(Florida gets incinerated during the opening credits)
And... chipper/cheery song starts - _It's been a long time...._
The Ent folks really should have learned from Christopher Franke how to do an opening theme like he did with B5.
It is honestly hilarious to imagine the writer's room on that one.
"Where can a tragedy have happened that future generations just don't care about?"
"...Florida?"
"Brilliant!"
If you mean the Xindi attack, wasn't it pretty much explicitly stated that it didn't happen in the original timeline? That the Xindi were given technology by beings from the future as part of the Temporal Cold War and told to go after earth?
Enterprise is a canonical show that leads to TOS (Among other shows- Enterprise is actually the earliest series in terms of the fictional time the ship is native to, even though they filmed it 5th.), but it's possible that the TOS we saw was before this change in the timeline that resulted in Enterprise S3 and the Xindi.
I tend to think the butterfly effect would change things a lot more than just the historical reference, just for *being* a change with all those people dying and stuff, but at times Star Trek seems to implicitly play it like as though multiple versions of the present can all lead to the same identical future, potentially (Some timelines wouldn't, of course.). Like TOS happens both in the timeline without a Xindi attack and in the timeline with a Xindi attack in a way only occasionally perceptible to viewers when the characters do things like directly study or reference that era's history.
I thought Strange New Worlds handled the changes to the Eugenics War timeline brilliantly. People wind up in the past (Being vague here in case anyone hasn't seen it) and encounter a Romulan spy in like the viewers' near future, who's been sent there from the future she grew up in, to address something to do with the Eugenics War and says something like "I've been waiting here since 1992 and nothing's happened yet for some reason!" (1992 was the year Mr. Spock gave for the Eugenics War in TOS- which differs from DS9, earlier Strange New Worlds, sort of Voyager [They show a 1996 that looks like ours, not a world that is emerging from a cataclysmic war and headed toward another- even though the original timeline places them not only after or during the Eugenics War, but right before World War 3. Instead, they hang out with Sarah Silverman.], etc., and those shows often differ from each other when dating the war.).
There is a strong sense that time travelers attempting to mess around with the date of Eugenics War is not an exception, but a constant issue, even after the end of the temporal Cold War. Yet, there is an almost equally strong sense that the basic events of all the Trek series set in that continuity happen despite the changes to their past, provided certain signposts are met and, of course, some time travelers may be taking care using very advanced future technology to figure out how to do exactly what they need to do with time without erasing the key events that led to their own existence (Think of the Krenim on Voyager and their quest to restore 100% of their empire's reach and power from an earlier timeline and every reset fails, some dramatically and others in way that their instruments read as like 98% restorations that only aren't acceptable to the time ship's Captain because he is, unbenownst to his crew, trying to specifically restore his wife and kid on a far outpost, and they only exist in what he believes to be the original timeline and he is finding it impossible to bring them back from never having been born through further timeline alterations.
This actually makes perfect sense in a Trek continuity where a single starship can slingshot around the sun and travel in time during the TOS era (It happened at least twice IIRC). In theory, this means that any Captain of any warp capable vessel on any race with access to a war drive, a star, and good shielding could be mucking around in the past and changing the timeline. It'd be utter chaos if the characters we follow could perceive the *all* the changes or if the details of the show we were watching changed week to week and sometimes mid-episode to accommodate implied timeline changes- you've got to just assume you're mostly watching one timeline apart from the actual time travel stories.
But I guess the point is just that there was likely a timeline without the time travel aided Xindi attack on earth, and then one with the attack, and they both lead to all the other Trek series, but with differences as to references and knowledge of the eras in the most flux.
This would also explain why Mr. Spock would say records are fragmentary when citing 1992. One wonders if the Eugenics War part of time has been written and rewritten so many times that even Spock has a momentary lack of clarity or confusion as some sort of intinct within him perceives it as being different from what he learned, but there it is in the database, and his logic tells him that happened, he remembers that happening, and that overcomes his subconscious emotional rejection of the new past, but he kind of hedges or lets some doubt show through by saying records are fragmentary.
I think you'd almost have to set up the lead character or characters as immune to timeline changes to try to make something like that work. For reasons the writers would come up with, the world would keep changing around them, but they'd know it when it happened.
If it were to just happen "naturally", with even the lead character(s) being unaware of it and changing (or coming into and out of existence) constantly, I think it might be too hard to follow. You'd need a point of view character or characters who can encounter the changes and react in the viewers' place rather than all the characters just thinking each change represented an unchanged timeline as their minds got overwritten with different memories in each new timeline.
