If you’ve read my Three Timeline Theory, you know I spend a lot of time watching and pondering Star Trek. Probably too much. Not only do I run a weekly club, write a lot of trivia, and pride myself on knowing canon well enough to come up with crazy ways to make contiuity mistakes work, but I also know a thing or two about production itself, and I even have a little theory about that.

 Besides the fact that they’re all set in the 24th century, have overlapping timelines, share some of the same characters and a whole lot of writing staff and production crew, the other major thing Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and Voyager all have in common is that they ran for seven seasons. Both the original series and Enterprise were cut short. There are a number of reasons for this but there’s one very interesting one that isn’t talked about too often. All three of those shows came dangerously close to cancellation due to being in ratings hell. And they were all saved by a bold step by the producers.

TNG became the ratings powerhouse it was the rest of its run because of the popularity it gained during the summer after The Best of Both Worlds Part 1. The hype surrounding the cliffhanger about Picard becoming a Borg, no one knowing whether he would live, die, or whether Patrick Stewart would return created a lot of new viewers– the ratings for the reruns that summer were higher than they had ever been for a new episode, and it transformed into a phenomenon. DS9 wasn’t doing so hot either until Worf was added to the cast. Same thing with Voyager, until Seven of Nine came along.

Every Trekky knows the famous ways in which these shows were saved, but I wonder how many have realized the bizarre coincidence they share. Every one of these events occured during season cliffhangers between the third and fourth seasons! All three of these shows almost didn’t make it past their fourth year, and if these stories and new characters hadn’t been added, they may have been cancelled during that season or wrapped by the end of it.

What makes this especially intriguing to me is what happened to Enterprise. In 2005, the fifth Trek installment was cut short with only four seasons. And four seems to be the magic number. It almost wasn’t even renewed for a fourth, put in that same dangerous situation of the shows before it. It was pushed from its Wednesday night slot at 8:00 back to TV’s pit of prime time despair, Fridays at 9:00. But I’m not sure it’s just that time slot that killed it. There’s every possibility that it would have met the same fate even if it had stayed on Wednesdays, considering that even the bold 26-episode Xindi arc of season 3 hadn’t managed to boost ratings very much. And somewhat like The Best of Both Worlds, it had a surprising cliffhanger, in which Archer seems to be dead, only to be discovered in an alternate history where aliens are helping the Nazis to win WWII.

But these days, somewhat thanks to The Best of Both Worlds, epic cliffhangers are common place and not enough to jolt any series back to life. So the question is, would a Worf or a Seven of Nine saved Enterprise? It’s hard to imagine what character could have been added that would change the show’s fate, considering the problem many Trekkies loyal to the Berman/Braga shows had with it in the first place was its premise. There’s no way to do a prequel to Star Trek without ruining the continuity that came before it, and that’s exactly what Enterprise did. Though it was a highly entertaining show and had a lot of episode worthy of the Star Trek legacy, its continuity issues were too numerous for a lot of Trekkies to ignore. So the only way Enterprise could have survived would be to bring in a very large fanbase of people who didn’t have to be Trekkies to be Enterprise fans, and apparently it didn’t do a good enough job of that.

Season 4 did have a brave new direction, led by its new showrunner Manny Coto, who was on the writing staff during season 3 and wrote many of its best episodes. But unlike the previous season, Enterprise stopped trying to create its own mythos and started concentrating again on the classic mythos of the Trek universe. Coto’s mission seemed to be cleaning up the mess made by the first two seasons and making the show fit better with the rest of canon, especially where it concerned Klingons and Vulcans. And it was a great idea… if there were very many Trekkies still watching the show. Because what it couldn’t do is keep bringing in that new fanbase– now it was actually trying to be Star Trek, while its earlier seaons had tried to somewhat distance themselves from the rest of canon.

Perhaps it was too late to get that old Trek fanbase to join by the fourth season. The ones who didn’t like it in the first place had three years to become very annoyed that there wasn’t another Trek show on the air that went forward instead of backwards. I doubt if they would trust any show set in the 22nd century and with a ship named Enterprise, no matter the story direction.

