Warning! This page contains information regarding Star Trek: Prodigy, and thus may contain spoilers.
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The Department of Temporal Investigations was a department within the Federation government, tasked with ensuring that time travel events which occurred under Federation jurisdiction were handled within guidelines established to prevent contamination of the timeline.
History[]
As of 2259, the department did not yet exist, so it was not surprising that La'an Noonien-Singh would be unfamiliar with the name, as Ymalay explained to her. (SNW: "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow")
By 2373, James T. Kirk had the largest file on record in the Department, with seventeen recorded temporal violations. (DS9: "Trials and Tribble-ations")
In 2380, when Doctor T'Ana informed Ensign Brad Boimler, suffering the effects of a faulty transporter, that she had contacted Division 14, he initially fretted that she had meant "the time travel police." (LD: "Much Ado About Boimler")
Investigations[]
In 2373, two investigators from the Department, Dulmur and Lucsly, arrived on station Deep Space 9, to debrief Captain Benjamin Sisko on a recent time travel incident, wherein Klingon spy Arne Darvin utilized the Orb of Time to take the USS Defiant back to the year 2268 in an attempt to assassinate Captain Kirk. To prevent Darvin from succeeding, Sisko and several members of his senior staff infiltrated both the USS Enterprise and Deep Space Station K-7, posing as crewmembers or visitors in order to thwart Darvin.
After the interview, Dulmur intimated to Sisko that he did not believe the actions of DS9's crew while in the past constituted a major violation of regulations regarding time travel. Lucsly, on the other hand, hedged, stating they'd have to review the incident first. (DS9: "Trials and Tribble-ations")
Missions[]
On one occasion, the Department sent an agent back in time to 2022 in order to prevent the assassination of Khan Noonien Singh by Sera, a Romulan time traveler. The Department agent was killed by Sera, but managed to transport himself to 2259 where he passed on his mission to La'an Noonien-Singh, Khan's descendant and the chief of security of the USS Enterprise. With the help of an alternate timeline version of James T. Kirk, La'an prevented Khan's assassination and restored the original timeline. The Department dispatched Agent Ymalay to recover their property from La'an and to thank her for her help, with a warning not to tell anyone what she had experienced. (SNW: "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow")
In 2385, Admiral Edward Jellico ordered Vice Admiral Kathryn Janeway to return the USS Protostar to Earth, where the Department of Temporal Investigations would send it back in time to Tars Lamora. (PRO: "Ascension, Part I")
DTI personnel[]
Appendices[]
See also[]
Background information[]
Early drafts of the episode featured a Starfleet admiral debriefing Sisko, but the DS9 writing team wanted something more interesting. Ronald D. Moore commented: "There was going to be an admiral showing up on the station, and he wants to know what the hell happened. And when René and I started writing the teleplay, it was boring. It was the one boring element of an otherwise interesting script, and we wanted to have more fun. So we thought of a team of guys that came from the Department of Temporal Investigations. Given all the time travel that goes on in Star Trek, it seemed like that could be fun". (The Magic of Tribbles: The Making of Trials and Tribble-ations) Moore added: "We figure that all of the things that we [writers ] use on the shows time and time again are things that are part of their job, and that they are bored by the stuff. They’ve heard every time-travel joke and pun that there is, and they have to do this every week”. (The Magic of Tribbles: The Making of Trials and Tribble-ations)
The names of the two DTI agents who interview Sisko about the incident with Darvin, Dulmur and Lucsly, are meant to be anagrams of Mulder and Scully from The X-Files, although "Dulmur" here on Memory Alpha is spelled with two "U"s, while "Mulder" is spelled with an "E". The Star Trek Encyclopedia uses the latter spelling.
Their characterization was based on Friday and Gannon from Dragnet. (The Magic of Tribbles: The Making of Trials and Tribble-ations)
Apocrypha[]
In 2011, Pocket Books began publishing Star Trek: Department of Temporal Investigations, a novel series in which Temporal Investigations takes a central role. The first novel was Watching the Clock, which ties up the loose ends of the Temporal Cold War and the second novel Forgotten History features the origins of the department in Kirk's era, analyzing the department's perspective on his time-travel escapades and how the Federation developed its understanding of how time travel could affect history, culminating in a meeting between Dulmer and Kirk due to a dimensional rift caused by an experiment in Kirk's era linking the two eras. The Collectors, an eBook, was released in December 2014, followed by Time Lock in September 2016. A third e-novella, Shield of the Gods, was released in June 2017.
In the novel A Pocket Full of Lies, it is revealed that, following the events of the Year of Hell, the Krenim of the new timeline have established a variation of the Department of Temporal Investigations known as the Krenim Temporal Defense Agency. However, in contrast to the DTI's goal to preserve the current history, the Agency's goal appears to be to use time travel to subtly ensure Krenim supremacy in the present timeline. As a result of this goal, they altered a timeline where their past enemies, the Rilnar and the Zahl, lived on a peaceful near-utopian planet, in favor of a timeline where the two were engaged in a protracted and pointless conflict on the same planet, because the peaceful timeline restricted Krenim expansion.
The department features in the Star Trek Online novel, The Needs of the Many.
Among their employees were Grey and Aleek-Om.
External link[]
- Federation Department of Temporal Investigations at Memory Beta, the wiki for licensed Star Trek works