“11:59”
Written by Brannon Braga & Joe Menosky
Directed by David Livingston
Season 5, Episode 23
Production episode 217
Original air date: May 5, 1999
Stardate: unknown
Captain’s log. Neelix talks to Janeway about the Great Wall of China—apparently, he and Paris are learning about each others’ homeworlds and challenging each other to trivia on the subject. This leads to Janeway asking him about the Millennium Gate, which one of Janeway’s ancestors worked on.
Janeway recalls the family stories about how Shannon O’Donnel was asked by the governor of Indiana to work on the project, and flew her in on a private jet. We then flash back to December 2000, where we see O’Donnel driving into Portage Creek, Indiana in a beat-up old station wagon, seeing signs for the Millennium Gate, but not knowing what it is.
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She’s looking for a service station, but most of the businesses in town are closed. Then she rear-ends another car, and has to admit to not having insurance. The guy she rear-ended lets it go and drives off. O’Donnel’s not so lucky, as her station wagon won’t start.
After calling for a tow truck, she takes refuge in Alexandria Books, owned and operated by Henry Janeway, assisted by his son Jason. We soon learn that Henry is the lone holdout in town—every other business has sold their land to the Millennium Gate project. It’s being sold as a planned community that can be the basis of future communities on other worlds (which Janeway said in the twenty-fourth century was one goal the Gate accomplished), but Henry sees it as a fancy-shmancy shopping mall and nothing else.
Henry has flyers he’s been putting up around town speaking out against the Gate. O’Donnel offers to use her laptop to e-mail everyone in town, which she hopes he’ll pay her for, as she’s flat broke and needs to pay to fix her car. (How she can afford a laptop, which in 2000 cost a lot more than they do now, when she can’t even afford car insurance is left as an exercise for the viewer.)
Gerald Moss, who represents the company building the Gate, is interviewed by local news. Not only is Henry the only holdout, but if he doesn’t capitulate by the time the new year flips to 2001, they’ll have to consider an alternate location for the Gate. Henry is thrilled, as now he just has to hang on for a few more days.
Back on Voyager, Janeway asks Seven to dig up information about the construction of the Millennium Gate, as most of the records are fragmentary. Janeway credits the family stories about O’Donnel as being a major influence on her decision to become a Starfleet officer. At Neelix’s suggestion, Seven expands her search to non-Federation sources, and they find a picture of an elderly Shannon O’Donnel Janeway with her children and grandchildren in a park. They also find a reference to the town of Portage Creek’s resistance to the Gate project.
In 2000, Moss comes to O’Donnel with a job offer. He knows that she washed out of the space program (another inaccuracy in Janeway’s family stories, as Janeway speaks of O’Donnel as being an astronaut), and her work as an engineer wasn’t respected. Moss is willing to make her a consultant on the Gate project, but only if she convinces Henry to sell the bookstore.
O’Donnel bonds with Jason over videogames and the Gate—Jason, unlike his father, thinks it’s cool—while Henry is off in Bloomington to buy stock, as the local suppliers won’t work with him, because he won’t support the Gate. When Henry returns, O’Donnel and he get into an argument about the Gate. She admits to the job offer, saying she doesn’t want to keep living out of her car, and Henry asks her to stay with him, but she doesn’t want to be stuck in his bookstore, either.
On Voyager, Janeway is disappointed to learn that most of what she thought she knew about her ancestor isn’t true. She wasn’t an astronaut, she didn’t work on any of the Mars missions, never even went to Mars, and it turns out that the only person who was against the Gate in Portage Creek was O’Donnel’s future husband. Chakotay urges Janeway not to be so hard on O’Donnel, as she had no way of knowing she’d need to live up to the expectations of her descendant the starship captain.
O’Donnel gets into her car to head out of Portage Creek. Moss says the job offer is still good, even though she didn’t get Henry to play ball, and Jason pleads with her to stay, but she drives off anyhow.
But after stopping for chocolate chip cookies, she turns around and comes back. A news crew and the police are outside Alexandria Books as the clock is moving toward the midnight deadline that will see the Gate officially moved to Canton, Ohio. She goes in to tell Henry that she realized that she didn’t want to continue her life without him, and that he needs to stop living in the past and do right by his son and the town, and he agrees at 11:59pm and everyone’s happy.
Neelix asks a despondent Janeway to the mess hall, where they’re celebrating Ancestor’s Day, a solemn and ancient holiday that Neelix just made up to make Janeway feel better. The crew remind her that O’Donnel is just as much of an inspiration even if she didn’t do everything she thought she did.
The EMH takes a holographic picture, and Neelix presents Janeway with a framed version of the picture he dug up. We then fade to the taking of that picture, with the elderly O’Donnel and her progeny.
There’s coffee in that nebula! Janeway gets a hard lesson in the difference between family history and recorded history.
Forever an ensign. Kim tells the story of an ancestor of his who piloted a sleeper ship to a solar system that turned out not to actually be there, so he had to turn around and pilot it back, while the rest of the crew was in stasis. The crew was awakened and confused as to why they never left orbit. The crew of Voyager finds this story far funnier than it actually is.