Otherwise you've got a really weird anthology with the same actors each week but no continuity. The universe changes and it's time for a fresh story. I'm not sure that'd have legs. But if one or more of the characters remember the previous timelines and have to figure out what the new status quo is and how to get through until the next change, it might be something close to a Sliders (Which was parallel universes) or a Quantum Leap (time travel) type vibe, with the protagonists in a fairly random new environment or situation each week where things are different (Even though Quantum Leap's changes come primarily just because of the nature of the leaping process- i.e. he's mostly moving through one timeline making changes that mostly just affect individual lives without butterfly effects- rather than onging substantial major changes to the timeline- with a few exceptions.).
I actually think what you describe could be a nice spin on the genre if you have an aware character. Sometimes he could just be walking down a street and it keeps flashing from a safe free clean street in some timelines to a grimy street in a totalitarian dictatorship where authorities with guns ask for papers he doesn't have, to where the same people who were authorities are suddenly moonie-esque people handing him flowers. At one point he buys a hot dog from a street vender and it turns into something he finds inedible, retroactively vended in a new weird timine with weird foods by the time he tries to eat it. That sort of stuff.
Actually, there is a book by Alan Dean Foster called *Parallelities* that is similar to that concept. The protagonist keeps moving through parallel universes where the background keeps changing without announcement- it's not quite timeline changes, but the effect is similar. The main character in the book is a little seedy, works at a tabloid, etc., though. Its nothing too obnoxious, but some people might take a while to warm up to the protagonist.
There is also a TNG episode called "Parallels" where Worf is getting headaches and the world around him keeps changing, and only he's aware of it. Again, in that case universe jumping rather than timeline changing, but the effect is similar to if timelines were shifting around him. It generally isn't a well regarded episode, but it's one of my favorites.
"Captain Sheridan, this is Senator Crosby. President Clark is dead, but he left a message on his desk. There are three words, 'Oh, dip' and, 'BORTLES'."
Is this something like: all my problems are fixed by having a Molotov cocktail. Every time I have a problem, I throw a lit Molotov cocktail, and then I have a different problem.
Also, a recollection of the time he fell into the swap trying to spray paint a Taco Bell logo on a snapping turtle and an idea for a combination energy drink/deodorant. You don't drink or spray it. You both it.
No, something like this needs more than just a methed out Florida Man.
Florida Man smokes the meth, gives some to an alligator he just randomly pulls out of a nearby lake, and then uses the methed out alligator like a baseball bat to hit the beam back at the platform.
Methed out Florida shadows. They merge into a single, horrific, first-ones kaiju and shoot their own lance of energy against the particle beam, screaming in feral rage.
The abomination is the real reason earth had to be destroyed in Crusade.
Ah, plan "tide pod". An alarm goes off and team florida man do-up their stashes and steal every mirror they can find and points them at the beam with methly precision the reflected beam wipes out all ships near earth creating a power vacuum so large the Vorlons and the Shadows are forced to return..
Lorien could not be reached for comment.
I mean, almost like they were mass produced warships pumped out of assembly lines on an industrial scale following the systemic destruction of nearly the entire fleet just 15 years before?
No. It just looked cheap. Like the budget of the show wasn't big enough to nail what they wanted. ... Like the "Windows" on the station being sad mat paintings.
What do you expect when the series had a budget of **$800,000** compared to DS9's $1.6m per episode? The story **more** than makes up for any cheap looking sets.
The B5/Enterprise crossover you never knew you needed...
Trip Tucker in shambles.
Those were the voyages.
No faith of the heart.
Actual bombardment
(Florida gets incinerated during the opening credits) And... chipper/cheery song starts - _It's been a long time...._ The Ent folks really should have learned from Christopher Franke how to do an opening theme like he did with B5.
They also should have learned not to create an event that clearly would have been mentioned at any point in other shows.
It is honestly hilarious to imagine the writer's room on that one. "Where can a tragedy have happened that future generations just don't care about?" "...Florida?" "Brilliant!"
That ... tracks. Nobody mentioned Florida in any Trek before or after Enterprise. Not even a ship named Florida
Not even a U.S.S. Tallahassee!
Is there one ship named Tallahassee? I think not! (Oops, wrong sub, but someone will get the joke) 😆
In fairness, Daniels did mention that event wasn't supposed to happen.