But the most interesting part of all of this is that, if the show had made it to a fifth season, another regular cast member was planned to be added: Shran, the Andorian. Shran was played by Jeffrey Combs, who has had a long history with Star Trek and has played numerous characters, especially in DS9. His Shran character was very popular with fans, and appeared in about half a dozen episodes. The idea that he might have become part of the regular cast, serving about Archer’s ship, reminds me a lot of what happened on DS9 and Voyager.

And it makes one wonder, if the staff had this revelation at the end of season 3, if Shran had become a regular in the fourth season, just like Worf and Seven of Nine… would it have been enough to save the show? I really don’t know. Shran was popular with fans already familiar with the show, but Worf and the Borg brought in fans from outside of DS9 and Voyager. I don’t know if Jeffrey Combs himself would have been enough to do that. But maybe, just because it was that fated fourth season that saved the other post-TOS shows, it might have helped.

LLAP

-Cap’n Logan

Time travel has always been a recurring theme in Star Trek. In fact, I believe it to be the only way to reconcile a lot of its continuity mistakes, especially those made in Voyager and Enterprise. I’d like to present a theory that my fiance and I devised about a year ago, which may help to explain a lot of these problems. First, let me say that I don’t believe this theory is in any way what the producers of Star Trek ever intended, but it is interesting how much accidental proof there is in Trek canon to support it. Secondly, this whole thing is quite complicated and we had way too much time on our hands when we came up with it. It’s very thorough, so I’ll be presenting it as a three-part series of blogs. Finally, as a result, you’re bound to get confused or bored if you aren’t very familiar with Trek, so I won’t be offended if you choose not to read on. But, if you dare to continue, here only for the pure fun of speculation, is the first part of the monstrous Three Timeline Theory.

There are a lot of instances of time travel in Star Trek in which time wasn’t altered enough to make much of a difference on the overall timeline. For instance, Kirk meeting Sisko in “Trials and Tribble-ations” didn’t have major repercussions on the future. However, there is one instance that I believe caused irreparable damage to the future, and that is the events of Star Trek: First Contact, in which Picard and crew return to twenty-first century Earth to stop the Borg from preventing first contact with the Vulcans. As soon as their mission is complete and Picard’s crew returns to the twenty-fourth century, they are probably unaware of any changes to the timeline. But there are continuity errors in a few Trek episodes that support the idea that some things had changed as a result of these events, but they were minor enough that no one would have noticed them without doing extensive research, as we’ve done, to find those changes. In fact, I believe First Contact created a second, only slightly-altered timeline.

According to our theory, the original series would have unfolded more or less exactly as it did in the first timeline– what you see in those 79 episodes probably wouldn’t change between the first and second timelines. The real changes caused by First Contact occur off screen and primarily have to do with Annika Hansen (Seven of Nine). A glaring continuity mistake in Voyager is in an episode called “Dark Frontier,” which claims that the Hansens left in 2255 toward the Delta Quadrant to study the Borg.

However, a much earlier episode of The Next Generation, “Q Who,” seems to imply that humans knew nothing of the Borg before Q introduced them to Captain Picard. Q is held entirely responsible in other episodes for putting Earth on the Borg’s radar. The problem is, these events happen in 2265, ten years after the Hansens left to study the Borg. But if the Federation didn’t know about the Borg until Q, how did the Hansens know about them?

I theorize that the Hansens indeed didn’t study the Borg in the first timeline, because no one had ever heard of them. But the events of First Contact altered time so that there were records, however burried and classified as they might be, of the Borg’s existence, because of the evidence Enterprise E left in the past. This existence of this evidence is made canon by the Enterprise episode “Regeneration,” in which those drones left behind in First Contact are excavated by Starfleet scientists, a hundred years later. Those drones come to life, kill the scientists, steal a cargo ship, and are eventually stopped by Captain Archer and the NX-01. Even though they’re never called by name in the episode, record of these cybernetic beings and what they can do must be recorded in Archer’s log– they assimilate some of the crew and even manage to almost assimilate Archer’s doctor, Phlox.

