The lie of the “Kelvin Timeline”

[Yukaphile]

Well, just because it has Patrick Stewart in it, it isn't, "Ergo, it's good." Season 1 and 2 proved that.

[Beastro]

Well, just because it has Patrick Stewart in it, it isn't, "Ergo, it's good." Season 1 and 2 proved that.

It isn't what? I made no comment on its to be quality beyond the fact that people for at least the past 20 years have done badly trying to create new stories with too much of one foot in the past of previous shows. I have, and had from the get go, dour expectations of that new show with him, same with STD which leads me to have no faith in it.

What I'm speaking about is having a new show with a clear break. No prequel shit, no bringing back some other characters again. We all know why it's not done anymore, because it is too risky and not considered the safe choice, which seems to dominant the minds of producers now. Now there's plenty of examples of that failing, but we live in an age when shows and film seem caught in the grip of being too cautious and it's killing the quality of them.

[Kendrakirai]

What do you think Star Trek: Picard is about?

In know, they finally clued in.

Still there's still the tie-in with Picard in it rather than breaking out on their own in the same way TNG did.

Even that didn’t break out completely. Neither DS9 or Voyager. There was always a cameo or other link to the previous show in the first episode

[Yukaphile]

What do you mean?

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

What do you mean?

What do you mean?

[Fianna]

When you're in a setting with more than one person or party capable of time travel, you can run into some interesting repercussions.

For example, suppose I do the "go back in time and kill Hitler before his rise to power" thing. As a result, a lot of people who would have been killed during World War II and the Holocaust remain alive. They have children, and their children have children, and so on and so on, till in the future there a lot of descendants of theirs running around who didn't exist before my time travel trip. Now suppose one of those descendants also gets their hands on a time machine, and decides to go back in time and save the dodo from extinction.

Even though the dodo went extinct centuries before my time travel excursion, I might return to the present after killing Hitler and discover that now dodo birds are common household pets, and be utterly confused about how that could have happened.

[CharlesPhipps]

I also simply believe that Spock not going to the Vulcan Science Academy as a "fuck you" to his dad and traditionalist Vulcans is perfectly believable.

[Makeshift Python]

“Live long and prosper” has never sounded so salty until that moment.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

Good riddance to you.

[AllanO]

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.

Umm the Archer example has at least one other analog. Yesterday's Enterprise, the moment the Enterprise C exits the temporal rift the world changes to one where the E-C did not fight the Romulans to save those Klingons and prevent another Federation-Klingon war.

If Mark Twain's time journey had worked the same way, all his stories written after his encounter with Picard and co in 1889 (he wrote several) would have disappeared while he was on the Enterprise plus erasing all his later actions, creating an alternate later-Mark-Twain-less universe and then reappeared when he returned to past resetting the timeline the. Yet there was no visible effect on the Enterprise maybe but really lucky.

I think you can think of several examples of time travel episodes where the present they travel from is predicated on them doing the things they did in the past (predestination paraodoxes Time Arrow seems full of those), several where they do not (they are constantly at risk of altering the past or do actually do it) and maybe even some that combine the two (some things seem to be predestination paradoxes and some things seem to be changeable at the same time, Yesterday's Enterprise may be an example of that, the Enterprise C going back somehow changes the timeline into an apparently unchanged TNG present, so alt-Tasha Yar's half-Romulan daughter changed nothing visible...).

Whether alternate timelines cease to exist or not is tricky does the past cease to exist as it changes into the present or does it always hang back there existing, time travel seems to suggest it does, so shouldn't that also be true of the pasts of the time travelers or the people they meet and so on. Oh dear I've gone cross-eyed...