Don't worry about the original time-line, it's fine

Discussion in 'Star Trek Movies: Kelvin Universe' started by Brutal Strudel, May 31, 2009.

  1. suarezguy

    suarezguy Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    I think we were supposed to agree that future Janeway's meddling was ethically questionable at best, while there wasn't much of an issue with alternate Yar returning to the real past because that WAS the real past and the alternate was just the result of an accidental anomaly ("I'm supposed to be dead" presumes that the familiar timeline is the only one, aside from this accidentally-created, wrong one).

    I know about the Eugenic wars turned out to be wrong, but for me part of the fun and message is that this could be our future.

    Certainly in YE the changing erased the timeline to set up a new one and I think that was also the intention with Endgame and The Visitor; the stories work better with a sole but changable timeline; if all Jake and Janeway were doing was making things better for alternates rather than the only real ones, I think that's less interesting and they'd have less motivation to do that.

    How does XI continue in the universe if it just kept some of the characters and concepts? It seems to me to be saying that the universe was too complex and established to write good stories in. This new universe can only be so much developed in a handful of films, especially if the filmmakers become interested in nostalgia.
     
  2. TrekGuide.com

    TrekGuide.com Fleet Captain Fleet Captain

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    "Yesterday's Enterprise," if you follow the causality, showed the natural future in the absence of time travel -- i.e., the Enterprise-C vanished in a spatial rift created by a volley of photon torpedoes during a fight with the Romulans, and that incident inevitably led to the Klingons being at war with the Federation 20 years later. The disappearance of the Enterprise-C was a natural result of its fight with the Romulans, so everything that happened after that was the natural course of history in the original timeline.

    New timelines are created only through time travel into the past (not vanishing and reappearing in your own future), so the familiar TNG timeline did not exist until AFTER Yar and the Enterprise-C went BACK in time, CHANGED the natural course of history, and prevented the Klingon war with the Federation. When the Enterprise-C initially disappeared, then reappeared 20 years later, it was in its own timeline, its own future, just like when Khan was frozen in 1996 and then awakened in his own future. Instantly appearing in your own future does NOT change history.

    When the Enterprise-C emerged from the rift near the Enterprise-D, it was in its one true future, where the Klingons were at war with the Federation. Only after Guinan (who had already met the alternate-Picard in San Francisco in 1900 in "Time's Arrow," and in the Nexus in 2300 in "Generations") convinced Yar that she needed to go back and change history, did the crew decide to send the Enterprise-C back in time, thus creating a new timeline and altering the natural course of events.

    Don't be fooled by the camera's point of view changing from one timeline to the other. It is simply following Lt. Yar's change from one timeline to the other. You cannot infer that one timeline erased the other, because the cameras left the original timeline at the moment Yar did.

    In many "Star Trek" episodes, such as "Star Trek IV" and "E2," the characters are shown having philosophical discussions about the nature of time travel, because, like you, they are not sure what the consequences of changing the past are.

    So sometimes they may think and act like there is only one timeline, and they are "preserving" their own past (like Marty in "Back to the Future"), but other times, such as "Time's Arrow" and "Parallax," the crew is simply going through the motions of fulfilling its own destiny in a causality loop (like Kyle Reese in "The Terminator"). In some stories, such as "Yesterday's Enterprise," "Endgame," "The Visitor," and "Star Trek XI," characters are intentionally changing history to permanently create a new timeline. In other episodes, such as "The City on the Edge of Forever" and "Star Trek: First Contact," one time traveler creates a new, "undesirable" timeline, causing another time traveler to go back and "undo" the changes (by making further changes in the second timeline), thus creating a third timeline that is "close enough" to the original.

    Through all of these episodes, there is one common theme: The characters are not completely sure what will happen when they go back in time -- whether to change history, to maintain history, or to "fix" history. (This is an extension of the writers of any particular episode not knowing exactly how time travel works, and consequently the viewers cannot derive a clear understanding of the rules of time travel, since there aren't any.)

    The characters are never sure whether they are in a causality loop (such as "Time's Arrow" or "Parallax") and thus must go back in time and do nothing just to maintain the time loop; or if they feel they are already in a "bad" timeline (e.g., old Jake in "The Visitor," Admiral Janeway in "Endgame," Captain Archer in "Twilight," or Lt. Yar in "Yesterday's Enterprise"), then they must go back and actively change history, in order to create a more desirable future.