Everybody comes to Neelix’s. Neelix and Paris’ trading of historical trivia about Earth and Talax is what gets Janeway started on thinking about O’Donnel, and Neelix also is the one who helps Seven get on the right search track.
Resistance is futile. Seven mentions an ancestor of her own that she’s found: Sven “Buttercup” Hansen, a prize fighter. She is skeptical as to Neelix’s claims that there is significance to her being a descendant of his. (Neelix’s mentioning of the similarity between the names Sven and Seven is met with a Stare Of Dubiousness.)
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. O’Donnel meeting up with a man named Henry Janeway is some pretty clumsy foreshadowing to their eventual coupling, though their conversations are entertaining.
Do it.
“The holographic engineer is having problems with her program, Neelix, the Cardassian cook, is low on supplies, Seven of Twelve is regenerating, and Captain Chakotay is doing just fine.”
–Janeway’s sarcastic commentary on how history can sometimes distort reality.
Welcome aboard. Character actor John Carroll Lynch, who was in the midst of his recurring role as the title character’s brother on The Drew Carey Show, plays Moss, Bradley Pierce plays Jason, Kristina Hayes plays the reporter, and James Greene and Christopher Curry play the townsfolk O’Donnel encounters upon arrival in Portage Creek.
And our Robert Knepper moment is the great Kevin Tighe as Henry Janeway. I vaguely knew he was in a Trek episode at some point, but I was completely gobsmacked to see him here.
Trivial matters: The original notion of this episode was to have an ancestor of Janeway’s in the twentieth century encounter either Q or Guinan, with John deLancie or Whoopi Goldberg guest starring, but it mutated into a more straightforward flashback with no science fictional or Trek elements to the flashback. However, the turn of the millennium was always intended to be part of it.
The episode accurately predicted that the Y2K bug would not be as devastating as feared, though the real reason for that was because programmers worked their asses off throughout 1999 to keep it from happening. (Your humble rewatcher was married to such a programmer at the time.)
However, the episode did not accurately predict that New Year’s festivities in the 2000/2001 new year would be equally as turn-of-the-millennium focused as those in 1999/2000. Instead, the 2000/2001 new year was just another New Year’s.
Another 1999 Trek story that dealt with the turn of the millennium was the novel I, Q by John deLancie & Peter David, which had an equally inaccurate prediction for how things would go, in this case a terrorist attack on Times Square.
O’Donnel appears in The Eugenics Wars: The Rise and Fall of Khan Noonien Singh Book 2 by Greg Cox, in which we learn she was part of the project that developed the Botany Bay, the ship on which Khan and his fellow Augments were exiled.
The model of the Apollo Lunar Module that hangs from O’Donnel’s rear-view mirror was borrowed from the desk of Trek writer Denise Okuda.
Portage Creek is fictional, though there is a Portage, Indiana that is a suburb of Chicago. Portage Creek is said to be near Bloomington, so is much further south than Portage. The outdoor scenes were filmed on Paramount’s “New York” lot, with snow brought in to simulate winter.
Set a course for home. “That station wagon of yours doesn’t exactly look like a sailing ship.” I wanted to like this episode more than I did, as its heart is very much in the right place, but it ultimately doesn’t quite cohere into what it wants to be.
It reminds me far too much of other episodes that tackled its themes far more successfully. “Living Witness” did so much more with the notion of history distorting the facts. DS9’s “Far Beyond the Stars” was a significantly more effective twentieth-century flashback. And DS9’s “Once More Unto the Breach” provided a far more effective colloquy on the differences between legends and reality. (I really wish Worf could have materialized in the mess hall at the end and delivered a version of his line from the latter episode: “The only real question is whether you believe in the legend of Shannon O’Donnel or not. If you do, then there should be no doubt in your mind that she was a great explorer. If you do not believe in the legend, then she was just a woman and it does not matter how she lived.”)
I wish someone had pointed out to Janeway that, even if O’Donnel wasn’t an astronaut, she was still a NASA engineer, an occupation that was only about ten percent women in 2000. I wish someone had told Henry that, if he’s the only actual open business in town, the town is going to go into economic ruin, destroying the lives of everyone in it.
When O’Donnel and Henry are talking about the pros and cons of living in the past, O’Donnel won the argument at the very beginning by saying there were no antibiotics in the classical period (not to mention no decent dental care, and oh, yeah, that women could be property), yet Henry kept going for some reason, apparently completely okay with the notion of dying from a small cut that gets infected at age twenty. It’s also really easy for an educated white guy to say that the classical period was better.
That’s another problem with the episode: it didn’t really sell me on the Henry-Shannon pairing at all. Kevin Tighe is fine as Henry, but I spent most of the episode wanting to punch him in the throat. (To be fair, that’s true about a lot of Tighe’s roles—he’s really good at playing people whose throat you want to punch.) The whole chocolate-chip-cookie thing at the end didn’t work because it wasn’t seeded anywhere in the episode. Which wouldn’t be so bad, except we spent lots of time on things like O’Donnel dreaming about the moon landing or helping Jason with videogames, none of which paid off in any way anywhere else in the episode.
