Star Trek (Old & New) Continuity Conumdrums

POSTED BY: RocketJock
UPDATED: Thursday, May 21, 2009 06:29
VIEWED: 3191
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ROCKETJOCK

Friday, May 15, 2009 4:22 AM

Warning: The following is going to be EXTREMELY SPOILERIFIC re: The J.J. Abrams Star Trek movie, and I am not, repeat NOT, spoilerizing text. If you haven’t seem it yet, Proceed past the following gap at your own risk!
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In cruising various discussion groups & web sites over the last week, I’ve seen some questions about the new Star Trek movie – and it’s relationship to the Prime/Classic Trek universe – repeated by multiple persons, sometimes with a grin, sometimes with a “gotcha!”, and sometimes with a “Hah, I’ve found one logical flaw with this new timeline, therefore it’s all crap” attitude. Sometimes these points have been well reasoned out, sometimes . . . not so much.

So, in an effort to get my own continuity geekitude out of my system, I’m going to list the most repeated, along with own possible answers, and ask all you kindly folks for your own opinions and/or observations on same.

Ground rules:

A. We assume that the two continuums were identical until the arrival of the Narada in the past.

B. We ignore any paradoxes that might result from previous time travelers from other Trek series visiting times before that point. If altering the time stream is possible at all, we have to assume the universe has enough flexibility to absorb a certain amount of paradox. So no, I’m not going to worry about whether Mr. Data’s head is still buried in San Francisco, or if Ben Sisko’s picture is in the history books about the Bell Riots.

C. We’re not going to worry about stylistic differences in special effects – the transporter effect, for example, varied greatly between TOS, the Kirk-Era movies, and the post ST-TNG shows. That reflects artistic decisions by the FX teams involved more than it does any change in Starfleet tech.

D. I’m using a Q&A format for simplicity’s sake.

Q1: Jim Kirk was born in Riverside, Iowa in the original timeline, so why is he born somewhere in deep space near the Klingon border in the Alternate Reality?

A1: It’s possible that the stress of being in a battle caused his mother to enter labor prematurely. It’s also possible that the USS Kelvin was diverted from a course towards Earth to investigate early precursors of the Narada’s arrival. I prefer the second answer since it doesn’t require changing Jim Kirk’s canonical birthdate.

Q2: How did Spock know of the cultural connections between Vulcans and Romulans, since that fact wasn’t known until the events of “Balance of Terror”, (which would still be some years in the future)?

A2: The Narada was identified as Romulan, (presumably from markings rather than design profile) and Captain Nero appeared on the Kelvin’s viewscreen . Given twenty-five years of divergent military history following the destruction of a Starfleet vessel by a Romulan ship, it’s not surprising if the Alternate Timeline has a greater grasp of the Vulcan/Romulan connection than the “Prime” universe had at the equivalent point.

Q3: This Enterprise seems considerably more advanced than her prime-universe equivalent; how could technology advance so quickly on one timeline but not the other?

A3: Partially this is an illusion caused by the sort of stylistic differences referred to in rule C (above); the rest can be accounted for out of context. After the Narada/Kelvin incident, one can easily imagine a new war – or a series of skirmishes damned close to one – erupting between UFP and the Star Empire, with perhaps the Klingons getting into the mix as well. This would undoubtedly lead to major advances in starship design and weaponry systems even in such a relatively short time as 25 years. This is, of course not to mention the UFP’s other major research impetus, namely that a mystery ship came out of frickin’ nowhere and blew the living shit out of a ship-of-the-line. . . And they’re still out there somewhere!

Q4: Uhura makes mention of the Cardassians – but surely

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PEULSAR5

Friday, May 15, 2009 4:34 AM

As far as the more advanced Enterprise, you left out the events of ST: First Contact, where Zephram Cochran and his team would be influenced by interacting with 24th century explorers in their subsequent ship designs. This is one of the explanations why ST: Enterprise had some technology that seemed more advanced than the original series (smaller communicators, glowing nacelles, etc)

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JEWELSTAITEFAN

Friday, May 15, 2009 6:21 AM

Q1. The second part of A1 was my assumption.

Q2. A2 was also my assumption.

