Logline
La’An travels back in time to twenty-first-century Earth to prevent an attack which will alter humanity’s future history—and bring her face to face with her own contentious legacy.
Written by David Reed
Directed by Amanda Row
Note: This is a second attempt, as technical difficulties were preventing people from seeing the original discussion post. Apologies to the people who were able to comment in the original.
I enjoyed that episode a lot, although it would have benefitted from its length being tightened up by ten minutes.
What do we think was the nature of the Romulan interference with Earth? And what time period is Sera, the Romulan agent from?
The DTI agent appears to use 29th century tech, which is several hundred years after the Romulan Empire’s supernovae-driven collapse but possibly around the time of the Romulan-Vulcan reunification of Ni’Var. Is she from that same time period?
Sera also shows Kirk a picture of what looks like a TOS-era Bird-of-Prey as part of her alien conspiracy photo deck. It has the round nacelles typical of the 23rd century, rather than those seen in ENT’s 22nd century designs, or some other design representing the 20th/21st century in which these attacks take place.
Is she a time agent from the 23rd century (with the appropriate Romulan ship in orbit)?
Is that her guessing who Kirk is, and planting the evidence he’s most likely to recognize? Or was that really a Romulan design from the 21st century?
Which leads to me wonder if the Romulans started interfering with Earth’s development only due to temporal war shenanigans, or had they been doing flybys for as long as the Vulcans?
Never thought that letting an episode run longer in streaming would be viewed as a negative.
I wouldn’t have cut anything.
I agree. I’m usually the first to complain when it’s obvious a show/movie needed an editor to cut unnecessary filler but this this episode used its time well IMO.
I don’t think their issue was the length per se. Rather, if you cut it shorter, you quicken the pacing and remove the parts of the story that didn’t need to be there. At least that’s how I interpret it when someone says runtime could be tightened up.
What didn’t need to be there though? Very few scenes were wasted, the all gave us something, be it exposition or character work.
Maybe, Sera is from a 29th century Romulan Star Empire that wasn’t devastated by a supernova. Could the destruction of Romulus have been the result of a time war?
It’s almost a throwaway line but I’m pretty sure she implies 21st century Romulans are interfering with Earth independently, and she’s running a parallel mission?
I suspect we will never get answers to any of that. The DTI has always been more about driving fun plots than establishing any sort of clear worldbuilding about how they work. And that’s probably for the best, because time travel really doesn’t make much sense, and that only becomes more obvious the longer you spend trying to make it make sense.
They literally just clarified how time travel works in this episode. Clarifying the DTI books take that only big probability wave changes form stable alternates, most collapse back to the “prime” waveform and reinsert key events elsewhere if they’re interfered with. Also we know we have at least one other time travel episode this year from Mariner and Boimler to appear.
Sure, but that clarification only holds until another writer on another time travel episode decides they need different mechanics for whatever story they want to tell. Because time travel is nothing more than a plot device, its nature changes depending on the plot it’s facilitating.
Well they have an actual science consultant on the franchise now, which I assume if why this episode moved to a more of a modern understanding of time and multiverse theory here. Hopefully she keeps them consistent from here on.