USSBurritoTruck

• The episode title refers to a textbook that several other characters have admonished Dal for not reading this season, beginning in “Into the Breach, Part I”.

• Rok-Tahk catches Murf having a discussion with a silhouetted figure in the USS Voyager A’s astrometrics lab. Previously we’ve seen Silik speaking with the silhouetted Future Guy, beginning in ENT’s premiere, “Broken Bow”.

• Janeway speculates that the temporal shielding aboard the Infinity is what’s preventing Voyager A from being affected by the changes to the timeline caused by Chakotay and Adreek escaping aboard that USS Protostar in the previous episode. Temporal shielding was used to great effect during the USS Voyager’s conflict with the Krenim temporal weapon in “Year of Hell, Part II”.

• A chyron informs us the stardate 52 years in the future where the Protogies are stuck is, 112152.1.

• ”Then we send a hundred ships.” It was established in “Preludes” that the Vau N’Akat did indeed send 100 ships into the anomaly in pursuit of the Protostar.

• Zero descends into the Va’Lu’Rah pit carrying Dal and Maj’el in a manner not dissimilar to Spock carrying Kirk and Bones up the turbolift shaft with his hover boots in “Star Trek: The Final Frontier”.

• Dal claims to be able to feel that Gwyn is in pain while displaced from time. Dal has latent telepathic abilities from this proto-Organian genetics.

• ”I’m a doctor, not an exorcist.” The Doctor has uttered variations on Bones’ famous, “I’m a doctor, not a bricklayer,” in 13 prior instances.

• ”I came across a mission log where lieutenant Worf was able to jump between quantum timelines by generating an inverse warp field, siphoned from a temporal anomaly.” Maj’el relates the events of “Parallels”.

• Characters this season have chided Dal for not reading Temporal Mechanics 101, but, to be fair, the text appears to be a short video lesson, so none of them actually read it either.

• Doctor Erin MacDonald was first mentioned in the LDS episode, “First First Contact”, and seen in “Supernova, Part II”. She is based upon, and voiced by, Doctor Erin MacDonald, the science advisor who has worked on every modern Trek series thus far.

• Temporal Mechanics 101 has three examples of how to travel through time:

    • Slingshot around the sun - “Tomorrow is Yesterday”, “Star Trek: The Voyage Home”, and “Penance”

    • Get on the wrong side of a Q - “Tapestry”, “All Good Things…”, “Deathwish”, “Farewell”

    • A wormhole - “Eye of the Needle”, “Into the Breach, Part II”

• Zero uses a chronitonic hypospray to temporarily prevent Gwyn from shifting between quantum realities. The Doctor did something similar in “Shattered” using a chroniton infused serum to bring Chakotay into temporal alignment after he was hit by a surge of temporal energy from an anomaly.

• The Doctor modified a phase discriminator to stabilize Gwyn. In “Timescape”, captain Picard, Data, Geordi, and Troi used phase discriminators to protect themselves from being trapped in a temporal fragment.

• The episode title is a callback to the TNG episode, “Who Watches The Watchers”.

• Maj’el uses a band of cloth to hide her Vulcan ears, a maneuver Spock first performed in “Star Trek: The Voyage Home”.

• A chyron informs us the stardate during the present time is 61860.1.

• Gwyn challenges Ascencia to Va’Lu’Rah, a “sovereign ritual” for the Vau N’Akat, mentioned in the previous episode. Certainly this isn’t going to be some trial by combat.

    • Cultures that have ritual combat include:

      • Vulcans

      • Ligonians

      • Klingons

      • Gelrakians

• ”Those Vau N’Akat put a weapon on our ship that threatens the entire Federation.” Adreek is referring to the living construct, which the Protogies discovered and dealth with during the previous season, by destroying the USS Protostar.

• ”It would not be the first instance of a causal time loop in Starfleet history.” Maj’el confirms that the events of “Past Tense, Part I”, “Past Tense, Part II” and “Star Trek: First Contact” were the results of bootstrap paradoxes.

• ”Vulcans do not lie.” Maj’el lies right in Dal’s face.

    • In “The Menagerie, Part I”, Spock tells Pike, “I have never disobeyed your orders before, Captain,” which contradicts “The Red Angel” where he refuses an order to stand down.

    • In “The Menagerie, Part I”, Spock made a false entry in the Enterprise’s log.

    • In “The Menagerie, Part 2”, it is revealed that Spock has been aware the entire time that the trial was a Talosian projection and thus has been making false statements in service of that deception.

    • In “A Taste of Armageddon”, Spock lies as a distraction, claiming there’s a bug on someone’s shoulder before nerve pinching them.

    • In “Errand of Mercy”, Spock tells Kor he’s a merchant.

    • In “Amok Time”, Spock lies about his excitement seeing that Kirk survived kal-if-fee, claiming it was simply logical relief that Starfleet did not lose a capable captain.

    • In “The Enterprise Incident”, the Romluan commander asks if it is merely a myth that Vulcans cannot lie, to which he responds, “It is no myth.”

