#019 - Miles and Keiko IN - A Double Date with Destiny!
I’ve been dancing around this, but let’s discuss timelines. NO DON’T GO I’LL BE GENTLE JUST–
This strip, to the extent that one can or should take this idea seriously (one probably shouldn’t!), takes place during the series run of The Next Generation. Not after the last episode, not in some amorphous before-during-and-after miasma where all times are one: it takes place sometime in late season 3 of the show.
I want you to be calm if you are now flinching and being like “man, I didn’t sign up for this nerdlinger continuity crap, I’ve only seen three episodes of Star Trek, I’m just here for the double entendres and I sort of think Picard’s sexy, what the hell is all this now”, because this is not information that you need to care about. You are fine.
This is information I’m making explicit specifically for my fellow nerdlingers, the folks who are asking stuff like “but if Miles and Keiko do have a baby named Molly, did Keiko change her mind?” or e.g. “but how can Bev invent the Trill in strip #12 when she has met a Trill and fallen in love with the Trill and then the Trill was in Riker and she loved Riker but then the Trill was in some other lady and she couldn’t get over her heteronormativity and seal the deal the third time”?
The answer to all those questions is, hey, it’s still somewhere mid-late in season three. And that’s where it’s going to be indefinitely, because they’ve got a lot of downtime on the Enterprise and we’re seeing maybe two minutes of conversation at time here. So, Miles and Keiko aren’t married yet. Bev never met the Trill-who-didn’t-even-resemble-the-Trills-on-Deep-Space-Nine-anyway. Riker’s got a beard now. Wes is an acting ensign. Picard’s never been Borgified. None of the stuff that hasn’t happened yet has happened. Maybe none of that ever will.
IT’S A SCHISM, BABY. Embrace it. Love it. Leverage that information in combination with your knowledge of ST canon to ferret out subtle additional humorjokes. Or totally ignore it, because I can’t promise I won’t at some point if it makes a better joke or I just forget.
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But so yes, I feel like while most of the crew are going to be terrible at this game, Miles & Keiko will mostly just be sort of terrible for the game. We’ll see what happens.
tk
Miles and Keiko as each other was one of the original little ideas behind this. Felt like a perfect fit, since they were both significant characters on DS9 but also primarily interacted with one another; I love them as characters but they were (Keiko, especially) pretty confined to a handful of dynamics, so there was less character history to flex onto other major DS9 characters.
Keiko was both fun and maddening to pull screenshots for, because as a civilian character she actually got costume changes on a regular basis. It was nice to have some visual variety there, but makes the job of pretending the visuals make sense over the course of a minute of conversation at a time a lot harder for the humble screencapper. But also, Rosalind Chao was really delightfully expressive as Keiko and that gave me a lot to play with once I found a good scene/episode to pull from.
My own comment at the time, when someone noted her hair keeps changing:
"That’s the fashionable thing to do in the 24th century: hyperdynamic fashion accessorization.
Her chopsticks aren’t disappearing in the last couple panels, it’s just that they’re literally a superpositioning of chopsticks and no-chopsticks and taking a screenshot requires collapsing that wavestate one way or the other for the instant of observation.
That or the costume designer wanted her to mix it up in different scenes in the episode I grabbed these from or the continuity guy was napping on the job (henceforth known as “pulling an O’Brien”)."