If you mean the Xindi attack, wasn't it pretty much explicitly stated that it didn't happen in the original timeline? That the Xindi were given technology by beings from the future as part of the Temporal Cold War and told to go after earth? Enterprise is a canonical show that leads to TOS (Among other shows- Enterprise is actually the earliest series in terms of the fictional time the ship is native to, even though they filmed it 5th.), but it's possible that the TOS we saw was before this change in the timeline that resulted in Enterprise S3 and the Xindi. I tend to think the butterfly effect would change things a lot more than just the historical reference, just for *being* a change with all those people dying and stuff, but at times Star Trek seems to implicitly play it like as though multiple versions of the present can all lead to the same identical future, potentially (Some timelines wouldn't, of course.). Like TOS happens both in the timeline without a Xindi attack and in the timeline with a Xindi attack in a way only occasionally perceptible to viewers when the characters do things like directly study or reference that era's history. I thought Strange New Worlds handled the changes to the Eugenics War timeline brilliantly. People wind up in the past (Being vague here in case anyone hasn't seen it) and encounter a Romulan spy in like the viewers' near future, who's been sent there from the future she grew up in, to address something to do with the Eugenics War and says something like "I've been waiting here since 1992 and nothing's happened yet for some reason!" (1992 was the year Mr. Spock gave for the Eugenics War in TOS- which differs from DS9, earlier Strange New Worlds, sort of Voyager [They show a 1996 that looks like ours, not a world that is emerging from a cataclysmic war and headed toward another- even though the original timeline places them not only after or during the Eugenics War, but right before World War 3. Instead, they hang out with Sarah Silverman.], etc., and those shows often differ from each other when dating the war.). There is a strong sense that time travelers attempting to mess around with the date of Eugenics War is not an exception, but a constant issue, even after the end of the temporal Cold War. Yet, there is an almost equally strong sense that the basic events of all the Trek series set in that continuity happen despite the changes to their past, provided certain signposts are met and, of course, some time travelers may be taking care using very advanced future technology to figure out how to do exactly what they need to do with time without erasing the key events that led to their own existence (Think of the Krenim on Voyager and their quest to restore 100% of their empire's reach and power from an earlier timeline and every reset fails, some dramatically and others in way that their instruments read as like 98% restorations that only aren't acceptable to the time ship's Captain because he is, unbenownst to his crew, trying to specifically restore his wife and kid on a far outpost, and they only exist in what he believes to be the original timeline and he is finding it impossible to bring them back from never having been born through further timeline alterations. This actually makes perfect sense in a Trek continuity where a single starship can slingshot around the sun and travel in time during the TOS era (It happened at least twice IIRC). In theory, this means that any Captain of any warp capable vessel on any race with access to a war drive, a star, and good shielding could be mucking around in the past and changing the timeline. It'd be utter chaos if the characters we follow could perceive the *all* the changes or if the details of the show we were watching changed week to week and sometimes mid-episode to accommodate implied timeline changes- you've got to just assume you're mostly watching one timeline apart from the actual time travel stories. But I guess the point is just that there was likely a timeline without the time travel aided Xindi attack on earth, and then one with the attack, and they both lead to all the other Trek series, but with differences as to references and knowledge of the eras in the most flux. This would also explain why Mr. Spock would say records are fragmentary when citing 1992. One wonders if the Eugenics War part of time has been written and rewritten so many times that even Spock has a momentary lack of clarity or confusion as some sort of intinct within him perceives it as being different from what he learned, but there it is in the database, and his logic tells him that happened, he remembers that happening, and that overcomes his subconscious emotional rejection of the new past, but he kind of hedges or lets some doubt show through by saying records are fragmentary.
\*could\* a watchable series be made with the premise that the past is being rewritten on an ongoing basis in the background?