In the end, this was a Lifetime Original Movie with a twenty-fourth-century frame grafted onto it. It’s still completely watchable, mainly because Kate Mulgrew does superlative work both as a frustrated O’Donnel and a devastated Janeway, because Tighe inhabits his character perfectly, and because both Bradley Pierce and especially the always-reliable John Carroll Lynch are fantastic in the roles of Jason and Moss. And, to be fair, I was completely engaged in the lives of the characters in December 2000 as I was watching it. I also must confess to getting a kick out of Paris and Neelix trading trivia about each others’ homeworlds. (I also love that they both forgot the Seventh Wonder of the Ancient World, leaving it to the ex-Borg to tell them it was the Lighthouse of Alexandria.) But it should’ve been so much more than it was.
Warp factor rating: 5
Keith R.A. DeCandido is also reviewing each new episode of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier as they’re released on this site.
Yeah, you’re right about Kevin Tighe. He can play a mighty awful person. I’ll always associate him with his role in the Tales from the Crypt episode “Cutting Cards.” He and Lance Henriksen play the two of the nastiest jerks ever put on film – and of course it pays off in hilarious, gruesome fashion.
I only recently watched this episode for the first time since perusing the options on streaming over the years as it never seemed particularly exciting. But now having seen it I can say it’s charming and has a “It’s a Wonderful Life” kind of vibe to it. Kate Mulgrew does put in fine performances both as her usual character and her ancestor. John Carroll Lynch was “that guy” whose face I know I had seen in other performances and it was a bit weird for me to see Kevin Tighe as the nice guy and love interest since the only other thing I’ve seen him in was Lost and he did a great job playing a truly awful, mean con man. I did like how the story accurately predicted that the Y2K bug was much ado about nothing and also pointed out how 2001 was the actual beginning of the new millennium.
But now after seeing this episode, it’s not one I really feel the desire to re-watch anytime soon if at all.
garreth: It was not “much ado about nothing,” as I said in the Trivial Matters section, it was prevented by a lot of people working very hard throughout 1999.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido, who’s still pissed at the dismissal of so much hard work two decades later
We got through Y2K just fine, but most of us will still be alive for the Year 2038 problem (in which Unix systems that store the time as a 32-bit integer will think it’s 1970). See you then everybody.
When O’Donnel and Henry are talking about the pros and cons of living in the past, O’Donnel won the argument at the very beginning by saying there were no antibiotics in the classical period (not to mention no decent dental care, and oh, yeah, that women could be property), yet Henry kept going for some reason, apparently completely okay with the notion of dying from a small cut that gets infected at age twenty.
What gets me about this is what finally gets him to shut up is O’Donnel’s claim that there was no cold beer back then. As is usually the case on TV, when people are talking about the past the frame of referenced used is Rome. Romans were familiar with the practice of extracting ice from a frozen well at night then keeping it insulated for later use. They could also chill beverages with snow when the weather cooperated. And Diocletian’s Maximum Edict on Prices listed several kinds of beer, and there’s many other sources that attest to the widespread availability of same. So the “winning” argument isn’t even right, Romans could have cold beer if they could afford it and felt like it. The past was horrible for other reasons that don’t involve cold beer.
@krad – As someone that also spent much of 1999 making sure that 2000 went off without a hitch, I agree. The IT industry would have been roasted if there had been an issue, but the fact that the turn of the century went off without a hitch almost seems to make it look easy. It was not.
I will always remember that I was at a NYE party in 2000, with my pager (!!) and laptop in a bag. I was absolutely not permitted to be at a party since I was on-call that night, but thankfully I don’t drink. I was dialed into a conference bridge and on mute and was nice enough to check in with everyone after the ball dropped to make sure that the world wasn’t ending, but there was no way in hell I was going to miss celebrating with my friends on one of the most significant days of our lives, regardless of what my employer’s particular feelings about that day might have been…
My issue with this episode is mostly around how Voyager just happens to have massive and completely unnecessary databases of everything all the time. Maybe they explained that, but I never wanted to rewatch this to find out. (And, I believe, I may not have even managed to finish this one at all…)
It annoyed me the first time I saw this episode that the Wonder they both forgot was the Lighthouse of Alexandria, because a) it’s not the one people usually forget (hello, Temple of Artemis) and b) Tom is both a history geek and, apparently, a sailing geek – he should have remembered the Lighthouse even if Neelix didn’t.
A nice little episode. I liked the crew’s musings about their family histories. I wasn’t as sold on the romance between Shannon and Henry, who seemed rather old for her among other things. And I’m not crazy about stories where actors play their characters’ ancestors. I presume that Shannon O’Donnell didn’t actually look exactly like Kathryn Janeway, that we were figuratively seeing Janeway projecting herself into the role. But that clashes with the idea that we were seeing her true experiences rather than Janeway’s beliefs about them. I’d be happier if they’d cast a different actress.
@2/garreth: “…also pointed out how 2001 was the actual beginning of the new millennium.”
Not really. That idea is based on the idea that “There was no year zero,” but there wasn’t a year 1 either, or 2 or 10 or 100. The calendar we use today wasn’t invented until the 6th century CE and wasn’t widely adopted for centuries after that. And it’s based on an estimate of Jesus’s birthdate that turned out to be off by at least 4 years, so its starting point is completely arbitrary anyway.
