Star Trek: 10 Things We Now Know About Agent Daniels (aka Kovich)

It matters little to canon whether the flow of things was set forth in advance. Like any time traveller worth their salt, Kovich is now his own retcon. In that sense, and with the ease for us of such a rewind, we're all going to have to be temporal agents, travelling back along the timeline, along all of Kovich's appearances in Star Trek: Discovery, to derive, or even make, meaning and connection with Daniels. You might say this is 'Temporal Observations' from within that very Observatory itself.

Let's begin in the somewhat dangerous territory of season three. In Terra Firma, Part 1, a possible cure for Georgiou's interdimensional ills is located on DANNUS V! In the next breath Kovich also mentions "movie night," which they also had on the Discovery, but still! Coincidence is a trap for the linearly timed. "Consider yourself lucky to have skipped the Temporal Wars," Kovich had said to Culber earlier in the episode. Carl/The Guardian of Forever's copy of The Star Dispatch had no article on Daniels, however. In the season three finale, That Hope is You, Part 2, Kovich was also very focussed on Discovery's spore drive. Simple concern for rebuilding the Federation, or already thinking a thousand years ahead to Craft?

In the fourth season episode The Galactic Barrier, Kovich is at a meeting to discuss first contact with Species 10-C. Amongst the cornucopia of combadges and communicators on the table in front of him are two very particular universal translators from the 22nd century — the wearable clip-on 2155 version, first seen in Demons, and the larger model (circa 2151) used by Hoshi Sato on various occasions, both in proximity to Kovich.

Back one episode, in …But to Connect, the piece that plays as Stamets enters the room to speak to Kovich and Saru about Zora is Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 3. That was first heard in Star Trek in The Next Generation episode A Matter of Time, the one with the fake future historian in a very real time ship. Rasmussen (from the 22nd century) was probably on the Temporal Agent's to-do list.

Now with added symbolic resonance is Tilly's NX-01 'snow globe,' seen at the start of All Is Possible. In that episode, Kovich is "consulting" for the newly re-opened Starfleet Academy. "One might say that today's exercise is about the very future of Starfleet," Kovich tells Tilly. That is a sentence which just about sums up every mission Daniels, though not Starfleet himself, was ever sent on!