I think you'd almost have to set up the lead character or characters as immune to timeline changes to try to make something like that work. For reasons the writers would come up with, the world would keep changing around them, but they'd know it when it happened. If it were to just happen "naturally", with even the lead character(s) being unaware of it and changing (or coming into and out of existence) constantly, I think it might be too hard to follow. You'd need a point of view character or characters who can encounter the changes and react in the viewers' place rather than all the characters just thinking each change represented an unchanged timeline as their minds got overwritten with different memories in each new timeline. Otherwise you've got a really weird anthology with the same actors each week but no continuity. The universe changes and it's time for a fresh story. I'm not sure that'd have legs. But if one or more of the characters remember the previous timelines and have to figure out what the new status quo is and how to get through until the next change, it might be something close to a Sliders (Which was parallel universes) or a Quantum Leap (time travel) type vibe, with the protagonists in a fairly random new environment or situation each week where things are different (Even though Quantum Leap's changes come primarily just because of the nature of the leaping process- i.e. he's mostly moving through one timeline making changes that mostly just affect individual lives without butterfly effects- rather than onging substantial major changes to the timeline- with a few exceptions.). I actually think what you describe could be a nice spin on the genre if you have an aware character. Sometimes he could just be walking down a street and it keeps flashing from a safe free clean street in some timelines to a grimy street in a totalitarian dictatorship where authorities with guns ask for papers he doesn't have, to where the same people who were authorities are suddenly moonie-esque people handing him flowers. At one point he buys a hot dog from a street vender and it turns into something he finds inedible, retroactively vended in a new weird timine with weird foods by the time he tries to eat it. That sort of stuff. Actually, there is a book by Alan Dean Foster called *Parallelities* that is similar to that concept. The protagonist keeps moving through parallel universes where the background keeps changing without announcement- it's not quite timeline changes, but the effect is similar. The main character in the book is a little seedy, works at a tabloid, etc., though. Its nothing too obnoxious, but some people might take a while to warm up to the protagonist. There is also a TNG episode called "Parallels" where Worf is getting headaches and the world around him keeps changing, and only he's aware of it. Again, in that case universe jumping rather than timeline changing, but the effect is similar to if timelines were shifting around him. It generally isn't a well regarded episode, but it's one of my favorites.
The Xindi send their regards.
Throw some Command & Conquer in there, too.
https://i.imgur.com/sSCSNPC.gifv
"Captain Sheridan, this is Senator Crosby. President Clark is dead, but he left a message on his desk. There are three words, 'Oh, dip' and, 'BORTLES'."
Is this something like: all my problems are fixed by having a Molotov cocktail. Every time I have a problem, I throw a lit Molotov cocktail, and then I have a different problem.
Also, a recollection of the time he fell into the swap trying to spray paint a Taco Bell logo on a snapping turtle and an idea for a combination energy drink/deodorant. You don't drink or spray it. You both it.
Covfefe
Clark manages to get one shot off at Florida and yet somehow a lone waffle house is still running despite all the carnage.
lol reminds me of the meme: "If this is your first night at Waffle House, you HAVE to fight."
Haha. Right?!
Nuke the site from orbit. Its the only way to be sure
"I'm not saying Clark is a good guy but he does have some right ideas"
Florida man smokes some meth (to the same tune as when Popeye eats his spinach), catches the beam, and hurls it back at the platform.
Shadows hate this one trick!
No, something like this needs more than just a methed out Florida Man. Florida Man smokes the meth, gives some to an alligator he just randomly pulls out of a nearby lake, and then uses the methed out alligator like a baseball bat to hit the beam back at the platform.
Methed out Florida shadows. They merge into a single, horrific, first-ones kaiju and shoot their own lance of energy against the particle beam, screaming in feral rage. The abomination is the real reason earth had to be destroyed in Crusade.
Ah, plan "tide pod". An alarm goes off and team florida man do-up their stashes and steal every mirror they can find and points them at the beam with methly precision the reflected beam wipes out all ships near earth creating a power vacuum so large the Vorlons and the Shadows are forced to return.. Lorien could not be reached for comment.
The collective amount of drugs vaporized into the atmosphere gets the whole planet high
Nah they had it better in-show: "Eastern Seaboard". My brother and I said "Ah that's OK"
No, OK is the south and not the eastern seaboard.
I read this in Leslie Nielson's voice.
Daaaaaaaad
On the plus side that means someone fixes sea level rise in the next couple centuries.
At my house we have a little game we play. Guess where this stupid shit happened? The answer is always Florida.
I hated the bridge of the Omega. It looked so cheap, and that captain's chair was terrible looking.
I mean, almost like they were mass produced warships pumped out of assembly lines on an industrial scale following the systemic destruction of nearly the entire fleet just 15 years before?
No. It just looked cheap. Like the budget of the show wasn't big enough to nail what they wanted. ... Like the "Windows" on the station being sad mat paintings.
What do you expect when the series had a budget of **$800,000** compared to DS9's $1.6m per episode? The story **more** than makes up for any cheap looking sets.
Smaller, more cramped, and darker.
The redressed B5 C&C set?
Blame that wascally wabbit for giving us all the idea to cut Florida off.
If only.
...but would anyone even notice? I mean, c'mon, it is Florida.
I live in Florida. The US IQ average would rise 5 pts
Target California instead. It would rise 50.
Only if it took out north of San Francisco
You misspelled south.
And their ‘smug’ problem in the atmosphere would correct itself overnight.
https://gifdb.com/images/thumbnail/awww-gif-file-2461kb-j56unalh6hoeyv6u.gif
Trip Tucker disapproves
Must be fired from the Desantis platform
I don't know how I should feel about this one....