quote:Originally posted by Guardian 2000: there would be no point in all these efforts to change the past that occur in Trek, because they would have no meaning for those not involved.
That is an existential question, not a scientific one. Meaning is an abstract construction of our own making. Besides, this is fiction, the only characters that matter to us are the ones the show is about. So long as it has meaning for them it has meaning for us.
quote:To borrow a phrase (no offense), the idea is not dramatically viable within the context of dozens of hours of Trek. ST4, FC, "Visionary", et al. all become meaningless, selfish diversions for the time travelers.
Or innovative and inspiring human efforts to mold one's own destiny and improve one's circumstances. I think, basically, that's what Gene always wanted Star Trek to be about. That's give or take a tragedy/horror story here and there, of course, to keep things interesting.
Registered: Jun 2001
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posted
You just sort of went off the reservation, there.
We're not talking about existential angst or any other hippie stuff. Why would Starfleet send Kirk and the Enterprise on a fact-finding assignment to Earth's past knowing they could never get the returned answer? Why would Kirk and Spock leave Uhura and the others on the Guardian's planet, knowing that he would never see them again no matter what? Why would O'Brien choose to die knowing that his Keiko could not be saved? Why would Picard think he was repairing a damaged timeline? Why would Kirk go get whales unless he thought he was going to re-appear in a universe wherein Earth was also being threatened by the whale ship, and that it was his? Why would the Temporal Cold War exist if the bystanders were, by definition, impervious to timeline changes? Why would Sarpeidon's population go to past times that sucked instead of other universes where the sun wasn't gonna blow? Why did Alexander Rozhenko go back to shoot his younger self to save his father knowing that his father could not be saved? Why would Annorax spend 200 years trying to restore something that wasn't even his?
Whether or not time travel is really possible and what it would mean, what you're arguing against right now is the very narrative of Trek. Our crews have shown how to use one's wits and courage and heart to change the world (e.g. Edith Keeler), and with time travel they've shown what might happen if good men do nothing, or the wrong thing. To take that away from Trek . . . sorry, I can't go there.
-------------------- . . . ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.
posted
What the characters know and what we know are not necessarily the same thing. There's lots of science fiction based on what we now know to be outdated/incorrect science, but it's no less enjoyable. You have to remember that it's fiction; not reality.
If the characters believe they are changing the future or past, but in fact they are moving between quantum planes, what difference does it ultimately make? The show is about the characters, not the nitty gritty details of quantum mechanics. It's just semantics, just a more accurate way of describing what happens.
Returning to my earlier analogy, the behavior of the Sun and the Earth did not change between the time when humans believed it to orbit the Earth and when they realized that the Earth rather orbited it. It's only our perspective and our way of describing it, our interpretation of its meaning, that changed.
Like you said, our observations are not wrong, but our conclusions may be.
-------------------- The flaws we find most objectionable in others are often those we recognize in ourselves.
Registered: Jun 2001
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So let's see. Vulcan's gone, with most Vulcans. Several hundred fleet officers and six ships. That alters the gene pool significantly. Saavik, Valeris and Tuvok may not be born. Valeris means the events of Trek 6 would likely work out totally differently. The Vulcan bits of TMP, TSFS and TVH don't necessarily change except in location. Sybok may have been exiled already, meaning he may still be out there.
47 Klingon ships. In a fleet that big, it's very possible that any Klingon officers we're familiar with were lost. That could conceivably completely alter the Klingon conflict in Trek 3, leaving the Enterprise intact but changing little else. The Romulan empire is left undamaged, while the Klingons have suffered a severe blow, and Starfleet is probably going to be busy. Major shift in the balance of power there.
Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
Of course, since everyone seemed to know Nero was a Romulan, the Klingons might go to war with Romulus, assuming him to have been a Romulan agent of some sort.
posted
Of course, if the Romulans learn about Nero and his motivations, they might wipe out the remaining Vulcans out of spite (as they'll never get the Red Lipstick to save their sun now) and they might be desperate enough to launch a full-scale invasion of the Klingon Empire- so they'll be both safe from their enemies and that whole "supernova' thing.
Heck, events might play out wherein the Romulans and Federation get chummy instead of the Klingons/Federation....
Though there seems to be some treaty between the Romulans and Klingons- the simulation called the KLingons ships "Klingon Warbirds".
My guess is that this is NOT a new timeline but rather Spock and Nero got dumped into an alternate uiniverse where there are already subtle changes from the Primeline- this would explain why there's no older brother for Kirk and why I think Spock's mom is so damn hot.
Also, consider that we've seen a ship get sent to a alternate universe and sent back in time- Mirror Darkly explained how universes move at diffrent temporal rates.
