I thought Janice Rand was supposed to be a young Janice Rand.
Is this a faithful prequel to TOS?
- Thread starter Admiral Jean-Luc Picard
- Start date
Since time travel's not real (yet at least), I like to go with author intent. In BTTF, it's one reality, one timeline that can morph into the next, but you cannot have more than "one" timeline at a time. This is why the picture was changing in BTTF and why Marty briefly began to fade. It's how we got the alternate 1985 in Part II. I think the producers/writers intended the "overwrite" of time to take... time. It's why Marty didn't begin to fade until a whole week after he shows up in the past. It's why old-Biff returned to the 2015 he left, allowing Doc and Marty to go back to bizarro 1985.
In FC, there's nothing in the film itself to suggest predestination paradox. Original timeline becomes Borg timeline gets "mostly restored" to original timeline. Not only did First Contact happen under new circumstances (the Borg, the Enterprise, Riker & Geordi on the Phoenix without Lilly), but then we learn some Borg survived and briefly ran amok 90 years later with "an" Enterprise taking care of business. I like to think this got buried and super classified over time. Given Cochrane's statements along with Archer's Borg encounter, Starfleet may have decided to keep it classified until "after" the 2nd Borg invasion, realizing the loop had come full circle. Imagine Picard's reaction to, "Yeah... not everyhting from the sphere went boom. Check this lovely 2150's report."
Honestly with Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow there's legitimate claim that everything from that episode onwards isn't a prequel to TOS. Especially as the La'an pining for Kirk thing got dragged on a few more episodes after that, meaning the episode wasn't isolated. It takes place in a new timeline where Khan was born in the 21st century. So TOS purists can claim that all SNW episodes before "Tomorrow" were in the original timeline and then got refit to TOS look, and we can ignore everything from "Tomorrow" and onwards as they take place in a new alternate timeline.
I haven't seen the episode or the series yet but spoil me this time. Does the episode pull a retcon, or is the past radically altered, but the future is the same anyway.... because?
It's the episode where Khan is very obviously and specifically shifted via temporal wars from being a 20th century figure into a 21st century one. Meaning the dialogue in Space Seed and Wrath of Khan about him ruling countries in the 1990s don't fit anymore.
La'an only fell for Kirk because she met a variant of him during the hunt for kid Khan. Meaning she COULDN'T be pining after him in the original timeline (or if she did, it would've happened differently). La'an herself probably is genetically different before and after the episode just due to her ancestor's timeline being shifted by 40 years (to be fair this is handwaved and arguably the shift by 4 decades of the globe spanning Eugenics wars would genetically alter every human in Trek whose ancestors in that timeframe would have drastically different lives but...
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Timey wimey wibbly wobbly
Which was the point.
I am so informed now.
That's a direct quote from one of the leading experts, if not the leading expert, on time travel. You don't get better than that.I am so informed now.
I'm pretty sure the 'author's intent' of BTTF was that Marty McFly and his family were living a humdrum and go-nowhere life, and he suddenly (without being aware of it) had the opportunity to change all of that by teaching his dad how to stand up for himself. The snowball effect of that action led to the subtly changed timeline in which he and his family are now in a much better state of affairs, and the old timeline has been completely erased (and that Doc Brown survived his shooting instead of dying from it, allowing for further time travel adventures in BTTF II and III.) The photo of Marty fading only briefly was just a plot device.
I completely agree, I was just trying to keep it simple. I presume we agree that it's one timeline that "becomes" the next one?
In BTTF, the original 1985 timeline is erased in favor of a new 1985 timeline. In BTTF 2, that new 1985 timeline from BTTF is then erased in favor of the newer Biff 1985 timeline. Doc Brown even states that they can no longer return to their timeline because this new one overrode the old one, which was why they had to go back in time again to 1955 to fix it.
I always loved it when time travel stories feature the "current timeline" as the only one. Wanna go home? Go back in time and restore your timeline. If you've seen SG-1, you probably love "Moebius" and "Continuum."
Go on YouTube and look up some "Stargate SG-1" promos from the early seasons. It's a great TV series that ran from 1997-2007. For you and anyone else interested, here's a simple "Stargate" watchlist.
Stargate (film)
SG-1 (Seasons 1-7)
SG-1 (Season 8) / Atlantis (Season 1)
SG-1 (Season 9) / Atlantis (Season 2)
SG-1 (Season 10) / Atlantis (Season 3)
The Ark of Truth (SG-1 film) / Continuum (2nd film)
Atlantis (Seasons 4-5)
Universe (2 seasons)
I suppose with observers from the Relatively and guys like Daniels, all significant timelime shifts just get shifted back eventually. It's just a matter of time.
Things like Khan's birthdate change is just like a temporal yo-yo. Even the Kelvin Timelime may only have a limited lifespan.(if they don't make anymore films, it might as well have been rendered defunct)
Even Sera from that SNW episode (you know, if you've seen it) said the timelime always wants to heal itself back to the way it was.
Things like Khan's birthdate change is just like a temporal yo-yo. Even the Kelvin Timelime may only have a limited lifespan.(if they don't make anymore films, it might as well have been rendered defunct)
Even Sera from that SNW episode (you know, if you've seen it) said the timelime always wants to heal itself back to the way it was.
Star Trek fans have an odd need for absolutes in storytelling. "The Eugenics Wars happened on X date, here's the entry in the Star Trek Chronology, cross-referenced with the Star Trek Encyclopedia and the Greg Cox novel series!"
But Strange New Worlds is being very deliberate in that they've left the option open for fans to treat it as a separate timeline should they want to, but they won't ever explicitly say so. Later in season two, "Those Old Scientists" crosses Lower Decks, explicitly tied into TOS-TNG-DS9-VOY-ENT, with Strange New Worlds and... it's treated as if everything is fine and as it should be (with the exception of Spock, and that is played as him going through something never put into his logs). So it's left up to the individual viewer to decide with no wrong answer and I'm not sure Trekkies are good with ambiguity
But Strange New Worlds is being very deliberate in that they've left the option open for fans to treat it as a separate timeline should they want to, but they won't ever explicitly say so. Later in season two, "Those Old Scientists" crosses Lower Decks, explicitly tied into TOS-TNG-DS9-VOY-ENT, with Strange New Worlds and... it's treated as if everything is fine and as it should be (with the exception of Spock, and that is played as him going through something never put into his logs). So it's left up to the individual viewer to decide with no wrong answer and I'm not sure Trekkies are good with ambiguity
yeah the key difference is that she's not a main character in TOS, we don't have the opportunity for deep interaction.
Dauntless NX-01
After First Contact, Voyager 4-26 "Hope and Fear" introduced the "fake" Dauntless NX-01-A that everyone thought was real until the big "got'cha" reveal. Fast forward 3 years later, and we get the Enterprise NX-01. How do you recon this?
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