3w ago

A huge question regarding alternate timelines related to Picard.

If you haven’t watched all of Picard, “All Good Things…” (TNG season 7 episode 25) and “Endgame” (VOY season 7 episode 25), please be advised there are major spoilers.

This may come down to a personal interpretation: did the events of “All Good Things…” ever exist? There is one reason I ask this: the false positive diagnosis of irumodic syndrome. The way I see it, the events of that episode are rendered non-existent.

Jean-Luc assumes prior to his death in season 1 of Picard that his illness was irumodic syndrome. However, it is never specified in that season that he has the illness. In season 3 Jack Crusher is diagnosed with it and assumed inherited. However by the end we learn it was a condition related to his time as Locutus of Borg.

In VOY, the future timeline with Admiral Janeway appears to be connected to the anti-timeline future from “All Good Things…”. The Admiral wearing the same uniform and badge. However the big difference is that the present day Prime Voyager is aided by future technology. We do not see the influence of Admiral Janeway get reversed, only the events of her future.

So did the events of “All Good Things…” actually occur or did the temporal incursion being fixed rendered it non-existent? After all, Q was testing Jean-Luc. Only Jean-Luc had memory of what happened. Sub-question: did Jean-Luc actually have a correctly diagnosed irumodic syndrome in the anti-timeline future?

9 comments

Regarding the future uniforms, the same uniforms appear in most portrayals of "future starfleet" during the TNG era, such as DS9 The Visitor. I don't believe they are meant to indicate a connection between alternate futures beyond being the next step for Starfleet uniform designs (although the uniforms shown for a similar time period in Picard turn out to be different anyway).
Regarding your question more broadly, yes. And also no. Both, really.
I'm not sure Q recognizes or cares about the distinction between spinning up an entirely bespoke simulated reality for Picard to do his thing in, versus altering the past such that branching timelines are created and shuttling Picard's consciousness between them before ultimately closing them off. Or whatever other myriad mechanisms an omnipotent being would have for triggering the events portrayed. Nor is there any real way for us the viewer or Picard the participant to distinguish between those things. What is real, what clearly matters both to Picard and to Q, is that Picard did pass a test, and that Picard remembers those events in a way which will influence his future actions and relationships.
- I didn’t bring this up before because it wasn’t relevant, but we see the “All Good Things…” badge in PRO, which a conversation between Admiral Janeway and Hologram Janeway confirms was a design copied from “Endgame”.
  EDIT: Which is great because if Cosermart never make a AGT uniform, I can get a PRO uniform and wear it together.

Star Trek routinely alters the timeline of theorized major future events, so I would chalk it up to temporal flux.
Also, you're forgetting the use of the uniform in The Visitor, an amazing DS9 episode.
- I didn’t forget (now that you mention it). I’m blocking it. That episode is a bit difficult to watch or think of for me in recent months (loss of an immediately family member).

I look at it as a future that could’ve existed, but because of the way the episode played out it never came to pass.
As far as the future uniforms matching, to me it just means that uniform design wasn’t intricately tied to Picard or the Enterprise - it was just the flow that uniform was going to take on its own. However, had anyone involved in uniform design been impacted in their uniform design capacity it could’ve been different - it just wasn’t.

For your first question, I'd agree with others that it was a possible future that just didn't happen in the Prime Timeline - there is a timeline out there where "All Good Things" didn't happen and so that's the future there. It was the future until Picard saw it.
As for your second, I would say it was still a false positive. It's just we didn't have enough Borg shenanigans in the TNG era alt future timelines for anyone to care about the difference, combined with Jack Crusher probably never being born.
For the uniforms, my overall theory is that what we saw as the the early 2380s uniform and mid-2380s badge design process started in the mid-to-late 2370's. The overall more peaceful nature of each of the three timelines with the alternate future uniform meant that either the TNG uniform (for "All Good Things" and "The Visitor") or First Contact uniform ("Endgame") lasted into roughly the late 2380s or early 2390s. This gave more time for the concept for what would have been the prime 2380s uniform to develop, slightly changing the uniform shape and getting rid of the black area on top. This uniform design was very persistent against temporal interference, but it was no match for the timeline alterations by Voyager's early return, which caused a faster design cycle on the early 2380s uniform and Starfleet uniforms in general.
I especially see it in this comparison:
Here's some deeper analysis if you want it, contained in spoilers to keep post length down (lots of nitpicking and rants about Klingon-Federation relations):
"All Good Things"

"The Visitor"

"Endgame"
- Why did you keep referring to the uniform in “Endgame” as First Contact? I ask because I feel like you are confusing the uniform from the early 2370s which appeared in First Contact. Voyager crew never wore that.
  
  While the VOY crew themselves still wear what you mentioned, we do see their Alpha quadrant counterparts are wearing First Contact Uniforms.
  I'll revise to make it clearer who I'm talking about.

So did the events of “All Good Things…” actually occur or did the temporal incursion being fixed rendered it non-existent? After all, Q was testing Jean-Luc. Only Jean-Luc had memory of what happened. Sub-question: did Jean-Luc actually have a correctly diagnosed irumodic syndrome in the anti-timeline future?
Yes. Although it is implied that the extent of the Q testing Picard was by pushing him to cause the problem in the first place, rather than creating it themselves, so that he would realise how it could be fixed, as an example of human thinking beyond their expectations.
We see in Trek that the future is always in Flux. While he had Irumodic syndrome in that future or something like it, in the present, it wasn't actually, but something else like it. There may be a thousand things that could have caused it, that we're not privy to. A space anomaly happens about once a week, and the manifestation of Irumodic syndrome itself might only have happened by chance, like the anti-time anomaly preventing the formation of life on Earth.
At the very least, in the future, there seemed to be no doubt that Picard presented with Irumodic syndrome, enough for his time-jumps to be considered just one of the symptoms.

9 comments

"All Good Things"

"The Visitor"

"Endgame"