer you to Futurama, Bender's Big Score, Jurassic Bark etc...
Can't wait to see the Elim Garak episode.
When he started talking about a "plain, simple" character I got a wile-wide grin on my face. I can't wait!
I have a lot to learn, I didn't know his first name.
"Was Time Trax really 25 years ago?"
My heart, I'm old. Thanks for the reminder, Steve!
Oh to see this 4 years later and laugh at how much more time travel is to come very, very soon to you. I'd love a follow-up video.
So are we just going to forget the time that Kira went back in time for a fact-finding/soul-searching mission and then tried to kill Gul Dukat and her own mother? I guess so.
Did she go back in time, or was that a vivid orb experience?
I always interpreted that as the Orb showing her what happened and it never had any risk of alteration because there's no reference to any changes that should have happened
Actually… Section 31 and the Bureau of Temporal Investigations, in rare concert, agreed that this was to be forgotten by ALL.
Yes, I think the reason the bomb didn’t kill then wasn’t cuz of Kira’s change of heart, but because the orb experience meant that the orb was always gonna protect the timeline lol maybe
I enjoy your Trek discussions. May not always agree with them, but you do make good arguments. Keep it up.
"We barely even tried" I laughed loud kkkk
sounds about right.
Although it's probably exactly what's going to happen, for some reason I think it would habe been funnier if Future!Steve responded with, "Oh, we totally took care of that. Not that it mattered in the end though…," and just looks off to the side with a look of remembering the horror only he know about.
This whole area would just be RETURNING to the sea, anyway. All of this used to be called...wait for it... 'The Great Ocean'!
Yeah... The dinosaurs sucked at naming stuff.
I'm super happy to be getting a Garak episode! Keep up the excellent work Steve!
I feel like Jake in The Visitor (DS9) is comparable to Harry in Timeless too? He lived a whole life without his father, then erased it all to get him back. Sure, it wasn't the best life, as he was obsessed with bringing his father back the whole time and pursued that rather than his other interests. But he still erased it when he could have simply let his life stand as it was.
yeah but then he couldn't harp on Janeway for as long
Scotty blithely gave away the recipe for transparent aluminum, and now we actually HAVE TRANSPARENT ALUMINUM!!
Time Trek = Doctor Who
_[IDW's frustration intensifies]_
Shouldn't that be Time Trek > Doctor Who? :)
I am commenting before I watch the video... I'm going to say Janeway is the most reckless time traveler.
She has mentioned multiple times that temporal mechanics give her a headache and that she really doesn't care... Admiral Janeway said it's best to just ignore the temporal prime directive.
The time police (whatever they are called) from the USS Relativity think that Voyager shows up in their sensors far too often.
And our peeps from the 29th century have a point. Didn't Voyager have something like ~9 time travel plots across 7 seasons... 3 of those were in the first season (don't quote me on that).
Janeway was a captain for 7 years. She has a record of 14 violations, especially including the rather unfortunate incident at the end of the series. Yes. She was a very naughty captain.
It should also be known that Janeway is the only reason those 29th Century Time Police have the ability to have her show up on their sensors. As she is kind of time travel Prometheus.
One of the early Voyager books also involved a complex time travel arrangement, with a civilization that regularly rewound time to correct negative events. Somehow three of the Voyager crew wind up breaking one of their temporal laws, and get locked up. The authorities on the planet had to do several rewinds to thwart all of B'Elanna's escape attempts...
@@TheJadeFist The caretaker basically begged her to destroy it...
it wasn't an easy choice, she wanted to get her crew home!
@@TheJadeFist exactly. Janeway and Tuvok never even *tried* to use the Array to fight off the Kazon ship attacking Voyager, maybe use its tractor beam to repulse the Kazon ship into the next star system, which would buy her all the time needed to figure out how to get Voyager AND the Array to the Alpha Quadrant, where it could be studied by Starfleet for years. It'd probably be as "simple" as deactivating any mechanism that tethers the Array to its current position in space, then locking the Array's tractor beam onto some object much more massive than the Array itself, like a star or a black hole, while tractoring Voyager along for the ride. The writers never gave us a reason why this couldn't be done.
My favourite time travel moment was the time police guy's response to Sisko telling him he met Captain Kirk "That man was a public menace"
I'm rather annoyed we never got to see the Temporal Investigations guys again. I actually think they could have had their own spin-off.
Perhaps it wouldn't be in their MO to have them travelling in time, but they could be a sort of "CSI-Space-time" investigating temporal infractions and incursions.
