Even their imagined backstories became integral events of the Ensigns' lives. Once there, they meet their actor doubles and realize that they are exact parallels, down to their scars and skin blemishes. The Ensigns kidnap a senior officer and proceed to travel to the past with the mission of convincing them to stop the show. Jenkins explains that with Dahl and the other Ensigns' otherwise routine duties, their colorful histories will inevitably make them targets of 'the narrative' when the writers need 'glorified extras' to kill for emotional impact.

This is why otherwise good officers occasionally seem incompetent, Ensigns make poor decisions, and the ship has mysterious technology on board to produce last-minute inventions and medicines which would otherwise be impossible to produce. As the writers create the plot, characters' free will temporarily ceases in order to progress 'the Narrative' of the show. Over the course of several away missions, various crew members suggest that the deaths are due to incompetence, superstition, or cosmic forces, requiring 'sacrifices' of some crew members so that others will survive.Īfter several close calls, Dahl meets Jenkins, a crew member who offers a different theory: their reality and timeline are under periodic influence of a badly written television show from the past. In the prologue, several senior officers of the Intrepid, flagship of the Universal Union, lament the unusually high number of casualties of low-ranking crew members during recent away missions and conclude that they will need more crewmen to replace them.ĭocking at a spaceport, the Intrepid takes on five new ensigns including Andrew Dahl, an expert in alien religions and xenobiology Dahl quickly discerns that the crew is extremely phobic of being near the senior officers and of going on away missions due to their unusually high fatality rate.

Scalzi red shirts