So if you let go of the fiction that it matters when the calendar began (because it has no meaningful starting point at all), all that matters is what makes sense to mark as a transition point between centuries. And the point where the digits roll around from 999 to 000 is a much more natural place to mark the transition than a year later. Think of decades by analogy. Nobody would define “the Nineties” as 1991-2000; they define them as 1990-99, because that’s what actually makes sense as a grouping.
Anyway, real-life practice outweighs theory. The entire world came together for a huge celebration on December 31, 1999, while as Keith said, the following New Year was just another routine one, except in the minds of a smattering of calendrical purists. Calendars are arbitrary; their only value is as a form of mutually agreed communication between people. And most people on Earth decided that the millennium began on 1/1/2000. That’s when it was actually acknowledged and commemorated by the overwhelming majority of people who use the Western calendar (and countless millions who don’t, because we live in a global age), so that’s what counts as “actual” to me.
@krad: Forgive my unartful language. I do acknowledge the hard work put in by computer programmers to avert a major computer bug (the work that went into it was something I was unaware of at the time), I just meant that after all of the doom and gloom predictions, nothing negative to my knowledge ended up happening. Therefore my perception, and I believe that of the public’s when 2000 hit, was that all the hype wasn’t worth it.
@7 – But the calendar doesn’t have a “starting point”, it has a point at which it switches from BC to AD (or BCE to CE if you prefer). If you subscribe to “New millennium started 1 Jan 2000” you’re effectively saying that the first year of the 1st century AD/CE was the year 1 BC/BCE, because of the lack of a year 0. Which is patently ridiculous. The other alternative is that there’s a 99 year century somewhere out there (the 20th century, most likely, because people at the time did realise that 1900 was the last year of the 19th century rather than the first year of the 20th). And that’s just not how centuries work.
If they wanted to get an older believable actor for Henry, then it should’ve been Peter Falk. ;-)
@7/CLB: Thanks for the calendar insight and I agree that calendars are completely arbitrary. It’s why I’ve always found it curious that the Federation and non-Federation worlds adhere to Earth’s Christian calendar and was wondering why in the TNG episode “The Emissary” why Worf would announce to the Klingons who had just awakened from the sleeper ship, “Welcome to the 24th century” as if that Earthly calendar should have any meaning to them.
@9/Muswell: “But the calendar doesn’t have a “starting point”, it has a point at which it switches from BC to AD (or BCE to CE if you prefer).”
So what? That was two thousand years ago. It doesn’t have to constrain how we find it useful to define the border between decades or centuries. Calendars have lots of irregularities anyway. Years and months don’t divide evenly into weeks, and months don’t have consistent lengths, so everything falls on a different day of the week every year anyway, and then there are leap years, and skipped leap years once a century except every fourth century… there are all sorts of irregularities and weirdnesses in the calendar that we take for granted, so why is it a big deal if the first century breaks down as only 99 years long? It’s contradictory to expect any aspect of the calendar to be mathematically perfect.
“And that’s just not how centuries work.”
That’s too literal-minded. A month is called that because it’s based on the cycle of the Moon, which is 28 days. But most months are longer than 28 days. Because a calendar is not an independent physical phenomenon following immutable cosmic rules, it’s merely a convenience invented by humans. So we can define any part of it to mean whatever we want, to be as long or as short as we want. If we can say that every fourth February has an extra day in it, then we can say that the first century was one year shorter than all the others. (Call it an anti-leap century.) I mean, it’s already over, so what does it matter to us in the here and now if it retroactively breaks the pattern?
@@@@@ 12 – Just because a system’s arbitrary doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be internally consistent. The number of Voyager crewmembers is completely arbitrary, but I think most of us would be happier if the writers had paid attention and kept their numbers consistent.
Language change happens. I accept that. It’s the reason I’m not typing this in proto-Indo-European. And we need new words for new things, and old words fall out of use, and apparently as a society we seem to have decided that the subjunctive hardly ever matters in English, and I can more or less live with that (I use the subjunctive myself, but when reviewing other people’s emails I will grudgingly leave counterfactuals in the indicative unless the email will be going out with my name on it). But when we change the use of words aribtrarily due to wild mass guessing or wild mass ignorance, we wrong the people who need those words to have a defined and accepted meaning, and have been happily using a term in the way their predecessors did. We take an unambiguous word or term and make it ambiguous, and that is detrimental to human communication; given that the primary purpose of any language is to enable human communication, something has gone wrong here.
I’m a classicist by training. I need to know what someone means when they refer to the 2nd century AD, because important shit happened in 100AD and in 200AD and I might need to know which of those things I’m taking into account. By making the usage of “century” ambiguous, you’re forcing me to stop and clarify something that didn’t previously need clarifying.
I’m a philosopher by training. When I say something begs the question, I don’t mean there’s a question that it raises, I mean an argument’s premise assumes the conclusion. Through the appropriation of the term “begs the question” (when there was already a perfectly good way of saying that, i.e. “raises the question”) I have been robbed of a simple and unambiguous way of saying that thing and have been forced to find other, more long-winded ways of saying that. My ability to communicate an idea has been harmed.