@@woodgatejack Same. I haven't read them, but I believe there is a series of a few _Star Trek_ novels about the Department of Temporal Investigation. Really need to pick them up at some point.
Dulmer and Lucsly. Aka Mulder and Scully. 17 violations of the temporal prime directive.
@@woodgatejack funny. I always thought following the time agents woukd be a cool series, but also a sort of like ... Star Trek: JAG series could be cool too. I was rewatching Measure of a Man a few years ago, and just thought how interesting it woukd be gonna be a series exploring the decisions of all of these space explorers all the time - plenty of room for a wide variety of aliens and all that, but with that courtroom and investigation stuff that so many people like. Or if not strictly JAG, it could be Federation operations in general ... like a political series - they allude to tensions in the administrations in several series (I'm not sure about TOS), and despite how great Picard always says it is, I'm sure there are bad people in high places doing naughty things (Discovery seems to be fleshing that out more, but Discovery is also before the more cohesive Federation that TNG and on had established). There are really so many different kinds of Treks you could have 😃 They don't all have to be about space exploration, (though I'll still watch all of those too 😎). I've been curious about how civilians live and relate in this utopian society of the future since I was a kid 😏
I love your review of Star Trek time travel episodes. While I understand that some folks don't consider ST:TAS to be canon, I think the episode "Yesteryear" is an intriguing concept where Spock used The Guardian of Forever to go back in time to save himself as a child. Not reckless on Spock's part, but a great story IMHO.
'It's like boilerplate villain talk, there is no plan' as a UK citizen this reflects exactly how I feel about Brexit.
I had a dream (probably after watching a lot of Doctor Who) in which my niece and I went back to 1997 to follow my past self.
"What if he recognises you?" My niece asked
"I shouldn't worry too much. He's very egotistical and self-involved. His self image is so askew, he wouldn't recognise himself if he saw himself from the outside, even if I walked into him." I replied as I scanned the crowded middle-distance for him (we were on Tottenham Court Road, London)
"Hey! wasn't that him?" exclaimed my niece, indicating a sullen, 20-something man, in a black trench-coat, with already receding hair, who had just brushed past me, unnoticed.
"Huh? Oh yeah!" I replied "See, I told you!"
Now, why am I not surprised who came in at number 1?
because she got a hologram with a mobile emitter stolen from the future
Because he has an ax to grind. Nevermind Genocidical Nero, or Revenge driven Captin Braxton who tries to murder all of Voyager. Janeway sucks!
I was not surprised either and I like Voyager.
Didn't she extremely hinder the Borg in the process tho?
@@Goujiki She did, and if the writers were actually thinking, they would have made that her main motivation. Perhaps the galaxy of the early 25th century is slowly being overrun by the Borg Collective, and the transwarp hub of the episode was the best bet to screw them over and get rid of their chief means of travel to boot, with the salvation of Seven, Chakotay and the like being a perk. Maybe in the future timeline they could have had a line about the Romulans falling to the Borg or numerous frontier colonies going out, to up the stakes.
I hate to disagree Steve, but not sure "Star Trek has always had terrible continuity" is a great defense of Discovery. From TNG in 1987 to Enterprise in 2005 we've had 4 series and 5 movies that did try to stay in some sort of continuity / shared universe. Complaining about Discovery in this context does seem valid to me.
I am a fan of Discovery, I just don't think that specific point is a great defense.
I'm a fan of Discovery too ... just not its idea of Klingons 😅 But yeah, pointing out the lack of consistency in the past isn't really an excuse for on-going or future inconsistencies. It's better to try and fix those inconsistencies, find a way to logic them together somehow ... or just try to pretend they don't exist and move past them 😏
@@redavatar Discovery hasn't changed anything. Filling in gaps in canon is not the same thing as a retcon.
Brian Ortiz It’s also the first Star Trek to get sued for copyright infringement because they didn’t want to use warp drive anymore and “make up” some crazy spore drive that has never been mentioned in any other series.
Seriously, that show isn’t Star Trek - they were just afraid if they called it something else no one would watch.
My husband and I absolutely love watching your stuff. You're hilarious thought-provoking and just all around a great content creator.
I completely admire your recognition of the side of Janeway doing what could and would be seen as good while also facing the bad it embodies.
The ending of Voyager was appropriate because it sealed the image of Janeway as a reckless captain who touts Federation ideals like the Prime Directive while violating those same ideals regularly.
