The lie of the “Kelvin Timeline”

[Kendrakirai]

So I’ve been going through all of the reviews lately, and I’ve reached the Star Trek (2009) one, which states it was a parallel universe that doesn’t wipe away the existence of the other shows, leaving only Enterprise as canon....

Except that’s exactly what it does. Star Trek’s own internal rules of time travel state that travelers are protected from the changes they make, as are those who are in some way temporally shielded. Otherwise, changes made are *immediate*, no Back to the Future slow fade-outs, and there is only one actual timeline. All others are quantum possibilities. There is no multiverse theory of time travel in Trek, by its own internal rules on the subject, as seen many times over every series I’ve seen (so everything buy Discovery). Hell, the only other universe anybody has ever been able to controllably move between is the Mirror Universe, and that is clearly not a timeline, but a fundamental alteration of existence.

The only exception to this has been Q, and THAT may not have *actually* been a real alteration of events - it’s impossible to know exactly what he was doing, despite what he said was happening.

Thus, what 2009 does is erase everything set after Kirk’s birth from canon, my Trek’s *own rules of time travel*.

One can only presume that the time police finally managed to get things fixed after Into Darkness, setting things back to normal for Picard to happen in. No clue how this affects Discovery, and after the first episode, which is the only one I’ve fully watched, I can’t find myself caring *what* happens to it. Though getting rid of those Klingons who look more like they’re lizards than mammals can only be a benefit.

....I may have been a bit ranty, but this has bothered me since the movie came out ten years ago. Follow your own dang rules, Star Trek, you’d had forty years to develop them.

[CharlesPhipps]

Wrong.

Star Trek time travel rules vary depending on the method of time travel, the events, and the series. For example, Mark Twain being brought into the future didn't erase him from the memory of the crew the way that removing Archer did (which was stupid) in Enterprise.

Given Picard exists and the Kelvin timeline is stated by Word of God to be a parallel branch timeline, that's how it happened.

Maybe Red Matter wormholes work differently.

[Admiral X]

Given everything we see of the Kelvin, inside and out, it's obvious that it doesn't fit at all with TOS. However, it does fit nicely in with all the other ships we see later, including the interiors of the Abramsprise. So I see all of it, including the "future" old Spock and Nero (someone really took the "space Romans" description to heart there) came from as an AU.

Oh, and wrong forum.

[Kendrakirai]

Mark Twain had already written stuff, he was already known and famous, and he was going to go back, and Archer....I’m not sure how that happened, I haven’t watched a lot of Enterprise, but I want to think it was the universe trying to pretend he never happened, like that time in Vegas with the swan and the trapeze.

I mean, even *Voyager* got their internal time travel rules right, with Old Janeway erasing her own timeline for the ‘better’ one of getting everyone home early.

*Voyager.*

Every other method of time travel has had the same effect, from the Guardian of Forever, to the slingshot effect, to the Krenim temporal cannon from Year of Hell, to the Time Cop and his trip back to the 60s to create the modern era to the Prophet’s Orb Of Time, and I’m more prone to think that a dozen other examples all saying the same thing are more likely to be correct than a single screw up in a terrible episode of a terrible show.


Edit: Wait, this is the wrong forum isn’t it, frig. How can I get this shifted elsewhere? ...although, is it really wrong? It is about a review....nah it probably is.

[Admiral X]

A mod would need to move it. Since the other one about holodecks hasn't been moved *shrug*

[CharlesPhipps]

Like I said, I just chalk it up to the method of time travel.

Red Matter be funky.

[Yukaphile]

All previous examples of time travel had intelligence to them. Yeah, they differed slightly, but I see no distinction between, say, the time loop of "Time's Arrow" than "The City on the Edge of Forever." It always functions as, you could travel to the past and change it, but it just depended on if "you" had already "done it" from a cosmic perspective, at least across a single, branching chronology, from the 2260s to the 2280s to the 2360s and 2370s. Voyager is arguably when that first began breaking down, possibly, but yeah. 2009 film was just a soft reboot to bring back disillusioned fans after seven years without a Trek film, the conclusion of Enterprise and the Berman era of Trek four years prior (though I find it shameless how they made plans for continuing it right after Enterprise was canceled, I mean, that's just so out of touch to how the fans feel, it's beyond me), and hell, almost two decades, 15 years without Kirk in a movie, and to the larger moviegoing crowd, he is not the man we knew from Wrath of Khan and TOS, that is just one facet of him. Those larger movie crowds never watched TOS. They probably begin with everything from TMP onward. Didn't help this came at a time when CGI was taking over the industry and audience expectations were going down (Dark Knight proved there could still be creativity, but otherwise, it was Attack of the Clones, Revenge of the Sith, and the two Bayformers movies of this period that highlight that attitude more than anything, given how it was probably the time when a younger generation was coming up and more accepting of these flaws than previous ones given how badly the education system had become, and that after eight years of Bush, people WANTED an escape after he wrecked 1990s culture on 9/11), so the reboot just features into that trend, we won't explain how this doesn't retcon the past, we just will, okay? Still, if STP proves to be a dud, this could be used by many fans to headcanon the awful away.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

When I first heard Kelvin with regard to the timeline, I until recently just thought it was based on Kelvin temperature which is just like C-273 and based upon absolute 0 temperature in terms of energy. So I just kind of assumed it was a reality minus 273 or w/ever (not specifically that much obviously).

Then I found out it's just named after the ship, and I thought that's much more boring of an interpretation.

[Kendrakirai]

I don’t mind the changing of the actors, or the rebooting, or any of that. It’s a dumb, dumb movie, but it’s not *terrible*, my problem is that they continue to lie that it’s time travel when time travel has *never* worked the way they say it does in this movie across every other example of time travel we have, both deliberate and accidental, with or without a guiding intelligence or design, and their insistence that *this* example leaves the other timeline alone, when we have *never* seen this being true.

I just want them to follow their own dang rules, like Chuck’s continued railing against beaming through the shields.

(Which, I *do* have sone dumb headcanon about - see, O’Brien once beamed onto another ship because he knew when the ship cycled its shields for like a quarter second or something, and if you know your OWN ship’s shield cycling, you could, if you’re good, also make use of that momentary gap while they’re down. And shield emitters are also in some way directional and presumably overlapping, one could also, theoretically, open up a space to beam through, but at risk of that space being used to slip an attack through, so its tactically problematic enough to not be an option much of the time.)

[Admiral X]

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.