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
Registered: Aug 2002
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posted
You know I could accept that it was alternate universe all along from the beginning. I mean that Deus Ex Matter seems capable of doing all sorts of stuff, so why not add "traveling to another universe's past" to the list.
Though I wonder if all the black holes created by the red matter sends stuff through time and space. Did the Hobus Star matter also travel through time? Did Vulcan Prime get bombarded by pieces of Alternate Vulcan? Is the debris of the Narada gonna end up somewhere?
Edit: Spock's mom is not as hot as Kirk's mom.
Registered: Feb 2005
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quote:Originally posted by Mars Needs Women: Though I wonder if all the black holes created by the red matter sends stuff through time and space. Did the Hobus Star matter also travel through time? Did Vulcan Prime get bombarded by pieces of Alternate Vulcan? Is the debris of the Narada gonna end up somewhere?
It might very well be that the time travel was the unintended result of the interaction between the red matter and the unique nature of the Hobus star supernova. In which case, it might be possible that the material from the Hobus star did also travel through time (and probably space too, since neither Nero or Spock emerged within the Hobus star).
-------------------- "Kirito? I killed a thing and now it says I have XPs! Is that bad? Am I dying?"
-Asuna, Episode 2, Sword Art Online Abridged
Registered: Mar 1999
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Why did Kirk feel the need to fire all weapons at a doomed ship? After all, Nero’s vessel was mere seconds away from being crushed inside the black hole. Not true, said the Trek scribes – Nero’s ship was built to travel through black holes, so if Kirk hadn’t done anything, the bad guys would have slipped away and emerged god knows where (and when) ready to do more evil.
So by this statement, the red matter does create portals through space and time everytime and the Narada is built for traveling through them. Yet this doesn't mesh with anything we learned in the movie.
Registered: Feb 2005
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Spite works so much better- Kirk and Spock got payback- Spock's mom and Kirk's dad were oth killecbecause of Nero and the Narada- why not waste some ordianance on it?
Registered: Aug 2002
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quote:Originally posted by Jason Abbadon: Dumbest. Explanation. Ever.
Yeah, I don't buy that either.
But, that's probably the assumption that Kirk was going with. After all, the Narada survived one trip through a black hole. Kirk had no reason to think it wouldn't survive another.
-------------------- "Kirito? I killed a thing and now it says I have XPs! Is that bad? Am I dying?"
-Asuna, Episode 2, Sword Art Online Abridged
Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
Except that Narada was pulled into the first black hole...while the second one formed inside her. If I remember correctly, the red matter, all of the red matter, blew up inside the ship. So, I think the ship would have been torn apart by the forces involved. But, I see your point. Kirk didn't know what was going to happen, so blowing it to kingdom come was probably a safe bet. Anyway...I kinda liked seeing the big E firing all of her weapons at the sinking ship. It was cool...
-------------------- "Kosh, I'd like to introduce you to our Resident schmuck and his side kick Kick Me."-Ritten
"Fighting for peace is like screwing for virginity". -George Carlin
Registered: Jul 2007
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Yeah it didn't seem like the ship could survive a black hole forming inside of it, though who knows, some of that tech might have survived and ended up in the wrong hands. I mean what if it appeared near a Xindi colony in the 22nd century, they might have been like, "Screw the mini-Death Star probe, we're gonna use this instead."
And blowing ship up in space for no reason is always fun. Just think of the Klingons in ST:V blowing up Pioneer 10.
Registered: Feb 2005
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posted
See, this is why time travel is such a bad mechanic to use in crafting a story. Since every single subatomic possibility is played out in an ever-expanding fractal twenty-something-dimensional multiverse.
If some lip service could be paid to a technological way to isolate oneself or one's ship from one's home continuum, and thus travel back, one could theoretically alter one's home continuum -- but never to the point of creating paradoxes. Paradoxes are, by definition, impossible. It's not a logic or engineering puzzle to be solved, the universe is simply not so arranged as to allow them to occur.
Sliders understood the lack of drama inherent in the multiverse model. Any space/time-jumping would land you someplace where you could meddle willy-nilly without affecting your home continuum. No drama. So they placed the drama of the time travel in not being able to get back home.
Time travel should not have been used in this new film, but the producers wanted to have a free rein to fiddle with events that unspool from here, without being bound to the established canon. Now, anyone could die in the next movie. The Enterprise could be blowed up, no problem. They wanted the audience, no matter how well they might know Trek lore, to not know what's going to happen next, or who lives and who dies.
I also don't like the idea that Nero and Spock-Prime are from what we're used to thinking of as our Trek universe. But I don't know how far back we'd have to go to find the "real" Trek universe, there's been so much mucking about with causality.