22:2
“It’s only hubris if I fail” - Ceasar
4:23 I have a better answer: they were doing it in an unfamiliar ship. The crew had done time travel many times before on the Enterprise, a Constitution-class ship which they were familiar with. They worked on it literally all the time and they knew how to travel through time safely in it. In Star Trek IV though, they have to do it in a Klingon Bird of Prey, a ship that they have not flow man frequently before and which they have no idea how it will handle the time jump. It might not be able to handle it as good as the Enterprise could. There. In-universe explanation in why it’s seen as difficult
Plus one can assume the BoP was old and in a rough shape at the time unlike the Enterprise which, as flagship of Starfleet, was most likely the peak of Starfleet engineering.
You’re really reminding me how much I liked Time Trax but also how much I forgot about that show.
How did time travel go from seemingly routine in "Operation Earth" to dangerous and uncertain in "The Voyage Home?" The former was done in his own Enterprise in which he had already gone back in time and Spock had worked out the details based on that. In the latter, he had to do it in a stolen Klingon ship to bring back an extinct whale.
@19:00, You're wrong. Less than half of the crew of Voyager made it home, most of the bridge crew survived, but they are a minority. Admiral Janeway couldn't live with the survivor's guilt. When she was confidant that the tech she had to share was enough to overpower the Borg, she went to the past. Reckless doesn't describe what she did.
or even if it was reckless, it was still justified
Janeway was angry that the remaining Voyager crew was happy. She couldn't allow that.
I know how you feel, dude. I'm pushing 40 too (currently 38). Every Xennial right now is feelin' it.
The personal time travel segment was pretty something weird.
LOL dude, this was beautiful. The layout and explanations was very well done and the periodic and escalating breakdown as you become aware of the passing of your own personal timeline was genius.
"Boilerplate-villain-talk" ... That needs to make its way into a movie. Great phrasing.
"There's nothing you can do that can't be done" -John Lennon, "All You Need is Love"
Wow, this episode was uploaded today, as in, like, TODAY. March 13th, 2019.
And in one year from now, on March 13th, 2020, there'll be so many other comments that this one will be buried under a mass of electronic digital debris, and no one will ever know it existed.
Great work, Steve!
Hello from 2024!
There's a good reason the time travel in Star Trek 4 was harder. They weren't in a Federation ship. The Enterprise was a lot more capable, and had a lot of Scotty magic done to it. In 4 they were in a beat up old Klingon bird of prey that didn't have the warp power the Enterprise did. In addition, for the return trip, the dilithium was messed up which meant they couldn't get to the necessary warp speed. Spock was able to successfully compensate by altering their trajectory, but they weren't sure it would work.
You missed one. When Janeway (Admiral Janeway) travels back in time and provides the then Voyager with weapons and armor to combat the Borg. - Mind you, that would've made so much more sense if it had happened prior to them encountering Species 8472 (Undine).
Literally watched the Past Tense episodes the other day.
It's literally one of the best pieces of art I've ever encountered.
I show people those episodes if they've never seen Trek, and it has a 100% success rate of conversion.
Dude.... I like your videos, really enjoy them already.... but with that nudge to Quantum Leap at about before 3:00 you made me laugh so hard it's a wonder my neighbours didn't come down asking what's going on :-D
Love it. And brilliantly delivered. :-)
I've always thought a Trek series set on a time ship would be interesting.
Trek Who? I think one ship which can move freely across the universe is sufficient to destroy the time line.
if janeway traveled back to the beginning seven would still be a borg
+ And all the "Maquis" crewmembers would still be part of the Maquis (unless killed). She made them Voyager -- and therefore Starfleet -- crewmembers. That's a huge plus in my book.
+ All the experience and information she brought back from the Delta quadrant was another huge plus, probably the biggest. Among them: biological and medical data about dozens of civilizations, the extent of the Borg menace, at least half a dozen ways to travel thousands of lightyears (some of them capable of more if not for a few quirks), etc.
+ At least some among the crew were from the Delta quadrant. Neelix (possibly a negative), Icheb, 7of9 (debatable -- if you count her as human, she was brought back home).
But there's another huge difference, and that's a negative:
-- Using future technology against the Borg, which might give them a chance to adapt next time. The armor technology should be an easy one; the Borg were probably not used to any federation ship with significant armor. While the Defiant is heavily armored, the Borg cube that engaged in battle during First Contact could probably not transmit a lot of useful data back home. OTOH the Voyager encountered 100s of Borg vessels at one point, and many of them survived when the warp node collapsed. The Borg will rebuild, and bump the federation to the top of the threat list.
