What Happened to the Valiant?

In the EAS notes on the early Earth starship Valiant, you refer to the problem of how to explain Valiant's disappearance and emergence on "the edge of the galaxy" when at Warp 1 it could never have gone so far on its own power.

In the TOS episode "Where No Man Has Gone Before" it is mentioned that the ship fell into a magnetic storm.

Well, what if 'Q' (or another member of the Q Continuum) decided to take the opportunity to 'experiment' or 'play' with the Valiant and her crew?

In TNG, Q was curious and concerned both about humanity's spreading out into the galaxy (due to being "a brutally savage child race") and also about humanity's potential, in the extreme long term, to become a rival to the Q themselves (from the TNG episode "Hide and Q").

This would seem to provide a reason for a 'Q' to whisk the Valiant and her crew off to the edge of the galaxy and put them in a situation where members of the crew would develop superior ESP powers, in order to study their reaction to their new-found powers. The ESP powers are, in fact, very similiar to the powers of the Q themselves.

The Q would have chosen the edge of the galaxy as a location partly because they knew that at only Warp 1, Valiant could never make it back to Earth from there anyway, nor even send a message.

The Valiant was allegedly in a magnetic storm, a very dangerous situation indeed for such an early and primitive starship. The Q may have realised (or assumed) that the Valiant was doomed to destruction anyway as a result of this storm, and therefore they could abduct the ship and its crew without compromising Earth's timeline. (Although Q himself rarely showed much concern about changes to the timeline, other members of the Q did.)

The Valiant's captain destroyed the ship himself in order to stop the dangerous super-human that one of his crew had become, (thus ending the experiment) but had he not done so or had failed, then the Q probably would have destroyed the ship, (and the super-human they had created) themselves.

What do you think of this idea? I quite like it, partly because the TNG era started with the Q taking an interest in humanity, and it would be very interesting indeed if the same applied to humanity's earliest warp flights.

(Theory by Tim Smith)