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San Francisco, 1:32 PM
Sun Nov 22
11 posts in the last 24 hours
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06/15/09
Who knew?
06/15/09
06/15/09
06/15/09
[www.igp-scifi.com]
06/15/09
If you can't get back to the previous timeline, it's hard to argue that it really exists.
06/15/09
Nero comes from the 24th century and affects changes on the 23rd. Consequently all future events (23rd century on) are different than we (the audience) were originally privy.
But in Star Trek, all time happens at once. So any time travel where events in the past are changed, automatically affect the future.
That means the time meddling by characters in the 26th and 29th centuries in their past (Enterprise and Voyager) never had a chance to happen. Nero effectively ends their possible existence when he changes the past as radically as he does by destroying Vulcan.
One might say that alternate futures explain it BUT Star Fleet maintains the time line by the 29th century. This implies there is only ONE time line.
If we are to assume that the USS Relativity or Gary Seven failed to correct the timeline Nero disrupted then this universe over wrote the old one.
If this universe over wrote the old one then the Temporal Cold War, The Xindi War and many of Voyager's time adventures can not have happened. 26th and 29th century characters that must exist to bring about these events don't and in some cases can't.
So this new timeline even over writes the past; eugenics wars onward is all fair game because cannon time travel from the 24th century or beyond was sometimes needed to make those past events happen.
06/15/09
Crap. I forgot about how much time-meddling was done from the future in Enterprise. Yeah, that pretty much kills it all. Well, maybe some good will come from all of this and Trip will have survived, while Riker and Troi never would have met. Or played around with the ST:E sim on the holodeck.
06/15/09
All those villains going back in time to kill their enemies? Not actually killing their enemies. They're killing their alternate universe enemies.
All those heroes going back in time to preserve history? Not preserving anything. Their history is in no danger of changing.
It's like replaying a World Series you didn't like on PlayStation. There is not effect in the "real world" the protagonists originate from.
Writers who claim "alternate timeline" when confronted by fans are bad writers. They're writing entire movies where all of the characters are wrong about their own motivations. That's just bad writing, motivated by some idiotic belief that they're avoiding a paradox.
News flash: Time travel is fictional. You need to resolves paradoxes in a way that's good writing, not good marketing.
(And that's before I go on a Trek-specific rant about "City on the Edge of Forever" and DS9's "Bell Riot" episodes. Star Trek was clearly one-timeline universe, until a bunch of screenwriters got scared of angry fanboys.)
06/15/09
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06/15/09
While Nero did destroy Vulcan out of vengeance, he was mostly doing it as vengeance upon old Spock, who was there and could appreciate the destruction. Basically everyone who was messed up in the process was just being caught in the path of Nero and Spock from the original timeline, neither had motivations that required time travel.
I suppose old Spock did intercede in this timeline, but he almost seemed to be doing so out of kindness and sentimentality, not any sense of preservation of the future. Besides, you could say that Nero was just nuts anyway, and his motivations are hard to justify as those of a rational actor.
06/15/09
There wasn't much point in doing anything he did with the intent of preserving the future. By the time he was able to do anything, it was already far too late. Not only had Kirk's entire timeline been skewed by the loss of his father on the day he was born, but Spock was captured the moment he appeared and stranded on a hunk of ice until after Vulcan was destroyed.
06/15/09
The Mirror Universe, for example, suggests parallel universes until Enterprise, where it can be seen to suggest a divergent timeline centred around Zephram Cochrane's reaction to First Contact. Worf's big adventure can also suggest parallel universes, but the only instances we really saw were based on certain critical timeline divergences, like the Borg assimiliating Sector 001.
The lion's share of Trek time travel episodes can assume a single timeline, be it the Nazis winning the war because American pacifists weren't justifiably executed or Janeway shaving a few years off Voyager's return home or the whole Temporal Cold War whatever that was. But when you think about it, there really isn't anything to say that those other timelines didn't remain anyways.