And the millennium thing isn’t even the first time unambiguous calendar terms have been appropriated to the detriment of communication. If people think the 20th century was 1900-1999, then they’re conflating the 20th century with a period currently known as the 1900s (nineteen hundreds), which makes one term or the other redundant.Which is adding insult to injury, since the 1900s originally referred to a decade, in the same way that the 1910s and 1920s are decades. The appropriation of the term to refer to a period of 100 years robbed us of a way to refer to that decade (and the equivalent decades of earlier centuries) (and don’t come at me with “Edwardian era” for 1901-1910, because they don’t line up exactly).
It matters to us in the here and now because a lot of us in the here and now need to refer to periods in the past unambiguously and accurately, and while some types of linguistic shift don’t hinder that, this example does.
Whenever I see Kevin Tighe onscreen, I instantly recall Anthony Cooper on LOST. Cooper was a grifter who cheated his own son out of a kidney, and then threw him down the street from a 10th floor apartment – who survived, although permanently paralyzed. Few characters made my skin crawl the way Anthony Cooper did. When Sawyer brutally choked Cooper to death inside the Black Rock, I was cheering out loud. A visceral reaction of joy and satisfaction.
That is to say I cannot see Tighe playing any other type of character. He was so good in that slimy role, I can’t help but see him as that person. This means I have a bit of difficulty picturing him as a stubborn, yet decent bookstore owner who falls for Janeway’s ancestor. The actors have chemistry, for sure, but I feel their tale is too dependant on conventional five act structure love story rules rather than a real connection.
Regardless, this is a well-meaning episode, and a welcome one, especially coming on the heels of Someone to Watch Over Me. You don’t usually get two pure character-based episodes in a row on Star Trek. Two weeks without a jeopardy plot to spice things up must have annoyed a certain segment of Trek fandom, back when these aired.
Though it’s weird realizing this was written by Menosky and Braga. It’s a story very much out of their comfort zone, especially with a staff comprised of Michael Taylor and Nicholas Sagan, who have proved they can write convincing relationship stories. It’s not really a bad episode, and it’s so different from ths usual episode it stands out in a good way. But still it feels somewhat pedestrian and uninspired. The Lifetime movie comparison fits the episode well. It’s still very much a product of Rick Berman-era Star Trek, and his own take on humanity.
And the plot itself’s been done to death. The old stubborn man who refuses to sell his property plot was done better on DS9’s Progress. I can sympathize with the concept of a single principled man holding his own against big bad corporations, but that’s not what we get here. Henry Janeway is too stubborn to garner that kind of sympathy.
Thankfully, it’s still a watchable, well-cast episode (Carroll Lynch brings life and energy to anything he’s on). And the shipboard scenes shine, especially Chakotay pointing out the obvious to Janeway in regards to her ‘disappointment’.
Is it? The O’Donnel character is portrayed as someone who has currently fallen on hard times but in the past was affluent enough afford education as an aerospace engineer (or smart enough to get a scholarship) and pursue becoming a NASA astronaut candidate. Like a lot of people in her situation it’s not unreasonable for her to have tools of her former ambitions that might have been acquired during a time when her resources were greater.
@13/Muswell: “Just because a system’s arbitrary doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be internally consistent.”
Show me where the Gregorian calendar is consistent.
Besides, the length of a century is consistent — with one isolated exception that’s comfortably tucked away thousands of years ago so it doesn’t matter to us today.
“If people think the 20th century was 1900-1999, then they’re conflating the 20th century with a period currently known as the 1900s (nineteen hundreds), which makes one term or the other redundant.”
That’s not true, because one is ordinal and the other is cardinal. The first century is the first span of 100 years, which obviously includes the years less than 100. So the second is the years from 100 up, and so on. Just as the second year of my life began when I turned one year old, and so on.
“It matters to us in the here and now because a lot of us in the here and now need to refer to periods in the past unambiguously and accurately, and while some types of linguistic shift don’t hinder that, this example does.”
Fine, then use that definition for scholarship. But if the majority of people around the world who weren’t scholars chose to have a gigantic celebration on 12/31/99 because that was more meaningful to them, then there’s no harm in that. Things don’t have to be done the same way in formal and informal contexts.
@14/Eduardo: “Though it’s weird realizing this was written by Menosky and Braga. It’s a story very much out of their comfort zone”
Funny… I was thinking it was very much in Menosky’s wheelhouse, because it’s about myths and symbols and traditions and how they affect us.
This episode also provides a prime example of an alternate present to our own reality with the Millennium Gate as obviously that monument doesn’t exist. That’s actually a shame though as I think a forward-thinking and futuristic (for the era in which it was built) monument celebrating humanity is pretty cool.
I guess it is a sign of my age but when I see Kevin Tighe I think of him on Emergency!
Charles, we must be the same age.
Greg Cox reminded me over on the Book of Face that I forgot to mention the small role Shannon O’Donnel played in his Eugenics Wars duology. That’s been added to the Trivial Matters section.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
“I’m stuck in the future, you’re stuck in the past. But maybe we could get unstuck in the present.”
A charming oddity. It’s like someone decided to make a romcom within the framework of a Star Trek episode and then forgot to include the humour. I’ve heard it criticised for the fact that Captain Kathy’s ancestor meeting a man named Henry Janeway makes the ending obvious, but that’s probably deliberate: It’s how stories like this always end.