The gag about Captain Jonathan Arche never returning home was great.
I didn't watch voyager, but I recently watched a retrospective on the events of the show.
Janeway going back had a LOT of consequences, on par with the kelven timeline. But because getting the voyager crew home years early, giving the federation a massive leg up in technology-from-the-future, and crippling the borg queen is all to the benefit of our protagonists, be don't bother looking at the unused timeline.
Janeway's time travel brought better understanding and tech about the Borg to the Federation.
Thank you so much for the Quantum Leap reference! A+. Would LOL again.
It occurs to me that you may not be familiar with the bootstrap paradox. It featured prominently in a movie I saw. It worked like this:
Elvis impersonator goes back in time to meet Elvis before he was famous. Elvis thinks he's his dead twin brother then a demon and tries to fight the Elvis impersonator. Elvis dies in the scuffle so the fake Elvis buries real Elvis and takes his place to make sure Elvis's music gets written.
The question and paradox is this: If Elvis is dead before he writes all the songs and fake elvis only knows the songs because Elvis wrote them then who wrote the music?
DS9 episode you mentioned where Sisko becomes Bell is a Bootstrap Paradox. Your hat sketch is a Bootstrap paradox.
The solution (or one proposed solution) to that paradox is divergent timelines, meaning Elvis wrote his music in one timeline, the impersonator created another as soon as he arrived. The thing is, in this scenario there is no fixing the timeline nor returning to your own. The future the time traveler may return to no matter what it looks like is not the one he came from.
It always irked me a tiny bit that Trek couldn’t decide what rules applied in their universe. We clearly see parallel and divergent timelines, but it’s also shown that many characters at least think that they can restore timelines through simple linear time travel.
Someone wrote a time travel story where a guy time travels and gets a sex change operation and becomes both his mother and father.
This would be a good concept for an episode. Crew stumbles into a Federation captain endlessly trying to go back in time and change things to create some impossibly perfect outcome.
I’d argue that Generations didn’t really feature time travel. They say you can exit the nexus at any point in time, but people seem to only exit after they entered. The only exception was how Picard opted barely jump back a few min.
Time traveling to the 1980's in a clunky old Bird of Prey would be considered pretty dangerous. I reckon Spock has no trouble time travelling the USS Enterprise cuz the ship is far more reliable.
"did so to correct temporal incursions, to restore history that had been altered. Archer wasn't being recklessly, he was striving to put right what once went wrong, hoping that each time his next leap...would be the leap home."
Dr. Mccoy saved Edith Keller and prevented the US from getting into WW2.
Checkov leaves his phaser on the Aircraft carrier Enterprise in Star Trek 4.
I wonder if McCoy saving Edith Keeler creates the mirror universe? Also, perhaps they just beamed up the items left behind by Chekov on their way out of San Fran?
@@dorianlindberg1662
A mirror universe like the one where Kirk, Uhuru, and McCoy meet an "anti - universe" containing a rather Klingon - style promotion system?
Or when they encounter a man and his opposite where one wants to leave a connecting corridor open and the other moves to seal it shut to prevent the annihilation of both universes, both forms of the man grappling forever in that corridor.
Ginny Jolly
The dude fighting his opposite self, was a favorite of mine.
The end, with him being stuck fighting for eternity, was nice.
@@CorbCorbin
It's one hell of a self - sacrifice.
Chekov's phaser didn't work, probably due to the radiation, so the spooks interviewing him assumed it was a Sci-fi Con prop reject and threw it in a junk drawer, never to be examined by any engineer. OR the spooks thought about what a report on the Russkie who penetrated a military nuclear facility and mysteriously escaped would do to their own careers, and buried it all.
I’d like to offer a counterpoint to your idea that, “routine time-travel is boring” in regards to the use of time travel in Star Trek IV. I will readily agree that if time travel is routine, it’s definitely not interesting, but I think the reason why they made it seem so difficult in Star Trek IV is the fact that they weren’t using federation technology or a starship, they were using a Klingon bird of prey.
In the film, the crew routinely derides the type of technology that the Klingons had on the ship, and also readily acknowledged their unfamiliarity with some of the devices on board. It’s similar to federation technology, but it’s not exactly the same. So, to me, it would stand to reason that there would be some hesitance to use time travel because of their lack of familiarity with the technology.
