The lie of the “Kelvin Timeline”

[CrypticMirror]

Easiest way to square it is that Real!Spock was wrong about going back in time. He really went to a parallel universe that just developed at a slightly lower speed and so was a little behind the real universe. And also it contained magic space fungus, which the real Trek timeline doesn't. Spock is not infallible, as he himself would be the first to admit, and was working on limited amounts of data. He made an error, and now we have more data we can recognise that.

[Yukaphile]

I mean, if you hate magic space fungus, Voyager did it first...

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

Star Trek '09 is officially a quantum reality as described in Parallels. It is not time travel.

If that was so, then there wouldn’t be time travel, as everything in Parallels was in the same time frame.

Parallels isn't supposed to describe every single episode involving dimensional differentiation.

TOS, TNG, DS9, VOY, all have stories involving time travel with, for instance, an original time point and a destination time point, eg Kirk and crew blowing up the Enterprise and traveling back to 1980's San Francisco. All of those stories consistently involve implications on the original point based on actions carried out in the destination point. Parallels is not one of those episodes. Trek 09 is not one of those episodes.

[Kendrakirai]

Star Trek '09 is officially a quantum reality as described in Parallels. It is not time travel.

If that was so, then there wouldn’t be time travel, as everything in Parallels was in the same time frame.

Time travel mechanics always vary depending on the story being told. There's no general rule for how time travel specifically works all across the franchise because the writers always change it in accordance to their story. And that's fine, because Star Trek started as an episodic series where each episode was self-contained. Sometimes we'll get stories like "Time's Arrow" you can't change the past because "it already happened", or you get "City on the Edge of Forever" where McCoy preventing Edith from dying changes the timeline. For ST09 the idea is that Nero's incursion branches off a new timeline separate from what we saw in TOS.

The filmmakers intentionally went that route so that they could move forward with the films doing their own timeline without having to "undo" the TOS timeline. Plain and simple. So there's no need to "explain" why the Picard series is still taking place, because ST09 never erased it from history.

Time travel is one of the things they actually kept very much the same. *Every* example of time travel save that one with Archer - and I’m not sure how that one went, I haven’t seen it, but I presume it was a temporal weapon of some sort that actually removed him from his own timeline via copious amounts of BS - worked the same way, with the travelers (and those specifically shielded from temporal shenanigans) being exempt from the changes they make to history, but the rest of the universe immediately altering, from City on the Edge of Forever on down.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

Time travel is one of the things they actually kept very much the same. *Every* example of time travel save that one with Archer - and I’m not sure how that one went, I haven’t seen it, but I presume it was a temporal weapon of some sort that actually removed him from his own timeline via copious amounts of BS - worked the same way, with the travelers (and those specifically shielded from temporal shenanigans) being exempt from the changes they make to history, but the rest of the universe immediately altering, from City on the Edge of Forever on down.

This I actually agree with in spite of what others are saying here.

Time travel is more or less the same as far as temporal implications (changing past to change present). The mechanism for travel is always different but that is just a detail. Flying around the sun, the Borg sphere in First Contact opening up a temporal distortion wave,,, idunno, that guy from the 29th century with a time ship(?) All very similar stories despite having very different mechanisms for travel.

Time travel itself is separate from parallel realities though. There are numerous parallel realities in Trek, and that is aside from time travel as characterized by one single timeline (of which all the stories except for Trek 09 take place).

Oh yeah and don't forget the Nexus, which is just a time travel/ holodeck mixture.

[Darth Wedgius]

Time travel is one of the things they actually kept very much the same. *Every* example of time travel save that one with Archer - and I’m not sure how that one went, I haven’t seen it, but I presume it was a temporal weapon of some sort that actually removed him from his own timeline via copious amounts of BS - worked the same way, with the travelers (and those specifically shielded from temporal shenanigans) being exempt from the changes they make to history, but the rest of the universe immediately altering, from City on the Edge of Forever on down.

Arguably, "Assignment: Earth" ended with the change the Enterprise crew made being a part of history all along, making it not quite consistent with "City on the Edge of Forever" or "Tomorrow is Yesterday."

I just kind of shrug and figure how time travel in Trek works depends on the method used, the phase of the moon, and whether the rice pudding n the ship's mess has raisins or not.

But I'm the first to admit that "it doesn't have to be consistent because it was inconsistent before" is a really weak defense of being inconsistent again.

[Beastro]

I could accept "red matter" splitting off another timeline, even by Trek's wacky non-scientific standards.

Regardless I like the concept of the split off because it allows for the only good thing to come from the Abramverse, and it's direct impact on the TNG Era: Spock failed his mission, the Romulans lost their home system.

That sets up a wonderful position to continue things after the Dominion War and finally let the Rommies get their time to shine as vengeful antagonists burned by Federation friendship who step back from detente with them and seek to do everything in their power to undermine and destroy the Fed.

