YMMV / Star Trek: The Lost Era

• Anvilicious: In "The Buried Age", Guinan is there to help make the point about the Carnellians absolutely and unmistakably clear, as she did in "The Measure of a Man".
• Awesome Moments:
  • Picard effectively leading Data to the point of asking (rather than being ordered) to join his mission - it's the first time Data has made any effort to actually REQUEST a better assignment, having only ever accepted orders. His anger over the treatment that Data had been effectively relegated to a glorified filing clerk isn't that shabby either.
  • Deanna has just been assigned by Admiral Hansen to covertly use her empathic abilities to judge Picard's mental state and see if he's becoming obsessed with the Manraloth, over her repeated and strenuous objections about the ethical violation. Hansen introduces her to Picard, and the moment that she and Picard are alone in a turbolift, she immediately comes clean to Picard, also acknowledging that she is disobeying a direct order and that she would turn around and tell Hansen exactly what she's done. Instead of sending her back to Hansen, Picard accepts her on his crew, clearly impressed by her honesty, forthrightness, and morality.
  • The Manraloth have triggered an empathic weapon that basically cripples all life that it touches with what amounts to a severely debilitating sensory overload. The two people who stand against it? Guinan, whose connection to the Nexus is cited as helping her keep her sense of self... and Tasha Yar, in full Determinator mode.
• Funny Moments:
  • Data just being... Data in The Buried Age. That is, Data pre-character development. And Picard's first meeting with him.
  • Picard comes to after being exposed to a Brown Note to find Guinan standing over him. They're both completely naked. Picard's only comment? First time in thirty years he's seen Guinan not wearing a hat.
• Fridge Brilliance: The "night people" sub-plot in Well of Souls becomes considerably more meaningful and fascinating when a reader recalls a certain key speech in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: A Stitch in Time, which the subplot is in large part based on.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • In The Buried Age, Giriaenn pretty much says that if Humans don't make the same mistake her species made, they would make some other mistake that would destroy all intelligent life in the galaxy. Season 2 of Star Trek: Discovery shows a possible future where Section 31's threat assessment AI went rouge and did just that and more.
  • The example from Catalyst of Sorrows mentioned down in the tearjerker section? Some years later a part of the Enterprise relaunch novels would confirm that yes, that did indeed happen.
• Heartwarming Moments:
  • Picard standing up for Data after first meeting him in The Buried Age.
  • The goodbye scene between Picard and Ariel in The Buried Age.
  • Also from The Buried Age, Data and Ariel's friendship, where she's one of the very first people to try and make friends with him.
  • The added context to Picard and Janeway's relationship, where she was one of Picard's crew in the investigation that discovers Ariel, to the point where he ends up being disappointed he can't tap her for a later crew because she's serving on one of her canonical assignments. Gives an extra layer of warmth and friendship to their interaction in Star Trek: Nemesis.
  • As The Buried Age goes on, we effectively see how every member of the senior staff of the Enterprise-D is assembled, how they impressed Picard enough to make him want to bring them to his next assignment. Even though many of these were preestablished within canon, actually getting to see them play out is still the heartstring tugger.
• Tear Jerker: As usual, anything involving the Vulcan/Romulan sundering, particularly in Catalyst of Sorrows:
  "Was the silence absolute, or did their ships sometimes...pass in the night? And if, when Romulus and Earth were at war and the Vulcans hung their heads and said "we don't know who these people are", was it at least partly true?"
  • The death of Hadlo, and also that of Bennek in Day of the Vipers. The former in particular:
  "Oralius! Prophets! My love is for you both!"

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