In case I didn't get it across clearly the first time, I really hate sloppy use of time travel, and that's what I call "Tomorrow Is Yesterday", "Assignment: Earth", "City on the Edge of Forever", and so forth. I try to ignore all the "fixing the timeline" episodes in the larger canon, and just enjoy them as isolated, fun storytelling whimsies. In that sense, I may be able to blame "Yesterday's Enterprise". That's the first episode I can think of where characters going back and staying back had an ongoing impact on the present (Sela).
Or, on a purely æsthetic basis, ignore the TNG era movies altogether. Let the Enterprise-D survive to become the dreadnought in "All Good Things...", avoid the step backwards that is the Enterprise-E, skip the weak Borg Queen stuff, bozing Cochrane, Son'a, joystick, Reman, dune buggy, clone bullcrap that weve been subjected to since the series went off the air.
Deep Space Nine can be allowed to stay.
And this is not getting anywhere near the movie-making problems I had with this film (writing, music, production design, etc.), or the fact that I thought the early days were covered much better in the novels Final Frontier, Best Destiny, and The Kobayashi Maru...
--Jonah
-------------------- "That's what I like about these high school girls, I keep getting older, they stay the same age."
--David "Woody" Wooderson, Dazed and Confused
Registered: Feb 2001
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posted
I saw the movie (finally) Friday night. It's a good movie. Great special effects. A lot of fans no doubt will enjoy it (and have). However, since I practically live, eat and breathe Star Trek I can't wholeheartedly agree. I found it to be a very, very good parody of Star Trek. A close imitation but not the original.
I don't mind the modern music. I don't mind the new approach to filmography or story telling. I just regret/resent the contradictions to established continuity. I'm a canonista so the movie rubs me a little wrong.
And, with the success of this movie, I'm sad but sure to say that the original Trek (and all the subsequent spin-offs) is now dead. Oh, sure, the movie explained that we're in an alternate timeline now but from a production standpoint I doubt we'll see any new material set in the Prime Timeline. It'd be too confusing and just muddy the market.
OK, let's start with the moment the movie began.
1. Ship design - like nothing we've ever seen in Trek. These are not the established Starfleet designed vessels. Both external and internal. 2. Kirk's OLDER brother. George Samuel Kirk. Only Jim Kirk called him "Sam." (TOS "What are Little Girls Made of?") 3. Romulans. As evident by crew reactions no one was surprised at what the Romulans on Nero's ship looked like. As opposed to TOS "Balance of Terror" which indicated no one knew what Romulans looked like at that time. 4. Star Dates - Totally different than established continuity. 5. Chekov/ages of the rest of the crew - Granted we don't meet Chekov until after Nero's ship changes the timeline but this still can only fit here. According to the original timeline Chekov was much, much younger than Kirk (over 10 years). This movie establishes all of the Trek crew are well within 10 years of each other (with the exception of McCoy). 6. Neutral Z0ne - I only saw the movie once so I can't remember exactly. Both Klingon and Romulan Neutral Zones are mentioned and something struck me odd. The Klingon Neutral Z0ne isn't established in TOS until after "Errand of Mercy" as part of the Organian Peace Treaty (OK, this is not explicitly stated but the Klingon Neutral Z0ne is not mentioned until after this episode).
Granted, these don't seem like major nits.
All these are events that happened at the start before Nero's ship had a chance to change history.
Continuity errors AFTER Nero's ship appears (but not necessarily a result of his appearance):
1. Enterprise built in Iowa instead of San Francisco (TOS bridge dedication plaque in every episode) 2. Kirk meeting Pike and serving under him. (Menagerie establishes that Kirk only had a passing knowledge of Pike, meeting him briefly). 3. Spock's time of service under Pike. (Menagerie states Spock served under Pike for 11 years). 4. Spock/Uhura love relationship. 5. Spock's more positive relationship with his father. 6. Design of the Enterprise. Both internally and externally. Not only looks different but is also significantly larger.
Continuity/Universe changes directly as a result of Nero's actions:
1. Vulcan's destruction/death of Spock's mother (changes events in TOS "Journey to Bable", "Amok Time", "Immunity Syndrome", Star Trek III, Star Trek IV, TNG's "Sarek" and other episodes where they go to Vulcan). 2. Talos IV - Apparently Pike never visits Talos IV (TOS "Cage" and "Menagerie") 3. It's possible Kirk never lives for a while on Tarsus IV and suffers under Kodos the Executioner. (TOS "Conscience of the King")
Some of the minor changes, cosmetic changes I can live with. It's understandable. The wholesale changes to the Enterprise, while visually stunning, aren't for me (the engineering section is just ridiculous!). It was just too many little changes contradicting too much of my beloved Star Trek that left just a slightly bad taste in my mouth.
Registered: Feb 2004
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