    Like the viewers of the episodes, the characters are just making decisions based on the limited information they have at the moment. Each temporal anomaly, time vortex, Guardian of Forever, slingshot effect, spatial rift, or red-matter black hole has different properties, so the characters have no idea what the consequences of their actions will be until they reach the other side.

    Saying "there's only one timeline" and that time travel erases one's own past in ALL cases is just speculation and opinion on the viewer's part. The characters in some episodes may SUSPECT that this is how time travel works, but once they are in a new timeline, they have no way of measuring whether it is the same one or an identical one.

    It has never been determined one way or the other, since the cameras invariably follow the time travelers into the new timeline, so we, the viewers, have no way of knowing whether the original timeline kept going without them, or vanished completely. From the characters' point of view, it doesn't really matter, since the time travelers always continue on with their missions in whatever timeline they end up in, and the cameras follow those new missions as if that is the only timeline.

    There have been some ambiguous episodes, like the Vorgons in "Captain's Holiday, where the cameras follow them back into a new timeline repeatedly, but we have no way of knowing which is the "real" TNG timeline, or whether all timelines are part of a causality loop or multiple alternate realities.

    In all of "Star Trek," there have never been two episodes where the same laws of time travel apply. Even where similar methods of time travel are used, each episode has some complication, such as two different time travelers on conflicting missions, travel into both the past and the future, being caught in a causality loop, traveling into an alternate reality and trying to get "back," or consciously changing the past in order to put right what once went wrong.

    There is no episode where the characters say, "Well, this is what happened the last time we time traveled, so we just have to do the exact same thing again." No, every instance of time travel in "Star Trek" is unique, and has different, unpredictable consequences for the characters. The writers of the episodes clearly have no idea what "laws of time travel" they are trying to adhere to, which is reflected in the confusion of the characters in most episodes, resulting in all these ongoing debates about timelines on TrekBBS.

    This was really the only way for the writers to accomplish two goals: To use the classic, original characters again and recapture the spirit of TOS, while at the same time, telling new, compelling stories with real consequences and suspense, where neither the characters nor the audience knows what will happen next.

    How monumentally boring would this movie be if this were just a "Star Wars"-style prequel, and Earth and Vulcan were threatened, but the audience already knows that both planets would still be safe in the 24th century? There would be no jeopardy, no danger -- just like we know young Anakin Skywalker would survive the pod race in the "Star Wars" prequel, because we already know how he dies in the future.

    The writers only had three other choices:

    1. To tie their own hands and limit the creative potential of any story by making this a strict prequel, so the characters would just be going through the motions, and would never be in any danger.
    2. They could have just continued the series into the 25th century, where the Federation has "magical" technology such as transwarp beaming, invisible cloaking suits, personal wearable transporters, ablative starship armor, transphasic torpedoes, sentient mobile holograms, no real adversaries left in the Galaxy, and 300 years of history that would only be known to the geekiest über-fans.
    3. They could have just done a complete re-boot like "Battlestar Galactica," "Batman," James Bond, and every "Punisher" and "Hulk" movie, where just the title and some characters are the same, but new history and characters are created because the previous series contiunity is deemed "hopelessly contaminated and unrecoverable." But "Star Trek" does not fit into this third category, because its continuity, while bulky and convoluted, is still valid and has never been fully abandoned, unlike those other franchises.
    "Star Trek" is unique, in that it is both an ongoing TV and movie series, and both follow a common continuity, unlike other series like "Smallville" or "Terminator," which had no connection between the TV stories and the film series using the same characters.

    Like classic comic books, "Star Trek" has been continuously relevant through the decades. The "Superman" comics may have started in the 1930s, but he is still relevant and current a century later, and most of his comics follow a common continuity (across multiple timelines and alternate realities).

    Very few fictional worlds can claim more than 700 episodes telling an ongoing story. Some, like "Robin Hood" or "King Arthur" or "Galactica" or "Batman" or James Bond, have a few strong characters or ideas that transcend one particular format or story, so they are continuously recycled or reimagined. "Star Trek" has always been about the ongoing narrative from one episode to the next, with a common history linking all the various series and movies, rather than just recycling a few iconic characters and ideas through multiple unrelated stories.

    "Galaxy Quest" showed how "Star Trek's" characters, plot elements, and technology could be re-imagined and used to tell a completely new story without being part of the ongoing continuity. But Paramount's ongoing canon of 700 episodes has an enduring appeal, so there is no reason for the producers to abandon it. They are free within that canon to go back in time, create alternate timelines, introduce new villains, etc. -- but that has been true in each of the previous 735 episodes, too. Like "The Motion Picture" or "The Next Generation," this new movie series is just updating the franchise for a new generation of viewers, while keeping the ongoing narrative alive.
     
