Source
r/startrek•
AngrySpock

I made an animation of the establishing shots of the sped up planet from Voyager's "Blink of an Eye"

https://imgur.com/a/UB17GG6

It's been my personal favorite Voyager episode ever since the first time I saw it.

One little detail I never noticed until I made this was how they built the telescope into the base of the castle tower from the previous era.

I also noticed it looks like the planet has a moon somewhere as there are shadows being cast at night. No moon is mentioned anywhere in the dialogue. If the moon has similar orbital characteristics to our own, requiring around 28 days to complete an orbit, then at 1 day per 1.03 seconds of time outside their planet it would take around 6,435 years for the moon to complete a single orbit from their perspective. I wonder how long it took them as a species to notice the moon was moving across the sky.

It's also interesting to me that the first and last shots use virtually identical foreground landscape, whereas the middle two are slightly more unique in order to accommodate the tower and telescope structures. There's also a nice visual rhyme about beginning and ending with the same shots.

I hope it's okay to share this here as as r/startrekgifs seems much more meme based and not the right fit for it.

Posted Jan 9, 2020, 11:24 PM UTC

6112
Mathalamus•

i like how the base of the castle was reused to house an observatory. and that the fire temple never moved.

14
Maxx0rz•

That too has been my favorite and definitely most memorable episode of Voyager, I remember the first time I saw it as a kid. Such a great and interesting concept and it was the first time 11 year old me was faced with the idea of relativity and the perception of time

9
Orfez•

Nice. That was a good episode.

3
ThatGuysNewAccount•

Really shows how far computer graphics have come since these digital mattes. Don't get me wrong, it looks fine, but nowdays they'd have the entire valley modelled in detail and they'd do some needlessly elaborate flythrough shot where you could see that entire city.

3
FlyingSquid•

They aren't really big on preserving their historical buildings, are they?

2
Mathalamus•

probably because they all kept falling apart. earthquakes were super common.

9
FlyingSquid•

I was looking at that castle.

Next...

"Fuck the historic castle, let's chop off the top and put an observatory there."

Next...

"Fuck the historic observatory built on the ruins of the castle, let's knock the whole thing down and put up an ugly round building!"

1
Mathalamus•

as i was saying, an earthquake probably levelled the castle, then the observatory, and the age of the castle base was too old to be useful.

7
terriblehuman•

That’s a really good point.

1
lordsteve1•

I always wondered if the planet did have a moon then how would it affect the planet itself seeings as the moon must have a gravitational affect on it but the word time dilation would mess things up. Would there still be tides but they would appear to take millennia to be noticed? In that case how would they tell them apart from something like climate induced sea level rises? And what about plants and animals that used the moons light?

2
l008com•

I shit on Voyager whenever I can, and rightfully so. That was not a good show. But I try to always asterisk my shitting by saying that there are some VERY good voyager episodes, floating around in a sea of crap. This is one of those episodes. A very cool concept.

-14
SafeToPost•

Voyager as a whole is very average, brought down by being a premise best served by being serialized but forced to be episodic, and brought up by having Picardo and Ryan giving top 5 performances.

1