Star Trek: Department of Temporal Investigations: Difference between revisions

* [[Manipulative Bastard]]: {{spoiler|Lirahn}}. And [[Star Trek: Enterprise|Future Guy]].

* [[Ms. Exposition]]: T'Viss, crotchety temporal physics lecturer extraordinaire. [[Word of God]] confirms it:

* [[My Name Is Not Durwood]]: [[Insufferable Genius|Professor Vard]] refers to Dulmur as Agent Duller, Agent Dummer, and Agent Dombler, among others.

* [[Mysterious Employer]]: "Future Guy", of ''[[Star Trek: Enterprise|Star Trek Enterprise]]'' fame. The mystery is finally resolved at the climax of ''Watching the Clock''.

* [[Ret-Gone]]: {{spoiler|Shelan}}

* [[Revenge Before Reason]]: The Sponsor has a little of this:

* [[Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory]]: The Department of Temporal Investigations keeps records protected by phase discriminators, shielding the data from alterations in the timeline. Although the agents themselves will have no knowledge of the previous history, they can research their own files to determine if changes have been made.

* [[Secret Government Warehouse]]: The Vault on Eris is where the DTI stores all its confiscated time travel tech, [[Shout-Out|including among other things,]] a [[Doctor Who|large blue box]] and an [[The Time Machine|antique temporal carriage]].

* [[Ten-Minute Retirement]]: Lucsly, after his faith that the DTI will protect the timeline's integrity is shattered when, on advice from a future agency, he is refused permission to prosecute Janeway for her actions in ''Endgame''. Dulmur talks him into returning.

* [[Time Crash]]: The climax of ''Watching the Clock'', caused by a [[Gambit Pileup]] involving at least a dozen temporal factions and [[Insufferable Genius]] Vard.

** Another type occurs in ''Forgotten History'', where a time travel experiment [[Goes Horribly Wrong]], creating a "confluence" where the past and present of two separate timelines overlap, with the potential that people could stumble between universes and / or times and accidentally rewrite each others histories.

* [[Time Police]]

* [[Timey-Wimey Ball]]: Averted. The books aim for consistancy regarding how time travel works in the Trek universe. Given that the onscreen source material is often guilty of the [[Timey-Wimey Ball]] approach, that's a tall order, but the author was able to tie most of the existing examples of time travel into a coherent theory on Trek temporal physics.

* [[Unusual Chapter Numbers]]: Each chapter of ''Watching the Clock'' has a subtitle with an [[Alternative Calendar]] date:

* [[Weirdness Magnet]]: Establishes that temporal anomalies turn you into one of these, explaining a great deal about Star Trek as a whole. Once you're exposed to one, probability is altered such that it becomes inevitable that you end up exposed to a whole lot more.