My thoughts on the 'Star Trek: Coda' trilogy

The story of the Star Trek: Coda trilogy, which was supposed to give closure to the Novelverse that sprang up with the relaunch of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine in the Avatar duology but instead attempted to bring about its utter annihilation by erasure from existence, falls apart under its own logic.

Supposedly, the survivors of the “temporal apocalypse” eliminate the threat to all existence from the Devidians chowing down on all of existence throughout space and time by eliminating the so-called ‘First Splinter timeline’.  The story puts its terminus puts at 2373, which would erase the last two-and-a-third seasons of Deep Space Nine and more than half of the run of Voyager.

Only, the terminus of the time vortex reopened by Enterprise-A to return to their own time was in 2063, meaning that the Borg-dominated Earth in the future which sent back its attack would have reached all the way back to just after First Contact (the event, not the movie) and thus eliminated ALL of Star Trek, with the exception of the Eugenics Wars and World War III.

Now, the problem with this is that by preventing the Borg takeover of Earth, the Enterprise ensured that the Borg-dominated Earth of 2373 had never happened because that had been entirely erased from existence by the Enterprise crew’s preventing the Borg sphere from stopping the Phoenix reaching warp by assimilating Earth before that happened, and the future Borg-dominated Earth was thus not there to send back its attack.

So, how could this happen?  In the words of Connor MacLeod to Rachel Ellenstein, “It’s a kind of magic”.  And not the good kind either, but the kind of lazy writing, lack of imagination, and contempt for longtime fans that has characterized much of “Nu Trek” to the point of becoming “Star Drek”.  At that point, it becomes not science fiction but fantasy.

Seriously: A star suddenly destabilizing toward supernova in just a couple of years?  Magic.  A supernova threatening the entire galaxy?  Magic.  The rather prosaically named “red matter”?  Magic.

The Romulan supernova was bad enough in the Kelvinverse version, when it was hinted that the star going supernova was the host of a planetary system nearby the Romulan system who destabilization going unnoticed was at least slightly plausible.

The Picardverse version that made the star in question the host star of the Romulan system is absolutely fucking absurd; stars that go supernova destabilize over millions of years.  The Vulcan exiles who founded what became the Romulan Star Empire would never have established themselves in a system with a dying star, which, if they were capable of interstellar travel they would have easily detected.

I mention the Picardverse because that is what the travesty of the Star Drek Coda trilogy was commissioned in service to.  That’s why the events of Star Trek: Insurrection and Star Trek: Nemesis are held to have taken place exactly as they did in the so-called ‘First Splinter’ timeline (the actual science fiction timeline as opposed to the science fantasy timeline) despite the erasure of everything before the frame time in Star Trek: First Contact, 2373, at least according to the Picardverse, despite the fact that following temporal mechanics as seen in the wider Star Trek Universe the destruction would have reached back to 2063 and that nothing at all would have happened as it had.  But how did it?  Magic.

Quite the contrast to the alternate timeline Q showed Picard in Season 6’s Episode 15, “Tapestry”, in which not starting a bar fight with Nausicaans which ends with him being stabbed in the heart as a newly-minted ensign leads to a career as an underachieving incel who never makes captain.

Or, even more graphically, TOS Season 1’s Episode 28, “The City on the Edge of Forever”, when McCoy went back in time and saved Edith Keeler from being killed by a car, resulting in the Nazis winning World War II and the Federation never coming into existence (a timeline posited as the origin of the Mirror Universe).

And this does not even begin to cover the egregious racism at the end of portraying Benny Russell apparently giving into what Mr. Stone, publisher of Incredible Tales of Scientific Wonder, had wanted and writing about a white starship captain, in this case Jean-Luc Picard, rather than his beloved central character for whom he had suffered so much to write about, Benjamin Sisko.

I mean, in 1953, ‘Benny Russell’ became so obsessed with his vision of “Deep Space Nine” and its commander Benjamin Sisko that he wrote SIX sequels to the story he’d submitted before there had been a decision whether to publish or not, then after he was committed following his breakdown in the offices of Incredible Tales, took to writing on the walls of his room after the racist Dr. James Wycoff took away his writing paper.

This was the literary equivalent of handing back to James Baldwin the manuscript of Go Tell It on the Mountain with instructions to come back with an “autobiography” of a poor white boy from the rural American South instead of his semi-autobiographical account of a poor black boy growing up in Harlem in New York City.

I hope the three authors of this travesty, all of whom have contributed some of the most exceptional works and stories to the Star Trek ‘Novelverse’ once dubbed the ‘Relaunch’ (until it extended backward in time) before they sold out to the “soulless minions of orthodoxy” are each happy with their thirty pieces of silver.  It’s cheaper than integrity.