    • In “The Enterprise incident”, Spock claims he was unprepared for Kirk’s attack, and used the *”Vulcan death grip” instinctually. Clearly the attack had been planned, and there is no such thing as a Vulcan death grip.

    • In “Yesteryear”, Spock lies about his identity after travelling to the past and visiting his family.

    • In “More Tribbles, More Troubles” Spock claims that Vulcans don’t have a sense of humour, which they obviously do.

    • In “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan”, Spock lies about how long it will take to repair the Enterprise in case the transmission is being monitored. When Saavik calls him on this, he claims he merely exaggerated.

    • In “Spock Amok”, Spock told Chapel that he had a dream where he had to fight his human side, whereas it was obvious that in his dream Spock was the human half fighting his Vulcan side.

• The timeline changes with Chakotay and Adreek escape aboard the Protostar instead of launching it under autopilot, causing Gwyn to start disappearing from existence. In “Children of Time” the descendants of the crew of the USS Defiant and their colony disappear when the alternate future version of Odo chooses to let 200 years worth of people never be born so he can save Kira from dying.

Trekkies were a mistake.

With tonight’s victory, Winnipeg has officially knocked the Saskatchewan Rattlers out of contention, and now have a spot in the Western Conference play-in game.

With tonight's victory, Winnipeg has officially knocked the Saskatchewan Rattlers out of contention, and now have a spot in the Western Conference play-in game.

Not my OC

• ”I swear, you’ve read those first contact protocols more than Picard.” Gwyn is too polite to reply that she, an alien child who grew up in a Delta Quadrant labour camp, has has no context for who Admiral Jean-Luc Picard is, even if he was captain of Starfleet’s flagship.

• Asencia [Jameela Jamil] escaped capture in the previous season’s “Supernova, Part 1” after murdering the Diviner.

• Janeway’s admiral’s log records the stardate as 61859.6.

    • The most recent stardate prior this episode was 61302.7, given in the fourteenth episode of season one, “Crossroads”.

• This is the first time we’re learning that the Diviner’s [John Noble] name was…is? Ilthuran. In season one, he was only ever referred to by his title.

• ”We were just a bunch of nobodies on a rock. No hope, no future, until we found that ship.” Dal is referring to the events of the season one premiere episodes “Lost and Found”.

• The crew of the USS Voyager and their allies used temporal shielding during conflicts with the Krenim during “Year of Hell” and “Year of Hell, Part II”.

• ”Refuse to help my own daughter? Surely I don’t make that bad of a father, do I?” The Diviner choose to abandon Gwyn on a sentient planet that manifested the nightmares of its inhabitants and then consumed them in “Terror Firma”.

• The Vulcan Nova Squadron cadet is named Maj’el, for the late Majel Barrett, who portrayed:

    • Number One

    • Christine Chapel

    • Lwaxana Troi

    • The Computer in TOS, TAS, TNG, DS9, VOY, ENT, “Star Trek Generations”, “Star Trek First Contact”, “Star Trek Insurrection”, “Star Trek Nemesis”, and 2009’s “Star Trek”

    • Several other characters in TAS, including Amanda Greyson and M’Ress

• This is the first on screen mention of a sonic toilet.

• Maj’el claims that Vulcan psychic abilities are enhanced in the presence of other telepaths. I believe this is the first time this has been explicitly stated, or even implied on screen.

• One of the crew who gets on the turbolift with Maj’el calls for deck 32. In the previous episode, Zero said that the USS Voyager A has 29 decks.

• ”Warp cores are so beautiful up close. It’s the delta radiation.” Delta radiation? You mean the thing that melted captain Christopher Pike and consigned him to a tortured existence in a beep chair? Too soon, Zero, too soon.

    • Mirror Charles Tucker III was also deformed by long term exposure to delta rays.

Not my OC

Trip: A poop question, sir? Can't I talk about the warp reactor or the transporter?
Archer: It's a perfectly valid question.

In season one of ENT's "Breaking the Ice", the crew of the NX-01 records a video for Ms. Malvin's class of fourth graders back on Earth, and one of the questions is what happens when someone aboard the ship flushes the toilet, which Archer throws to Trip, and Trip is concerned the kids are going to think he's the ship's sanitation engineer.

Now, because Archer is an awkward goober in this episode, it seems like he's reading the questions off the cuff, with no one other than the possible exception of Ms. Malvin herself, having first vetted them. However, at the start of the recording, Archer announces that he's the one who selected the questions so he knew going in that the, as Trip puts it, "poop question," would be in there. Also before the recording Archer told Trip that he needed to there to participate as opposed to dealing with the large amount of work that was on his plate. What's more, we know from the start of the episode that Trip's nephew is one of the fourth grade students in Ms. Malvin's class.

So, my theory is that Archer made the intentional choice to have Trip answer a question he knew the engineer would find to be embarrassing, specifically to diminish him in the eyes of his nephew. Why would he do this extremely petty thing to someone who is ostensibly his friend and most loyal officer? Probably because he sucks and wanted to put Trip in his place for some imagined slight, just like he later has an outburst with the Vulcan captain whom he invited to dinner.

Not my original content.

Happy Free RPG Day!