I’m undecided about its message. Normally the guy making a stand against corporate types trying to bulldoze his town would be the hero of the story, and for a decent chunk of the runtime it almost seems like he is. But the ending suggests that we’re meant to see Henry Janeway as a misguided relic and the corporate types as visionaries pointing the way to the stars. The episode does a decent job of portraying the Millennium Gate as a positive thing (they’re bulldozing the town but it’s all right because they’re going to rebuild it even better!) but I can’t help thinking that I’d be the individualist refusing to give up what I love for something shiny and new.
Sadly, people in real life never noticed that they’d celebrated “the Millennium” a year early. (Sorry, it’s a word in a dictionary with an accurately defined meaning, and a bunch of idiots getting overexcited about seeing some numbers change on a big clock doesn’t mean that a thousand years is suddenly a year less. Just like a bunch of science-fiction writers talking about a galaxy as though it’s a quick bus ride doesn’t change the meaning.) But at least, in a decade where no fewer than four Doctor Who stories predicted a great catastrophe on New Year’s Eve 1999 (one of which seemed to treat it as fact that all technology would cease to function at the stroke of midnight because computers wouldn’t be able to handle a year beginning with 2), this episode correctly predicted it would be a non-event. (Sorry if that seems like dismissing the work of people who worked hard to make it a non-event but hey, that’s their job.)
Harry Kim claims that in 2210 there was no subspace communication and crews went into stasis for six month trips to other stars: This probably ties in with some TOS episodes (eg “A Piece of the Action”) but contradicts others (eg “Balance of Terror”) and is definitely hard to reconcile with what we see of early warp travel in Enterprise. Neelix says a Ferengi was trying to sell collectibles of the beginning of the Federation eleven years ago: Curiously, that would be right after the first formal contact between the Federation and the Ferengi. Then again, even though we’re only three episodes from the end of the season, we’re told it’s April, which is hard to reconcile with the established “one season equals one calendar year” model. (This will get even more problematic in Season 7.)
@21/cap-mjb: “(Sorry, it’s a word in a dictionary with an accurately defined meaning, and a bunch of idiots getting overexcited about seeing some numbers change on a big clock doesn’t mean that a thousand years is suddenly a year less. Just like a bunch of science-fiction writers talking about a galaxy as though it’s a quick bus ride doesn’t change the meaning.)”
They’re not “idiots.” Calendars aren’t objectively real physical phenomena like galaxies, they’re artificial conveniences invented by humans. Right now it’s 2021 in the Gregorian calendar, 5781 in the Hebrew calendar, 1442 Islamic, 1943 Indian Civil Calendar, and so on. There are many, many equally correct answers to “What is today’s date?” None of it is objectively real, like the Earth being round or dinosaurs existing. It’s just a set of symbols and conventions mutually agreed upon for purposes of communication, like language. Defining the calendar differently or flexibly doesn’t make people stupid any more than speaking a different dialect or using slang makes them stupid.
@22: Maybe not, but buying into a commercial invention that three noughts on the end of a year is somehow something big and important called “The Millennium” with a capital “The” is evidence that you really can fool all of the people all of the time, or most of them anyway. I’ve never really understood the appeal of standing around (on one of the coldest nights of the year if you’re in the northern hemisphere) watching a bunch of numbers tick round to a different day as if that doesn’t happen every 24 hours.
So long as we’ve created the debating topic “is it reasonable that the first century in the Gregorian calendar should have 99 years, to align with both (a) the lack of a retroactive year zero and (b) the common notion that century-boundaries are at 99/00,” consider these two precedents:
* A “calendar year” is either 365 or 366 days, to align an integer day-count with Earth’s orbit.
* The switch from the Julian to Gregorian calendar necessitated a synchronizing-jump. Depending on when a country adopted the new calendar, between 1582 and 1927, between 10 and 13 days were dropped, such that the transitional “year” contained 352 to 355 days.
(Personally and FWIW, I’d prefer a calendar whose starting point is comfortably prior to any event within the gamut of archaeology, so that we needn’t count backwards during BCE for Persians, Sumerians, settlement of the Pacific coast of South America, etc. Under such a system, we’d say things like “the Western- and Eastern-centered Roman Empires operated from years 37,900 to 39,200, the first sustained powered flight was in 40,003 and the first Moon landing in 40,069” and so forth.)
“Personally and FWIW, I’d prefer a calendar whose starting point is comfortably prior to any event within the gamut of archaeology, so that we needn’t count backwards during BCE for Persians, Sumerians, settlement of the Pacific coast of South America, etc. Under such a system, we’d say things like “the Western- and Eastern-centered Roman Empires operated from years 37,900 to 39,200, the first sustained powered flight was in 40,003 and the first Moon landing in 40,069” and so forth.)”
I would be down for this too and it would have the nice side effect of deleting the BCE/CE thing. I have no particular attachment to the old BC/AD system, but changing to two initialisms that look alike in text and sound alike in speech, thus making it very easy to make a mistake or misunderstand something, was a very silly thing to do, especially because the “common era” it alludes to is fairly nonsensical. Even if we stuck with the current dividing line, anything would be better than BCE/CE.