Then there are the fun ones that I like, which rely on linear time: Sisko always was Gabriel Bell, Quark always was the Roswell alien, etc. But those all happen within one timeline anyways because they're closed loops.
Man, no wonder my girlfriend hates Star trek...
06/16/09
I'd have to argue that Cochrane's bit is just further evidence of parallel universes, since those were clearly a bunch of ET-hating maniacs.
06/16/09
06/16/09
In theory, that should have been before their first ecounter with the Borg. Of course, since the First Contact first contact only happened because the future timeline mucked up the past timeline, that theory doesn't hold a lot of water.
06/15/09
06/15/09
As time travel in Star Trek tells you (via the episode where Archer gets stuck in a post-apoc future), there's really only one timeline. Also there's the fact that Guinan knows when the timeline is wrong, meaning that the timeline clearly has to be changing around her, not merely splitting infinately. Alternate universes, yes, alternate timelines, no. What happens in Timeline stays in Timeline, and the only previous Trek that's not eliminated by Abrams Trek is ST:E (and then only because it had already happened by the time the movie starts).
If there were multiple timelines, time travel should allow you to hop from one to the next by a means other than _changing_ the timeline.
And all of this is why Lost's WHH time travel is so refreshing, even if they are hinting that it might not be as restrictive as originally stated.
06/15/09
It could be plausibly argued that the Prime time-line was already messed up with due to the events of First Contact, because it appeared to have led to the events of Enterprise (and a different looking Enterprise ship which is more similar looking to the TNG movie Enterprise).
So Enterprise is already set in an alternate time-line, and that time-line, in turn, appears to have led to JJ Abrams' Star Trek, which in itself branches off onto another time-line with the arrivals of Nero and Spock Prime.
06/15/09
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06/15/09
Spock and Nero's adventure didn't mean much. Their history still existed. There was no jeopardy, really.
06/15/09
But if Old Spock DOES stop it this time, then Nero will never go back in time with Old Spock in the first place, thereby not destroying Vulcan. This, of course, means that Old Spock is no longer in the past to prepare for the destruction of Romulus, so Nero will AGAIN travel back in time and so will Old Spock.
AUGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHH!!!
06/15/09
06/15/09
06/15/09
Yes, and Nero destroyed the Berman-Braga timeline.
02/11/09
No playing a non-humanoid race though, eh?
I'm gonna totally geek out here, but my biggest complaint is that they went to the old-school Starfleet logo for uniform communicator pins. Not terribly impressed there; they didn't use the oval-backed ones from TNG, or the bar-backed ones from DS9 of Voyager, or even the dual-vertical bar-backed ones from the "future" episodes of all of the above. Bah!
02/11/09
You can bet your bottom Federation credit that my ready room is going to have a Horta-skin rug, any mysterious probes or floating space wreckage we come across will be used for target practice (at maximum range too), and any blue godlike entity that wants to borrow my spaceship is going to get a photon torpedo to the face.
Also, lets see how those damn hippie spore plants of Omicron Ceti III like it when I have Scotty teleport down a few dozen half-starved tribbles.
02/11/09
Plus, it'd also be handy the next time we come in contact with a race of alien illusionist/shape-changers who like to pick their forms directly out of our crew's minds.
I bet by the time our 5-year mission is over, we could bag ourselves a good half-dozen Miss Augusts! (Sure, some of them would probably be salt vampires, but we'll just stick them in a go go cage and have a redshirt change out their salt licks once a month, and it'll be fine!)
02/10/09
02/11/09
02/10/09
How about a space opera MMORPG with decidedly non-humanoid aliens? How about living crystals, arsenic-based life or giant balloon-like creatures from jovian atmospheres?
Or is it all about the chatsex to be had with green skinned alien babes with 4 breasts?
02/11/09
02/10/09
I WANT A SPORE MMO. I DO NOT WANT A STAR TREK MMO.
LISTEN TO ME FOR ONCE.
02/10/09
Mr. Potato Man...in space!
02/10/09