    Last edited: Jun 8, 2009
  3. The Exile

    The Exile Ensign Red Shirt

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    The good thing about the multiverse is that every decision you make creates a new timeline. Simply decide that new Star Trek is perfectly plausible within the multiverse structure and hey presto! You've created another alternate timeline. Just pity the poor you who decided it wasn't ok and is miserably battering away at his keyboard, tears in his eyes and the pointy bit of a communicator pin badge through his heart.
     
  4. Captrek

    Captrek Vice Admiral Admiral

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    Eh eh. In in “initial” timeline, the Ent-C (presumably) went down fighting with Captain Garrett in command. Then this temporal rift kinda reached back and yanked the Ent-C out of time in the year 2344, creating a new timeline in which the Klingons and Federation went to war (and presumably the Federation ended up losing). The temporal rift spat the Ent-C back out in the year 2366, creating a timeline in which the Ent-D discovers the Ent-C and goes down protecting the Ent-C as it reenters the rift, creating yet another new timeline where the Ent-C is defeated fighting with Tasha Yar at the helm, Sela being born a year later, etc.
     
  5. TrekGuide.com

    TrekGuide.com Fleet Captain Fleet Captain

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    That's not a timeline; that's a hypothetical scenario of what would have happened if there had been no spatial rift. Kind of like "What if the Nazis had won the war?" It's just hypothetical. That course of events never happened in any timeline.

    There's no indication that the rift "reached back." It was stated in the episode that the rift formed during a high-energy volley of torpedoes, during the Enterprise-C's fight with the Romulans in the past. It was created in the past, not the future, so there was no time travel involved in the creation of the rift. It was part of natural causality that the Enterprise-C disappeared into the rift in all timelines. There was never a set of circumstances where the rift was NOT created.

    It was only when the Enterprise-C RETURNED with Lt. Yar that a new timeline was created -- the timeline we would see in every other TNG episode. Before they went BACK in time, there was only one timeline: the one where the Enterprise-C vanished in the rift and never returned for 20 years, resulting in the Klingon war.
     
  6. Omega_Glory

    Omega_Glory Commodore

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    So what were all those TNG episodes that preceded Yesterday's Enterprise? They were not at war during those episodes. If the Ent-C left the timeline and then reemerged twenty years later, they should always have been at war..but they weren't.
     
  7. Hartzilla2007

    Hartzilla2007 Vice Admiral Admiral

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    Timeline 9 NuKirk goes forward in time and kicks Picard's ass for getting him killed with his shitty plan.
    Timeline 10 Picard has a better plan in Generations and is still flying around in the D
    Timeline 11 NuBalance of Terror Commander Romulan Commander id best buds with NuKirk after Prime Spock bitchslaps the entire Romulan Senate.
     
  8. Ovation

    Ovation Admiral Admiral

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    They were the retroactive result of Yar's return to the battle on the Enterprise C. We had simply been watching the timeline altered by the C's return, with Yar. In essence, TNG had always been in an alternate timeline.
     
  9. SheliakBob

    SheliakBob Commander Red Shirt

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    Argh.
    I can't help but feel that Star Trek, in general, would've been better off just freakin' staying away from time travel all together!
    Sure we'd lose a few great episodes, but think of the pay off in not having to listen to Harlan Ellison whine for decades about being given a job!
    sigh.

    Okay dokey. Here's my very own personal take on the nature of time travel in Trek, having read many of these actually fascinating posts and had more than a few too many arguments with fellow fans over drinks at one convention or another.

    I'm picturing a timeline as a stream, a big ol' main trunk of a stream. Many sidelines branch out from it, some looping back into the main body, some thinning out and dying off, others growing upwards along with the main trunk. You can travel within a timeline by using, um, "internal" methods of time travel. The slingshot effect. The Guardian of Forever. Any sort of time travel which involves those pesky "chronaton" particles, etc. That's an internal leap. The shape of the main stream can be be altered through these methods, but they also often spin off a sidestream. The Temporal Cold War showed us various powers from within the stream using these internal methods to try to "sculpt" the main trunkline. Possibly some, coming from spun off sidestreams, trying to get back into the main trunk or to shape the main trunk to their liking and boot a rival off into a side stream of their own. (Annorax's "temporal incursions" kept fractuing the trunkline and spinning off sidestreams until his tool for sculpting the main stream got broke and all that turbulence settled down.)