@23/Human beings like any reason to party and celebrate even if that means marking the occasion where a bunch of digits change on an arbitrary calendar and doing the celebrating in relatively uncomfortable environmental occasions. That said, I myself like the idea of events that signify the anniversary of momentous occasions in the history of our society. One that is coming up relatively soon is on 2026 which will be the semiquincentennial (250th anniversary) of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. I’m sure there will be some interesting events to mark the occasion that year.
@18
Me too! Emergency is still in reruns on various side-channels these days.
@krad
I was (still am) a programmer and I well remember the run up to 2000. We were also (in the Windows world) still dealing with the 16-bit to 32-bit transition which was another load of fun. I remember the first time I became aware of the y2k problem as being a problem was in the mid-90’s when people in their early hundreds started getting threatening letters from school systems about not showing up for kindergarten and first grade. Because the schools stored ages in 2 digit fields. Oops. Two glitches of note:
1. On January 1 2000 the Official Time site at the US Naval Observatory reported the date as being “01/01/19100”.
2. Just last year parking meters in New York City began failing because of a delayed y2k bug.
And then there’s the Y2038 problem…
@25/Rick: “especially because the “common era” it alludes to is fairly nonsensical.”
Not entirely. In broad strokes, what we call the Common Era is an era of greater cross-cultural communication, interconnection, and exchange of ideas compared to what came before, an era when religions and languages and cultures and innovations spread more widely and global culture began to emerge. Of course the exact dividing point is arbitrary, impossible to narrow down to a single year or century, but the past two millennia more or less are legitimately a more “common” era than the preceding millennia.
@22 But dinosaurs do exist! I hear their mating calls every year around this time. Then in late November we celebrate the harvest by eating the biggest dinosaur we can fit in our ovens. :-)
Quoth wiredog: “2. Just last year parking meters in New York City began failing because of a delayed y2k bug.”
Yup. I remember standing at a Muni Meter in great frustration trying to pay to park… *laughs*
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
As someone who works in IT now (but did not in 2000), this is the classic IT item. If you fix an issue before it effects anybody, everybody just assumes there was no issue, but if you don’t everybody just assumes you were too incompetent to fix it. Just can’t win…
@16/Christopher: Only on a superficial level, at least for me. This episode and Janeway’s misguided interpretation of the family line doesn’t carry the same weight the way an episode like Living Witness does, at least in terms of symbolism.
I bet Shannon O’Donnell would be thrilled to know one of her descendants is a starship captain! Henry would pretend not to be impressed.
Star Trek has long served as a platform for the discussion of contemporaneous social issues within a science fiction context. Here we have the issue of cities giving sweetheart tax abatements to attract privately-owned constructions.
@33/Eduardo: Oh, sure, it’s a superficial treatment of the theme. I’m just saying that it wasn’t any kind of a stretch for Joe Menosky to write an episode about myths and symbols, even if he did it in a simpler way than usual.
I can also attest to the fact that the Y2K threat was real. I won’t go into details of my company, but someone I worked with designed and delivered a correction of a 2-digit year date calculation into a 4-digit year date calculation. It went out with all the warnings in place to clue customers in to its purpose and urgency. Nothing happened to anyone (at least nothing attributable to us), except to one customer in another country who somehow managed not to get the memo and failed to install it. As soon as midnight hit, they suffered a major outage.
@phillip_thorne: That’s exactly what the Holocene calendar is, under which it’s currently the year 12,021. It has the virtue of allowing me to experience one last palindromic year.
I think we got a patch for the UNIX version of Foxbase Plus so that January 1st 2000 worked, and happily we weren’t using it much anyway. Then it turned out that someone, sometime, had fairly pointlessly programmed it to treat every 100th year as “not a leap year” – done in other software products too – since really the first time that this made a difference was 2000, which was a leap year. (Obviously I’m refusing to consider 1900.) So after that, we used Foxbase Plus even less.
Surely there are still web pages that display today’s date (for no reason, in fact) with the year as ’19’+getYear() being by now 19121. Or in some documentation, year 192021. Unironically. And it’s the date ON YOUR OWN COMPUTER that you’re looking at. If you set your PC to the First of Octember, the web site will display “Octember 1, 192021”.
The episode was set slightly in the future at least… and when are the Eugenics Wars anyway?
@39: I believe the Eugenics Wars had already transpired and Khan and his men had been exiled into space by the time Shannon O’Donnell went rolling into Portage Creek.
@39/Robert Carnegie: As we discussed back with “Future’s End,” the continental United States was virtually untouched by every war in the 20th century, so there’s no reason to think the Eugenics Wars would be any different. The US is not the entire planet.
Also, as garreth said, the EW ended in 1996.
And though it’s not screen canon, Greg Cox’s Eugenics Wars makes it out to be a shadow war that we already lived through and that only becomes apparent years later. And, well, I like those books so I’m hoping they never contradict it onscreen in Prime canon.
@44/wizardofwoz77: I think Greg’s premise in the novels really only works from an American perspective. I mean, there’s no way the people of India and Southeast Asia could’ve been unaware that Khan was directly ruling over them. At most, they just wouldn’t have known he was an Augment engaging in clandestine conflict with other world leaders who were also Augments. Similarly, the part that depicted a chemical weapon attack on an international conference in Europe couldn’t have happened in secret.
