GuyFleegman

What a lovely episode.

I saw a fair amount of skepticism across the Fediverse about how musical episodes are always bad and annoying, to which someone would always respond "well, Buffy nailed it." Apparently the SNW writers feel the same way, because "Subspace Rhapsody" isn't just a homage to "Once More With Feeling," it's a love letter. They may have swapped the demon for a subspace wedgie, but they kept the idea of using music to force the characters to confront their feelings about each other, and they even threw in a bunny callback.

10/10. I hope SNW maintains the tradition of a theatrically silly episode near the end of each season as long as it runs!

But again, the notion that NX-01 was called "Dauntless" before the Borg First Contact incursion is your headcanon. No one working on Enterprise ever attested to that, and Cromwell's casting as Cochrane is certainly not evidence of this alteration.

You started this conversation by saying "They did the same thing for First Contact" and I just want to know who "they" is and what the "same thing" that "they did" is. You've brought up this Dauntless/Enterprise theory twice now but that's certainly not evidence that any "they" did any "thing." As far as I can tell it is your headcanon for a relatively minor inconsistency that could have any number of other explanations, the most obvious one being that Arturis got a detail wrong.

I just find it incredibly hard to believe that anyone working on Enterprise was working on the assumption that they were creating a show in a timeline that was "altered" by the events of First Contact. That was never alluded to in the show's four year run and as far as I know no one working on that show ever said anything of the sort.

How does Cromwell reprising Cochrane in "Broken Bow" support the notion that Enterprise is in a different timeline from all previous Star Trek? I don't see how these things are connected at all.

Interesting headcanon, but headcanon nevertheless. I'd wager heavily that neither the First Contact nor Enterprise production staff share this interpretation, much less intended it.

they have the actors say “these events weren’t supposed to happen” repeatedly on screen?

The purpose of the "time has been altered and we need to fix the timeline" conversation that occurs near the beginning of every time travel story is definitely not to inform the audience that every subsequent installment of Star Trek will occur in an altered timeline.

In fact, it's just the opposite. The entire reason the characters are so concerned with restoring the timeline is that they want to return to their lives in an unaltered timeline.

I don't really care if they mess around with continuity if continuity is interfering with a good story they want to tell. My point is that the SNW writers are making a clear and concerted effort to maintain continuity.

Has the writing staff of First Contact ever confirmed, on the record, that it was their intent to alter the timeline? Has the writing staff for Enterprise ever indicated that they intended to depict an "altered" timeline?

and there could be some minor adjustments with the characters to accommodate the story that showrunners want to tell.

Other than the Kelvin timeline where they said up front "THIS IS A DIFFERENT TIMELINE," when has that ever happened?

Keep in mind, we're talking about showrunners who contrived a reason for Pike to be "fleet captain" for a single episode just so they could have Kirk and Pike interact without invalidating one line from TOS: "Court Martial." These are not the type of Star Trek fans who are going to make "minor adjustments" and justify it with "well you see back in S02E03 we changed the timeline, so now we can do whatever we want!"

There’s also nothing that indicates Kirk didn’t serve on the Enterprise in another role before getting promoted

Hm, here's an interesting formulation for all or part of a final season:

• Pike leaves, becomes an Academy instructor
• Una becomes captain of the Enterprise
• Kirk transfers in to be her XO
   

Kirk and Spock working together for a year or so would give us a chance to explain the unusual situation where Spock is simultaneously science officer and XO. By the end of this season you'd have the full TOS crew in place. (Minus perhaps Chekov, or maybe he's a cadet like Uhura was in season 1.)

The background music that plays behind M'Benga's confession is a callback to "The Battle For Peace," the soundtrack for the climatic battle between the Enterprise, the Excelsior, and Chang's Bird-of-Prey at the end of The Undiscovered Country.

And of course when that confession escalates to confrontation, it transitions to the iconic Klingon leifmotif, first heard in The Motion Picture.

It’s almost as if time itself is pushing back and events reinsert themselves and all this was supposed to happen back in 1992 and I’ve been trapped here for 30 years!

This line is a pretty conspicuous breach of the fourth wall placed there by the current stewards of the franchise to tell us that we’re back to pre-Kelvin timeline time travel rules. The whole “time travel creates two discrete timelines” notion is gone. It was a one-off to justify the Kelvin timeline, and now we’re done with it.

It’s all one timeline and while that timeline is in a constant state of flux due to time travelers tinkering with it on a regular basis, it’s still one big wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey timeline. Therefore, the answer to every “are X and Y in the same timeline?” question is a continuously shifting “maybe” which largely depends on how you choose to understand “the timeline.”

To put a finer point on it, this is the writing staff telling the fanbase to chill out about timelines. Akiva Goldsman speaking to CinemaBlend, emphasis mine:

This is a correction. Because otherwise, it’s silly, or Star Trek ceases to be in our universe…By the way, this happened in Season 1, so this is not a Season 2 [issue]. It’s a pilot issue. We want Star Trek to be an aspirational future. We want to be able to dream our way into the Federation as a Starfleet. I think that is the fun of it, in part. And so, in order to keep Star Trek in our timeline, we continue to push dates forward. At a certain point, we won’t be able to. But obviously, if you start saying that the Eugenics Wars were in the 90s, you're kind of fucked for aspirational in terms of the real world.

Translation: the Star Trek canon is going to keep shifting forward to accommodate keeping it in our future. More broadly, we should all accept some measure of canon flexibility so Star Trek is always set in an aspirational future, well suited for telling morality tales in space which are relevant to modern issues.

Warcraft III. Voodoo2 wasn't cutting it, upgraded to a GeForce4 MX420.

.... which still wasn't really cutting it, so I spent every penny to my name and upgraded to a Radeon 9700 Pro like 6 months later.

Man, I loved that card. Used it for years. To this day I think it was the card I held onto the longest.