"Back To Reality"

Every fictional series has its familiar characters and settings:

Baker Street;
the bridge of the Enterprise;
Gotham City;
etc.

Sheila starts watching a TV mystery series. We witness a murder. Then the theme music starts or the detective appears and I know which series it is: Poirot; Marple; Fr Brown; etc.

A TV drama showed familiar actors, Shatner, Nimoy etc, in 1930s New York scenes. My sister kept saying, "He's in Star Trek, he's in Star Trek...," then the scene changed to the bridge of the Enterprise.... My mother said, "Back to reality!" (Which it is anything but.)

In "The Sorrow of Odin the Goth," that "back to reality" moment arrives when the second section, headed 1935, refers to "space-time" and "a Patrol base." (p. 341) The story deserves to have been read for the first time in a collection where we did not know in advance that it was going to be a Time Patrol story.

In 1935, the viewpoint character:

is in the Patrol;
is not Everard;
was the Wanderer in 372;
is a first person narrator.

This is new territory for the Time Patrol series. Everard will appear but neither as the main character nor as a viewpoint character.

Onward.