But Americans being blithely oblivious to this conflict going on openly elsewhere in the world? That’s absolutely believable, because it essentially did happen with the massive civil wars that rocked Africa in the 1990s but got very little US media coverage. The American media rarely pay much attention to anything going on in the rest of the world that doesn’t affect us directly, especially if it doesn’t affect white people.
Greg’s premise, as I read it, wasn’t so much that the conflict was in secret as that the reasons behind the conflict were secret. The events that made up the EW were publicly known, and included a number of things that happened in real-life 1990s history, but it wasn’t until decades later that historians learned the truth that those seemingly isolated instances of violence and conquest and so forth were all part of a single global conflict among Augments.
In “Seeds of Dissent” https://memory-beta.fandom.com/wiki/Seeds_of_Dissent, Shannon O’Donnell, Rain Robinson and Shaun Christopher take the Botany Bay to escape from Khan victorious, by the way.
My local “sign up for the Covid vaccine” page had a warning to put your birthdate using MM/DD/YYYY, no variations, don’t forget the slashes, our software can’t cope. Which I did, because I am a software engineer who was also around for Y2K.
Despite that, I was bounced for being “under 16” – the only possible way I can see that happening would be that they took only the first two digits, which are 19…
This episode…so boring…
I mean, its fine with good performances all around, but its just so inconsequential. We know that Shannon and Henry wind up together the moment we hear his name is Janeway. Then we spend most of the episode listening to an old white man ramble about how awesome the past was; it wasn’t so great for a lot of people, Henry, especially women and folks who looked like me.
A neat story, well-acted. Its just…so boring…
I thought it was fairly clumsy also to have Henry’s last name be Janeway. I believe they said Shannon O’Donnell was fifteen generations removed. I mean, there’s likely to be a daughter or 2 thrown into the lineage now and then, not just 13 generations of sons. I suppose any daughters could’ve retained their last name, though it’s usually presented as hyphenated. I’m not overly familiar with how Trek presents couples from their time with assignation of last names, but the examples I’ve seen seem to retain the fairly standard practice of taking the last name of the man in a heterosexual marriage. But like I said, I’m not intimately familiar enough with Trek lore to state it as fact.
When Star Trek: The Next Generation premiered in the 1980s, I learned from some source (don’t recall if it was onscreen canon) that the Enterprise’s computer contained “the sum of human knowledge.” That idea really captured my imagination—that it held, not only every novel, dictionary, and encyclopedia ever, but also every birth record, every municipal traffic ticket, every boxful of family snapshots, every property tax receipt, and every crew and cargo manifest from every vessel from the Roman long ships to the first Mars-colonizing spacecraft.
That such a trove of data could exist, indexed and cross-referenced, seemed like a wonderful idea and a rich story mine—but I’m not sure Star Trek has ever made good use of it. The fact that Voyager’s computer had to be specifically told to search outside the Federation corpus seems spectacularly dumb to me.
@14/Eduardo Jencarelli: When I see the older Kevin Tighe on screen, all I can think of is the despicable con man he played in LOST. But when I see the name “Kevin Tighe” in credits, my only thought is of the young blond paramedic from old reruns of EMERGENCY! Funny how the brain works.
The Millennium Gate, as described in the episode, sounds like an arcology. But no one ever calls it that.
I was randomly skimming through the TV channels in my hotel and I came across an actor who looked familiar, and I realized it was a young, or at least younger than anything else I’ve seen him in, Kevin Tighe! It appears to be 1989’s Road House. And he doesn’t seem to be an evil character either!
Oh, and it happens to be Kevin Tighe’s (76th) birthday today! So there you go.
And one of the bad guys in Road House is Anthony de Longis (“Culluh” – the Kazon baddie from the first two seasons of Voyager).
I feel like the cultural valence of an angry white guy from the rural American Midwest who won’t shut up about how awesome the Roman Empire was has, unfortunately, rather shifted in the quarter-century or so since this one aired. Where were you on January 6th, 2021, Mr. Janeway?
The thing I appreciate the most about this episode is that FINALLY we see the crew not to have to DO something out of the ordianary, but sit and talk. Now they took it to the extreme and it makes the episode slightly boring, but it was good to see that they show interest to learn about each other.
Krad said a Lifetime movie, which is apt, because the whole time I felt it was a Hallmark movie, except this time the small town doesn’t give a crap and even the guy who believes in tradition sells out. The thing that made no sense to me is that there’s no reason to build the tower on the old town. They’re in the middle of nowhere. Plenty of space. They could build it outside the town and then just watch the new solar mall drain the downtown businesses dry — which is how things usually work.
Well not the only thing. The romance doesn’t make sense, because there’s no chemistry. Also, it doesn’t make sense that 7 wouldn’t just ask the computer to search EVERY database, because it doesn’t seem to task the computer at all.
Finally, why was the holoimager in portrait mode for a group shot? Maybe it doesn’t matter, but in other episodes it’s held in what we would consider landscape for group shots.
I guess I’m nitpicking because the episode doesn’t really sell itself, and I hate Hallmark movies with a passion. Tho, the very end did have a little emotional pitch. Also, I appreciate that O’Donnell kept her own “captain’s log” on a cassette deck.