Zecora is played by Whoopi Goldberg - who knew? · 4:44am Dec 1st, 2015
"This war's not supposed to be happening! ... This timeline must not be allowed to continue."
- Zecora Guinan, to Twilight Captain Picard in an alternate timeline
I don't know if it's a ripoff, shout-out, callback, or an outright homage, but the similarity is eerie. If you've never seen it, look up the Star Trek: TNG episode "Yesterday's Enterprise" and compare it to the Changeling Victory scenario in "The Cutie Re-Mark." Here, let me hit you with a sample:
P: "Who is to say that this history is any less proper than the other?"
G: "I suppose I am."
P: "Not good enough, damn it! Not good enough! I will not ask them to die!"
G: "Forty billion people have already died! This war's not supposed to be happening! You've got to send those people back to correct this!"
P: "And what is to guarantee that if they go back they will succeed? Every instinct is telling me this is wrong, it is dangerous, it is futile!"
G: "We've known each other a long time. You have never known me to impose myself on anyone or take a stance based on trivial or whimsical perceptions. This timeline must not be allowed to continue. Now, I've told you what you must do. You have only your trust in me to help you decide to do it."
If it had been anyone but Guinan giving advice to Picard, I woudn't have noticed outside of a passing reference to yet another butterfly effect / timey-wimey story [1]. But it's the friendly token black woman zebra and I just couldn't get past it. She's the only one who realizes the timestream is wrong, and that the protagonist needs to go back to their own time, and there's a desperate battle to hold off the alternate-timeline's major villain while the protagonist escapes through the temporal rift portal wormhole and... oh screw it.
Really, I'm just seeing things. It's certainly not the most direct reference, but it works for me. It's almost like I've seen Hasbro / DHX pull off a direct homage before...
Seriously, I enjoyed the S05 finale. Maybe later I'll write about why I think Starlight wasn't OP and why this caps off a wonderful character arc for Twilight.
[1] I hate timey-wimey stories. Bootstrap paradoxes, grandfather dilemmas, stable time loops... eeeurgh. I can stomach a few stories that handwave their time travel philosophy and chuck a shovelful of pseudo-science on it and never mention it again, but anything that even remotely tries to take itself seriously is a huge turn-off for me. It's why I could read Hard Reset but not Que Sera, Sera (or the Hard Reset sequels).
Holy....
Now that you mention it, that really does seem too close for a coincidence. :o
Hah, I noticed this too! I was a bit wary of saying so though, as I didn't want to compare Brenda Crichlow to Whoopi Goldberg purely on the basis of ethnicity... but those two characters who both happen to be played by black female actors do have similar mysterious mentor roles. (Or at least Zecora would have if Faust had had her way).
I had the same thought