Q3. I call hogwash on "stylistic differences" - that's whole engineering levels of difference. The second part of A3 is fair. Consider the growth of the NASA R&D from 1970 until today, 2009. Compare to the period 1960 until 1969. The destrction by Narada was a catalyst. 25 years of R&D with the greater catalyst makes a big diff. The original 5-year Mission was to explore strange new worlds and to seek out new civilizations. This alternate post-Narada Mission is the same, but added "and not get our azzes kicked in the same way as 25 years ago."

Q4. Just because you know of a planet does not mean anybody has been there, or verified life is present. Do we have any drinks named after Venus, Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Pluto, Neptune? Or is Caddassia named after something else on Earth? Most of our planets were named after Gods. The translations allow that "Caddassia" is what Our Language calls it, not what they named it in their language. So we found a planet, Uhura didn't say she'd met any Caddassians.

Whoa! What? Time changes alter the ORIGINAL timeline??? I guess I've missed out on Star Trek canon - when was this explained? This is the first I've heard of such a thing, anywhere. This would mean ST:TOS is now deleted. it also means this film is false, as soon as the Narada changed Kirk's life, Spock would have already known of his "new" beginnings with Kirk, and not been surprised that Kirk was not Captain.
I would need to see where this is proclaimed.

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RIPWASH

Friday, May 15, 2009 12:41 PM

I'm copying and pasting the following that was written by Greg Dean over at Reallifecomics.com. I think his thoughts are pretty good on this subject in terms of the time-line.

Quote:

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As someone who has spent a lot (I mean a LOT) of time thinking about the working mechanics of time travel, and will generally give any time travel story/book/movie a fair shake, I will say this about how Abrams handled it: 1) Time travel via black hole is silly, but I'll let it be seeing as how the original Kirk managed to take a Klingon Bird of Prey for a ride around the sun to go back in time... and 2) If you forget about the method, the actual WAY it was handled makes complete, utter, and total sense.

You have to alter how you think about time. Back to the Future treated time as a linear thing.... you would go back and forth on this line, and any changes you make would then propagate forward, irrevocably changing your future. You go back and give a sports almanac to a psycho, for instance, and when you return to the future, events have taken place in a vastly different fashion, meaning your original time no longer exists...unless, of course, you just went even FURTHER back and stopped it all from happening... etc, etc, etc. Worked well enough for the movies, but the flaw here is thinking of time as a line you travel back and forth on. It doesn't work that way... not according to Einsteinian physics, anyway. Going forward in time is easy - get on a ship and haul ass away from the planet at as close to light speed as you can, then turn around and come on back - presto, you're in the future. Time has sped up, due to the time dilation effect of traveling at near-light speed. Doesn't exactly work in reverse.

Quantum theory, on the other hand, gives us a slightly different way of looking at time travel... it's not actually moving back and forth on some imaginary line, but going to an alternate universe. Another dimension, really. The theory works like this: there are innumerable universes existing in innumerable dimensions, where every possible outcome of every possible action has in fact taken place. In some cases, these dimensions can be wildly different - universes where Hitler won WWII, or where the Soviet Union took over the United States. (Yeah, I watched a lot of Sliders.) The interesting thing is, that because of these infinite permutations, universes exist that are in the EXACT state of the past of your OWN universe. So somewhere out there, there would be a universe that is CURRENTLY an exact copy of any moment in history. This concept was played around with in Timeline, which despite being a terrible movie, was actually a pretty good book. (It's Crichton - that's usually how it works.)

The long and the short of it is this - under quantum physics, traveling in time is an action that is more like SPACE travel than time travel. You're going to another universe, one that is IDENTICAL to a previous time in history. The upshot of this is that it's nondestructive... assuming you could control the movement to and from the destination universe (instead of being sucked into a black hole), you could in fact travel back to your own "time" and nothing would have changed. This is the model used by Star Trek, and frankly, I'm ecstatic that this is how they did it.

The reason? Nothing is predictable. "Spock Prime" is not in his own past, but is actually in another universe... one that began to differ from his original timeline the second Nero's vessel came out the other side. Every event that took place from then on served to alter the future irrevocably. Cause and effect don't apply here... young Spock and "Spock Prime" are two different individuals, and nothing "Spock Prime" does is in any danger of causing paradoxes, or altering timelines... in short, you CANNOT know what to expect from this series of movies. In this universe, nothing that happened in any existing Star Trek show or film can be counted on as "future canon". It will not happen the way it did originally.

Now, my dad was a little upset about this, because he thought

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