On top of that, the Klingon ship was also badly damaged and needed to be repaired by the Vulcans. So, you had a mishmash of Klingon technology and Vulcan technology, which would mean the compatibility would be a little bit off. On top of that, it’s pretty clear that the Bird of prey would not be accustomed to going at speeds beyond warp seven. I don’t recall offhand exactly what speed it took place, but after it hit warp seven, everything started to shake and a section exploded in Uhura’s face. Clearly, a Klingon bird of prey would not be able to handle speeds beyond that, to say nothing of whatever speed is necessary to break the time barrier.
In general, I just believe that the usage of the Klingon ship added an extra level of concern for everyone involved.
What surprises me is that time travel is less common considered by the distances and speed the enterprise travels forces time travel.
Steve, having just finished watching this video I am firmly convinced that Janeway is one of Georgiou's more vicious descendents!
I feel like you left out the part where Janeway's "recklessness" destroyed the ability of the Borg to have any real presence in Federation space by... IDK - blowing up the hyperspace conduits the Borg were using for FTL travel, even though that tech pre-dated the Borg and they couldn't possibly rebuild it - or something? She struck the most crippling blow to the most powerful enemy of the Federation, right?
I haven't kept up with all the Trek since then. Did anyone ever do anything more badass than that?
Sisko punched Q in the mouth. Nothing tops that. Lol
Being a great Star Trek captain isn't about being "badass". It's about doing the right thing. Sometimes that means being badass. But as Steve points out, Janeway's feat is a story usually reserved for villains.
I agree with this message.
Borg ships have their own transwarp coils to travel faster than normal warp speeds. Voyager's crew tried to steal one.
Also, since when did Starfleet have the justification of "it's ok to travel back in time so long as you SMITE THE ENEMIES OF THE FEDERATION!!!"
Why not go back in time and destroy the Dominion?
at lest you can still say your in your 30's for a wail longer. its nitpicky but its something I miss being able to honestly say.
“No not him the real god...thank you!”
Don’t you mean “Thank Q!”
Woosh
Way back in '66 a television program that ran on ABC was "The Time Tunnel" that was about... well, time travel. It was not a bad show as I remember it.
I'd love to see Wesley as the current Traveler doing Time Trek. Basically just Doctor Who, but it's Star Trek. And Wesley.
Wheaton's pretty awesome now. He was kind of annoying in TNG, but I'd definitely watch him reprise his role as adult Wesley.
You see time is..
Time is like a ball... Of squishy wishy plot devicey.. stuff.
wibbly, wobbly, timey, wimey..... stuff.
I wish ytube had FB-like emojis for this.
And fezzes are cool...
Fezzes and excessivly long scarves.
Imagine four balls on the edge of a cliff...
Fucken paradoxes, man. I had the same argument with myself about a lighter. I argued if it’s the same lighter being passed down every 20 years then the lighter still ages/wears when I hand it back to myself.
Was this a lighter you had recently used to ignite a joint?
Well, that's at least a partial solution to the Paradox, the loop has no beginning but definitely has an end.
@Matt Ell the only joints I roll are my ankles.
I watched this again after some time and LOL’ed so hard. I forgot about the sketch at the end, which doesn’t drag at all!
“The taking time donut” that’s what I’m calling the guardian of forever now
I just started the video. Is it Janeway?
EDIT: Shit it is Janeway.
4:32 Time Travel in a clapped-out Klingon Bird of Prey (which is lucky it can fly through space, let alone time!) MIGHT be just a tad more exciting than in a state-of-the-art Federation starship.
5:42 Sprichst du nicht deutsch?
12:19 Two months away from 39? I'm 9 months away from 69, bro. Cop a chill pill!
20:14 Not regular cast members ... they don't count (obviously!).
20:38 Which follows the example of someone else who "broke the rules" with the Kobayashi Maru test, though on a much larger scale and with considerably greater impact.
27:51 "Who's on first?" "What's on second?" "I don't know." "Third base!"
So ... Ohio's on the East Coast 20 years from now? Here's hoping my place is on high enough ground! I think it is...
Why isn't it keine Deutsch?
really enjoyed "this doesn't get paid off at all".
I was really hoping for a Dale Midkiff cameo
The bridge crew in the early seasons of TNG regularly discussed the risks of space exploration as their crewmates died, and they regularly came across starships that encountered the perils. If Janeway can't accept the very nature of atttrition in starfleet, then that teases other crews who might hope they can be time travelled back into existence if only their captains were more awesome.
"You don't have to take my word for it" Hahaha! LeVar Kunta LaForge Reading Rainbow Roots