One little hole in the theory, however, is why Q didn’t seem to be aware of this when he introduced Picard to the Borg 200 years later. He has to do this in both timelines in order for history to look mostly the same. Perhaps most of humanity didn’t know about the Borg, due to the incident being buried or classified, so Q still thought it would be an effective lesson for Picard. That’s not a good explanation, but it’s the best I can come up with.

I believe that any episode or film post-First Contact occur only in this new, second timeline, and couldn’t have happened in the first. Deep Space Nine and Voyager both get started and each of their first few seasons are part of the first timeline, but if Enterprise E hadn’t gone back in time to stop the Borg, Earth would have been assimilated, Thus, the Borg would have created their own second timeline, in which the Federation never existed.

Are you following this so far? Catch your breath, just a little left to go.

Now, let’s fast-foward to Voyager’s “Scorpion,” in which Captain Janeway rescues Seven of Nine from the collective. Keep in mind, this only happens in the new, altered timeline. Even if the Borg had never gone back in time in First Contact, this never could have happened in the first timeline. If the Federation didn’t know about the Borg in 2255, the Hansens wouldn’t have studied them and Annika Hansen couldn’t possibly have been assimilated and there wouldn’t have been a Seven of Nine. I would go as far as to say that if the first timeline weren’t altered (by the Borg or by Picard) Voyager would probably have never made it back to the Alpha Quadrant because they wouldn’t have had the invaluable assistance of a human, ex-Borg drone who had been raised almost entirely by the Borg.

This explains some inconsistencies regarding the Borg, but how does this explain all the continuity errors made by Enterprise, you might ask. The events of First Contact can’t possibly account for new species we had somehow never heard of before (Denobulans, Xindi, Suliban) or the Temporal Cold War, which is apparently a huge part of early Starfleet history which, conveniently, no one in other series ever thinks to mention. And indeed, you would be right. This is where that pesky third timeline comes in.

According to our theory, some unknown event far in the future (past the 24th century, in this second timeline) sparks the Temporal Cold War, as seen in Enterprise, which begins to affect the Trek universe in the 22nd century and spirals it into a third timeline. I’m not sure who would have instigated this event or exactly when it happens, but it be someone from the 29th century, in which the Federation now has a Timefleet, according to Voyager. Or it could happen in the 31st century, the time Crewman Daniels in Enterprise comes from, who spends three seasons trying to stop the Temporal Cold War. Then again, it could be any faction from any time that participated in the Temporal Cold War.

Regardless, I theorize that the majority of continuity problems we see in Enterprise are caused by the Temporal Cold War and this Third Timeline. Thus, we believe that Enterprise is best viewed not as a prequel, but rather a sequel that takes place in the past.

I am aware that there are a lot of time travel episodes in Star Trek, and each one changes the timeline, even if it’s very slightly. You could say there are dozens, if not hundreds of different timelines, and so it’s moot to number them as I have here. However, I’ve numbered them this way because I think these “second” and “third” timelines are the most significantly altered, and the only ones responsible for many of the canon mistakes made in the series.

Of course, Star Trek is just a TV show. Those who are really responsible, naturally, are writers, who make mistakes like everybody else. Sometimes they’re careful with continuity, and sometimes they’re not. But I think it’s fascinating that there are ways to look at the series in which even the most glaring mistakes can be explained within the confines of what we’re given on screen.

Next week, in part II, I’ll delve deeper into the third timeline and look at it in relation to some very specific continuity mistakes in Enterprise. I hope you’ve enjoyed this complex and ultimately silly exercise so far, and please share any interesting holes in the theory you might find or share a theory of your own.

Con’t to Part 2

LLAP

-Cap’n Logan