Consequences You Otherwise Avoid
| Star Traks: Boldly Gone | |
| Episode name | |
|---|---|
| Season | 10 |
| Episode number | 4 |
| Writer(s) | Alan Decker, Anthony Butler |
| Year | 2503 |
| Stardate | Unknown |
| Chronology | |
| Previous in series | Welcome to the Party [BG] |
| Next in series | Born to Rom [BG] |
| Previous in timeline | Welcome to the Party [BG] |
| Next in timeline | Born to Rom [BG] |
Have you ever woken up in a different bed…and timeline than the one where you went to sleep?
Summary
It's a Choose Your Own Adventure, so it's a bit hard to summarize. But in the "correct" version, Rosalyn Bain wakes up in the wrong timeline, goes to see Admiral Kristen Larkin for help, gets a time machine, goes back in time to prevent the creation of the new timeline, confronts a time agent from the future, and finally reveals to her husband, Reginald Bain, that she's a Section 31 agent.
Featuring
- Captain Reginald Bain
- Rosalyn Bain
- Admiral Kristen Larkin
Author's Comments
A lot of the credit for this one actually goes to my wife. She has her own writing project that she's been working on for quite a while now and may have written more pages for than I have for all of the Star Traks I've done (I'm not remotely kidding about that). She's been working through different scenarios for her characters and putting them through different relationship paths. At one point we were talking about it, and I said she should turn it into a choose your own adventure romance novel. We chuckled at the idea, and that was that.
Then I started working on this story. I had a couple of basic goals for it: deal with the destruction of Romulus (again) and have Rosalyn finally tell Bain that she's in Section 31. I wrote the first part of the first scene of this story pretty much as it is now, just from our usual third-person perspective, but then I stalled out. I had a bunch of different ideas for how the story could go, but nothing that was really gelling into a coherent plot. That's when the thought of actually doing a choose your own adventure story with these ideas hit me.
By the way, there are actual Star Trek choose your own adventure books. One is #15 of the Which Way Books series (As in Which Way to avoid being sued by the publisher of Choose Your Own Adventure?). It's called Star Trek: Voyage to Adventure and was published in 1984. The other, #24, is Phaser Fight, which was published in 1986. At some point many many years ago I got my hands on them (I'm not sure when), but I don't think I've ever successfully gotten through either story.
Writing a choose your own adventure story, even a fairly basic one like this, requires a lot of planning. I drew out a branching diagrams of the choices and where they led. I have a huge amount of respect for the authors of the actual books because of all that goes into these. I can't imagine trying to map things out at that scale.
The story in "Consequences You Otherwise Avoid" (The title makes sense (sort of) on its own, but each word also starts with the same letter as the corresponding words in Choose Your Own Adventure.) is fairly simplistic, and readers shouldn't have too much trouble getting to the real ending. I enjoyed writing the other scenes, though, and had some fun with some key moments in Trek history. I had a few more that didn't fit in. I know at one point Q was going to turn you into a cat for some reason. There was a joke that went with it that I've completely forgotten. I also considered including more alternate Bains, but that was really going to make things messy.
Mostly I played fair except for the coordinates bit. I couldn't resist including an actual solvable puzzle there, but it wouldn't surprise me if people just blunder through it.
As for the conversation between Bain and Rosalyn, Anthony and I had decided a long time ago that Bain likely knew about her activities. It doesn't mean he likes Section 31, which he makes clear at the end of Series Seven, heading off her attempt to tell him then. But he also knows and loves her. These are two people who have been together for decades. We weren't about to destroy that relationship over this, particularly so close to the end of the series. If anything, removing this last secret will just make them stronger.
The upshot of all of this (as much as it pains me to say) is that Boldly Gone is officially in a different timeline than Star Trek: Picard and seasons 3-5 of Discovery. The split point is the destruction of Romulus, which was prevented in the Boldly Gone timeline as described back in Series Nine. Does any of that matter? Not really. But we've generally tried to stay true to Star Trek continuity in the past. In this case, though, we just can't.
In case you didn't make it to the end, here's the "correct" path -- 21-15-24-19-28-18-25-16-32
And there is actually a Section 31 to the story (of course there is), but no path leads to it. You'd have to put in the URL manually...or just click HERE