    But, there are also alternate, parallel "trunks" alongside the main one, all with their own sidestreams and loops and "temporal topography" or wot not. Sometimes when you travel through a "rift" or a "tear" in subspace, you actually jump from one trunkline to another. As in Trek XI. Supposedly.

    It's not "canon", per se, but I think it's mostly consistent with what has been depicted, preserves the drama of time alterations while allowing for parallel or derivitive timelines. More importantly, it keeps me from going totally hair-pulling insane when watching these episodes trying to figure out just what the hell the writer was thinking.

    Variable mileage is a given.
     
  10. Freman

    Freman Fleet Captain Fleet Captain

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    How about we just assume that Red Matter time travel works differently than the other modes of time travel we've seen on ST? That way, we don't have to worry about this stuff.
     
  11. suarezguy

    suarezguy Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    I think that's the driving force of a lot of episodes. This multiverse concept kind of wipes away the drama of "Timeless" where Kim feels he's justified in changing the past and LaForge thinks he isn't; if their beliefs are mistaken and it just creates a new timeline rather than changing anything, at least LaForge is wasting his time and Kim, and Janeway in "Endgame," aren't really preventing the bad events.
    The idea that there are countless universes based on each decision kind of weakens the decision making process as the same character makes different decisions and it's totally random which one we get to see.
    If there are so many universes, where's the justification for Guinan and Yar saying that things should be different?

    I would have preferred having a new crew, set at any time period, since as you said ST should be ongoing; going a bit further doesn't have to involve magical technology or alienating newcomers. Even as a strict prequel, there could have been new species and worlds we hadn't heard of before (or the film could have avoided a planetary-destruction level threat, if it even had to have villains).
     
  12. TrekGuide.com

    TrekGuide.com Fleet Captain Fleet Captain

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    "Yesterday's Enterprise" showed the events in the original timeline at the moment the Enterprise-C appeared through the rift, concurrent with the episodes of TNG that we are familiar with. (It is similar to the "Enterprise" episode "In a Mirror, Darkly," which was depicting what the Mirror Universe counterparts were doing at the same time as the missions of the NX-01 in "our" universe.)

    We saw at the beginning and end of "Yesterday's Enterprise" what Worf and the other familiar TNG characters were doing at the same time as the events in the other timeline. As we have seen in "Star Trek: First Contact" and "All Good Things ..." temporal rifts exist simultaneously in multiple timelines, so the Enterprise-D witnessed the brief appearance of the rift, but no ship emerged (since the Enterprise-C emerged in its own future during the Klingon war, then returned to the past, creating the alternate TNG timeline).

    Just like episodes of TNG aired before the movies "Star Trek V" and "Star Trek VI," which are set a century earlier, the fact that we saw the origin of Lt. Yar going back in time in the third season of TNG does not really have any impact on the first two seasons.

    As we later saw, Yar's half-Romulan daughter was around 24, so she had obviously been alive during the first three seasons of TNG, living on Romulus. In retrospect, it is obvious that the entire TNG series is set in the alternate timeline, created by Lt. Yar going back on the Enterprise-C, just like "Star Trek: Nemesis" is set in the alternate timeline created by Admiral Janeway getting the Voyager home 20 years early.

    If you think of it in terms of causality rather than chronology, it all makes more sense.

    Well, from the point of view of the characters (and the TV viewers), they don't know whether changing history will change their own past. The cameras always switch to the new timeline, so we have no evidence that the entire universe ends the second a time traveler goes back in time. (The only time we see the original timeline after the time travelers have left it is in "Star Trek Generations," when we see the sun explode and everyone on the Enterprise-D die AFTER Picard enters the Nexus. And in "Star Trek XI," Ambassador Spock is still in the original timeline while Nero is screwing up history for 25 years on the other side of the black hole.)

    As I recall, Kim died at the end of "Timeless," and Admiral Janeway remained trapped in the new timeline she created, as did Yar after "Yesterday's Enterprise" and Ambassador Spock after "Star Trek XI," so we never see the original timeline after our viewpoint characters are gone. We don't see characters fading away from photographs like in "Back to the Future" (aside from the Krenim chroniton weapons in "Year of Hell," which didn't make much logical sense regardless of what timeline theory you follow).

    So the only times that characters (and TV viewers) are aware that history has been changed, the person who changes history is either dead (like Kim in "Timeless" or Jake Sisko in "The Visitor") or the time travelers are trapped in the new timeline (like Admiral Janeway, or Lt. Yar, or Ambassador Spock), or the time travelers "fix" history and return to a future that is similar to the one they left (like Picard in "First Contact," Kirk in "City," or Sisko in "Past Tense").

