Star Trek: Discovery (Page 7 of 15)

“Through the Valley of Shadows” writers Bo Yeon Kim and Erika Lippoldt explained to SyFy that nobody mentioned time crystals because it wasn’t relevant to Worf’s reasons for visiting the planet.

“Boreth has always been carefully established as a sacred place for the Klingons — and that’s not something we wanted to muck up,” the writers revealed. “Instead, we wanted to EXPAND on existing canon and the functionality of Boreth by introducing a hidden sect of monks who have dedicated their lives to guarding the time crystals. We loved the notion that this otherwise fierce warrior race has learned not to mess with something as dangerous and volatile as time.

“Worf would not have been granted access to the part of Boreth’s monastery that housed the crystals,” they continued, noting “that’s not why Worf was there.” They say to explain any more about the time crystals risks “spoiling the finale episodes.”

Discovery and the Future: Star Trek's No Man's Sky Problem

Discovery and Exploration underlie the mission of the UFP, but as we work our way into the future, we run the risk of eroding into nihilism, and missing what it was that made this all worthwhile to start with.

In the TOS era, space was largely undefined, but small. This worked well. Time travel was used a bit heavy-handedly but in general, space was a linear vehicle used to drive stories forward, stories anchored in Kirk, Spock, and McCoy.

In TNG, things were much the same. The Federation was fleshed out as an entity (spawning hundreds of threads about how fast warp actually is vs. how big the Federation actually is), and we received more backstory from a number of nearby empires (which were largely monocultural for the sake of narrative). Picard +/- Data replaced the trifecta. DS9 played in this world as well, with the majority of the series dominated by control of a strategic asset and subsequent war over it, anchored in human responses to conflict both external and spiritual. The TOS and TNG movies played with this space as well, with only Nemesis really having long-reaching effects on the physical universe we know of (changes on Romulus).

Voyager was flung across the galaxy and the motive force behind the story was their desire to get home. The vastness of space ensured their isolation, but even then many of the stories started to seem derivative of those that came before. Eventually, VOY anchored itself on the Borg for multiple seasons.

Every subsequent work within Trek has been insular and bound by canon on both sides: ENT, DIS, and the NuTrek movies. ENT exploded the time travel concept and dabbled in future elements created by VOY with decent success. All good.

Now, though, Discovery is going far into the future. Many threads are discussing hope of seeing a future version of the Federation. Assuming they're in the Milky Way and they're not playing a grand temporal game that caused the UFP to be destroyed somewhere along the way, we'll likely get that.

Space is too big

As we move technology forward beyond Voyager, we start to run into a problem: the sheer vastness of space. With each decade warp travel gets faster. The Universe-class ship has been described as traversing the galaxy if not other galaxies. As we speed things up, the universe may seem to get smaller, but we ultimately have to face the truth. It's too big, but for the most part, it's all the same.

No Man's Sky illustrates this. There are 18.4 quintillion planets in the game (18,446,744,073,709,551,616), and constant complaints that things aren't really that different. Now, that's a lot of planets. In the known universe, though, there are an estimated 10²⁴ stars alone, the vast majority of which likely contain planets of some kind (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars).

If you visited 1000 stars a second, it would take you 31.7 billion millennia to visit them all. Exploration is grand, but as an entity, the Federation becomes wholly meaningless in such a universe (the same way nation-states tend to look meaningless in science fiction that has introduced alien life). As our ships get faster and we head off to other galaxies, we find new stories, but also stories that are largely the same, and as we spread our net wider, the region of space we call home starts to seem less and less important.

Voyager ran into this problem. Everything new was derivative of the original archetypes, so they stuck with something well-known. ENT and DIS benefited from what came before. But if you can zip across the universe at near-infinite speed, we start to wonder what the motivation for everything is. Everything is different, but not that different. Exploration is infinite but also finite.

We get at this occasionally, in threads wondering aloud why anyone would sign into Starfleet. The gist: "You're going to get on a ship and spend most of your life tapping at a console in engineering (most don't get to be Captain), for no pay, likely to see things that for the most part have already been discovered or are similar to the same, and possibly die in a horrific fashion somewhere along the way?" Underlying such a thought tends to be the sentiment that there isn't anything out there worth exploring anymore; why wouldn't you just stay home?

We would, of course, still explore. This is similar to saying there are more towns on Earth than you would ever visit -- and why would you? Outside of regional differences, here is not so different from down the street. This problem scales into the universe as well. There are more stores to be told, of course: Trek has never introduced a race far-older than humanity, that might view them as playthings (but are not straight-up gods a la Q).

Time is too complex

...but also more of the same.

One angle that is being discussed is that the Federation will eventually become a fourth-dimensional power, discovering other races from other times that exist outside the flow of linear time. That, similar to the discovery of warp and the rise into the galactic community, the Federation will harness time drives and rise into a new temporal community. This will be a tremendous source of story fodder, and it wouldn't surprise me if observing this transition is a direction that DIS moves in.

Ultimately, this larger temporal community suffers some unique challenges (congestion as races attempt to escape the heat death of the universe), and it'll be fun to explore them. We've explored a number already in Voyager (Year of Hell, the Q Continuum lying outside of time, its stagnation and subsequent war). But the universe, from a functional human perspective, goes on forever, as does time, and there's a limit to what truly unique things wait to be explored out there.

Q alluded to this reality in the end of All Good Things. The true exploration is not out there, but within. We see this in character interactions and discoveries, new patterns of thought being shared, and the diversities therein. Q identifies this specifically as the next step for humanity: when Picard broke through his assumptions and discovered a new way of thinking about the problems he faced. To push the boundaries not of Federation space, but of thought.

That's where, someday, Trek must go next.