I don't mind the concept of a reboot (should be pretty obvious since I wrote my own), other than that it was poorly done. Ironically, what bothered me was the thing they were hoping would soothe fans - the attempt to connect it to the previous continuity.

Exactly! If it was just it’s own thing, that’d be fine! Hell, even have Nimoy as some *other* Vulcan that isn’t Spock. Really drive home that it’s an alternate reality, rather than ending up confusing and conflating time travel with inter-universal travel.

But they wanted to reboot Trek and throw away everythign else that had come before without rocking the boat, so they threw out excuses to worm through the trouble.

They are not looking at this through the perspective of creating fiction and working things into a world already very much built, they were wanting to create new content for a franchise they owned and wanted to find what they felt was the most effective way of making money off of it, which many keep thinking is reboots and prequels to tap into the preexisting legitimacy a franchise has rather than build off of it fully in a proper fashion.

How they should have stuck to the hard reboot, lol.

That wound has pissed off Trek fans massively, effectively throwing away Shatner and others work on the franchise.

How it went was effectively the same old political speak "Don't worry, we're not going to do what you fear while we go about doing exactly what you fear" crap.

The question I have is wtf does everyone seem so damn reclutant to continue into the post-Dominion War world after DS9/Voyager/ Nemesis? It's not like things were worked into a corner that would be shit to get out of, it's left wide open to build out from and continue on with proper continuity (not prequel, reset shit), yet no one seems to have the desire for that that are at the helm.

"We should adhere to this style because that was what a TV show several decades ago did." It also ignores where the later series went, like DS9.

Trek sits in a vague position of precedent and consensus focusing on what's good keep. It's not like Tolkien's Legendarium where things are set solidly as canon without variation because of how established everything described is (stories built off of his work have to work in the wide unexplored areas which Tolkien very consciously left in place given his love of the historical perspective).

In Trek all the silly shit in TOS is only kept so long as something good can come from it. So we have good world building, like Sargon's people turning up later on as "Vulcan" off shoots, as well as the silly stuff, like Tribbles, but not the attempted spin off time travel to the 60s episodes reappearing, nor things like someone else getting the "Spock's Brain" treatment.

When it works it really works, like Wrath of Khan, but after the 90s it's seemed to increasingly lose its way. IMO, people are just looking on it as pieces to simply fit together, or a resource of mine from the ground rather than trying to be true and in keeping with the spirit of the work. Whatever they say, or however committed they are to it, they are out of sync with it which stands in contrast to how well others were able to "get" Trek despite doing so in the face of Roddenberry.

[Makeshift Python]

But I'm the first to admit that "it doesn't have to be consistent because it was inconsistent before" is a really weak defense of being inconsistent again.

It was inconsistent in the past because it was all episodic storytelling, and as far as the TOS writers were concerned they were putting the story first ahead of world building/internal consistency.

If a writer wants to do a time travel story where it has a character vanishing because the timeline changed the instant so someone went back in time, even though it contradicts the “everything already happened” conceit of a totally different episode, I would be fine with that. I’m not watching Trek to pretend it’s as tangible and consistent as the real world, I’m watching on a story by story basis.

Now, if this was concerning a story arc where they change the rules within the story, then I’m gonna call BS.

[Yukaphile]

The question I have is wtf does everyone seem so damn reclutant to continue into the post-Dominion War world after DS9/Voyager/ Nemesis? It's not like things were worked into a corner that would be shit to get out of, it's left wide open to build out from and continue on with proper continuity (not prequel, reset shit), yet no one seems to have the desire for that that are at the helm.

What do you think Star Trek: Picard is about? Whether they are competent enough to handle it remains to be seen. I am skeptical given how the Borg were overused long before the reboot or Berman had even quit the show.

And yes, I would accept a hard reboot for Star Trek so long as that continuity was preserved in another timeline. It's just a side dimension. You could always return to the original. Only reason I don't do that for Star Wars is that they just REALLY wanted to retell A New Hope, but George would NOT let them reboot his babies, he was smart enough to see they would if he didn't stop it, and so I consider The Force Awakens and NuCanon to basically be another soft reboot. It has both limited story options and locked them into a path of mediocrity as well as taking things in a direction I don't think they wanted in hindsight. Ironically, the new direction they are going in are areas I think will be what defines the NuCanon as different from Legends, and will justify the reboot. They were just too greedy to cash in, and thoughts were, "If Lucas could wing it and half-ass it and make money, why can't we?" Trek is different, since it is all about world-building. And we are used to alternate realities. That's still an alien concept to Star Wars, and given how the sci-fi "midi-chlorians" earned such "hate" and that they consider it escapist fantasy, I think that's a long time coming, if ever. Legends and even new EU will just one day be ejected from canon and reduced to a hybridized kind of smeared mishmash of ideas to plunder from with no consistency and no respect.

[CrypticMirror]

I mean, if you hate magic space fungus, Voyager did it first...

Neelix's athlete's foot infection doesn't count.