It’s been a few weeks since Discovery wrapped it’s third season, but I still wanted to pass along a deep and heartfelt thank-you to Star Trek’s current flagship show. Since late is better than never, here it is. Thank you Discovery, for putting time travel, Star Trek’s worst story storytelling addiction, in a timeout. At least for now.
That might sound like a weird thing to say about a show whose third season was built on dropping the ship and crew over 900 years into the future. But hear me out.
First lets establish that time travel does more storytelling harm than good and Star Trek is hopelessly addicted to it. I can barely tolerate time travel personally, though there are always exceptions. I’m a fan of skillfully told stories and time travel burdens even the best tales with more holes than five tonnes of Swiss cheese.
I’m not against time travel as long as it tells a compelling story and it’s implications are respected. It can tell fantastic stories while also offering some great re-interpretations of our favourite characters.
One of my favourite X-Men stories was The Age of Apocalypse, where Charles Xavier’s son travels back in time to assassinate Magneto before the Master of Magnetism becomes the monster that plagues both mutant and humankind alike. But he accidentally kills Professor X instead, resulting in a world that never knew his dream of peace between humans and mutants. With no X-Men to oppose him, the ancient super-mutant Apocalypse rises to subjugate the entire planet to his mercilessly genocidal will. The story was intriguing but it’s real attraction was the way it re-imagined familiar characters in compelling and imaginative ways.
Despite it’s many storytelling flaws, I’m enjoying Netflix’s The Umbrella Academy (mostly because the entire show seems to be a tongue in cheek parody of the super hero genre). The first two Terminator movies offered a satisfyingly closed narrative loop, though it was the guilty party that started my eventual rejection of time travel (if the Terminator succeeded in killing John Connor’s mother, there would be no John Connor leading the human resistance against the machines in the future. Therefore there would be no reason for Skynet to send a Terminator back in time to kill his mother to begin with. Does anyone else need some Advil?). I enjoyed Avengers: Endgame so much I forgave it it’s storytelling trespasses.
As one of the largest and longest running science fiction franchises in history, Star Trek has told more than its fair share of time travel stories. Make no mistake, some of them were highly entertaining and a few were downright unforgettable. City on the Edge of Forever was arguably the original Star Trek’s best episode and provided science fiction with one of its most powerful moments. I challenge anyone to find a more profound scene than an emotionally torn Captain Kirk not only allowing the woman he loved to die to protect the future, but actively preventing her from being saved.
Yesterday’s Enterprise is one of my favourite episodes of The Next Generation (the Federation is on the brink of losing a war with the Klingon Empire after a hiccup in the time-space continuum sets the two galactic superpowers at each other’s throats). The Voyage Home-where the crew returns to the 20th century to retrieve a pair of humpback whales (extinct in the 24th century) to placate an unstoppable alien force that is destroying everything in its path– is my favourite Star Trek movie. My favourite episode of Deep Space 9 is easily Trials and Tribble-ations, where Captain Sisko and company travel back to Captain Kirk’s infamous first encounter with tribbles.
But aside from those, Star Trek has a nasty habit of telling underwhelming and poorly thought out time travel stories every other week. DS9 was able to use the Prophets (near omnipotent celestial beings that lived in a wormhole) to reconcile some of their time travel yarns (like Far Beyond The Stars). But after that it felt like time machines were standard Starfleet issue. And while we were always hearing about the Prime Directive, we almost never heard anything official about messing up history or unraveling the universe with inevitable time-travelling paradoxes.
Time travel stories include an inherent flaw (see my Terminator evaluation above), and the more a franchise depends on it the more it’s cumulative damage threatens to cripple it from the inside out. After all, what does it matter if a beloved character dies or the entire universe suffers a seismic catastrophe if you can just go back in time and rewrite history to your preference?
(Yes, that’s pretty much the entire plot of Avengers: Endgame, but I already admitted to giving that movie a pass-as long as Marvel resists the temptation to participate in any future temporal shenanigans)
Especially when time travel goes from being an occasional indulgence to a repeatedly used crutch to crank out enough episodes to fill a season with no thoughts to long term narrative consequences. And no one is guiltier of this than Star Trek.
(Doctor Who may sprint through time nearly every episode, but that’s it’s whole reason for its being. It might as well be called Time Travellers Anonymous. The only rule it’s writers seem to have for dealing with the constant time travel affecting it’s ongoing storylines seems to be a shrug of the shoulders).
But Discovery seemed to put the brakes on that this season. Again, that seems weird because the entire storytelling conceit was the crew adjusting to life nearly a thousand years in the future. Almost every episode reminded us how far out of their depth they were, especially with the Federation reduced to a mere shadow of the organization they once knew.
Discovery’s mere presence in the 32nd century was a crime. Remember Star Trek: Enterprise? No other Star Trek show leaned as heavily on time travel. Enterprise introduced the Temporal Wars to Star Trek lore. The Federation was locked in a struggle to protect the timeline with everyone else who had gotten their hands on time travel technology. The good guys won in the end, destroyed all the time travelling technology they could their hands on and passed laws outlawing the practice altogether.
Discovery still managed to sneak one time traveling tale into its third season (they had to send Emperor Georgeou back in time to star in her own spin off) but did it in a way that was both a nice shout out to the original series (the aforementioned City on the Edge of Forever) and didn’t break any existing Federation laws.
A lot of fans were expecting Discovery to return to the 23rd century after it solved the third season’s big riddle. Many expected it to return after it had reminded what remained of the Federation of it’s founding ideals (it had strayed a little). Not everyone expected it to hang around in the future come the end of the season. But it looks like Captain Burnham and her crew will be calling the 32nd century home for the rest of their days. Sending Discovery back would have been an enormous storytelling complication (the ship has been retrofitted with 32nd century tech and it’s now semi-sentient databases are full of information about the next 930 years of history) and it would mean breaking Starfleet’s current cardinal rule (and hasn’t Burnham broken enough of those in her rocky Starfleet career already?).
Besides, the U.S.S. Discovery has a new mandate; helping rebuild the Federation. There’s a poetic irony that an ancient ship with a crew more than nine centuries out of time are uniquely equipped to handle that task.
There is still a very good chance Discovery will play it fast and loose with time travel in its coming seasons. Hopefully the existence of the Federation’s Temporal Directives will keep those nasty storytelling impulses in check. If so, this will force the show’s writing staff to explore other, less messy avenues of storytelling. And there’s no promise that Star Trek’s growing family of other shows will demonstrate the same restraint (only Discovery appears to be restricted by a set of official Starfeet rules).
But for now at least, Discovery has put this particular genie back in its bottle. And I can spend the time between now and whenever Star Trek inevitably tips it’s toe back into the temporal waters breathing a little bit easier.
Image via blog.trekcore.com