    In all three of these situations, the characters who changed history, or the characters whose history was changed, never see their original "unchanged" timeline again. So whether there's only one timeline, or millions of parallel timelines, it really doesn't matter to the characters or the viewers, since we only ever see the timeline we're in at the moment.

    There has never been an episode where a time traveller goes back in time, permanently screws up history, while someone remains in the original timeline and says, "Boy, I'm glad I'm not in that other timeline."

    But for all we know, every timeline we have ever seen still exists after the time travelers left. Picard could still be fighting the Klingons after Yar and the Enterprise-C left; Seven of Nine and Chakotay would still be dead in the future that Admiral Janeway left; and Captain LaForge is thinking that Kim and Chakotay were idiots for dying while changing the past, and realizing that they were all wrong and the original future is still there.

    As Ensign Kim said at the end of "Timeless," "If I sent a message from the future and changed the past, then that future would no longer exist, right? So how could I have sent the message in the first place?"

    No one in the episode had an answer to that question, except for "Oh, well, it's a paradox!" That's because the characters (and the writers), like you, believed that there was only one timeline, but in fact the only answer to Kim's question is that there are multiple timelines that co-exist. Changing the past doesn't erase the future; it just creates another, divergent future. That is the only answer to any similar "Grandfather Paradox."

    But old Kim's motivation, like many time travelers' in "Star Trek," was based on the misconception that there is only one timeline; Captain LaForge was trying to stop them for the same reason.

    We only ever see stories BEFORE the time travelers try to change the past; then the camera switches over to the new timeline. But we never see the characters in the ORIGINAL timeline after history is changed. If we did, we'd see them realize that the changes had no effect on them, and that a different timeline was created. But "Star Trek" never follows those people; it only shows the time travelers who are ignorant of the consequences of their actions, so they go back in time based on erroneous information about how time works, and no one in those new timelines ever has any evidence to the contrary.

    I don't buy the Quantum Mechanics mumbo-jumbo that all ordinary events have multiple outcomes, like every time you flip a coin, it lands on both heads and tails in two different universes. There's no reason to believe the laws of physics and aerodynamics and gravity are any different in two parallel universes, so the coin would land on the same side in all universes, unless a time traveler went back and changed the air flow around the coin, or bumped the person's arm who tossed the coin.

    So there are not countless universes. There is a finite, but unlimited, number of universes -- one for each act of time travel that ever has or ever will take place in any timeline.

    Guinan had previously met Picard from the alternate TNG timeline twice: Once in San Francisco in 1900 (in "Time's Arrow") and once in the timeless Nexus in 2300 (in "Star Trek Generations"). Both times, it was a Picard from a future where Yar was dead, and the Federation was not at war with the Klingons.

    So, 70 years later, when the Enterprise-C appeared during the Klingon War, Guinan realized that she was in the "wrong" timeline, and had to "create" the alternate reality where the Picard she had already met twice would exist. She did this by convincing Yar that she would be better off in the alternate timeline.

    That is usually the motivation for time travelers: "This timeline sucks. I'm going to another one where things are better."

    However, half the time, the time travelers don't survive long enough to enjoy the new timeline they create (Kim and Chakotay in "Timeless," Lorian in "E2," Admiral Janeway in "Endgame," Lt. Yar in "Yesterday's Enterprise," Jake Sisko in "The Visitor," the Borg Queen in "First Contact," Nero in "Star Trek XI").

    Other times, the time travelers succeed in creating a happy, new timeline, so they either stay in that new timeline's past or "return" to its future, which is better off than the one they left (Picard in "First Contact," Picard in "Generations," Captain Sisko in "Past Tense").

    Either way, the characters never return to (or live long enough to see) the original, unaltered timeline again, and since the TV cameras follow only the characters who end up in the "good" timelines, we are left with the impression that the original future is "erased" or overwritten, but we have never actually seen any evidence of this.
     
  13. BillJ

    BillJ The King of Kings Premium Member

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    Obviously you have no idea when exactly the rift was created. Since it wasn't specified in the episode. And in Trek we have seen phenomenon that travel from the future into the past.
     
  14. Ovation

    Ovation Admiral Admiral

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    It is heavily implied, at the very least, in the episode that the rift was created in the battle where the C came from. There is a probable cause for the rift in the C's battle, there is no discernible cause for the rift 22 years later, so the odds are far greater that the battle created the rift 22 years before the "militarized D" rather than the other way around.