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Spoilers Star Trek Beyond & Treklit

Well it's really not a big deal to me... But specifically:

I just accept on face value what Edison said about the Xindi and Romulan Wars. It could be twisted a little to fit ENT but the plainest meaning of it is a larger Xindi conflict.

That's suggestive, sure, but isolated bits of odd dialogue aren't necessarily probative. Remember the admiral in "Doctor Bashir, I Presume" saying the Eugenics Wars had only been 200 years earlier? Or Admiral Morrow saying the Enterprise was 20 years old? Writers make mistakes, and sometimes it stands to reason that the characters are making mistakes too. It's been over a century, so maybe Edison's memory of the Xindi conflict is distorted and exaggerated. I did get the impression that his transformations had affected his mind and memory.

Besides, I don't recall what his verbatim line was there. I've seen it reported various ways.


And the existance of the Franklin in the Starfleet production lineage we currently know would require a bit of squinting. It's totally possible to make sense of it, but it doesn't have an obvious and easy explanation. Given the automatic possibility of timeline changes, and the fact that the ENT era would be the most ripe time for effects from the future to make changes in the past, that seems like the more straightforward explanation to me.

Maybe, but NX-01's own existence is something of a retcon already. I'm not sure anything in ENT definitively establishes that there wasn't a Warp 4 prototype ship before the Warp 5 prototype. We don't really know that much about starship development between the NX-Alpha in 2143 and Enterprise in 2151.

Also, word from the filmmakers is that the Franklin may have been a MACO ship. I can buy that the Earth military had its own independent ship development program building on the work of Henry Archer and his team, kinda like how the US military was long rumored to have its own space shuttle that it developed for classified missions (and does have an unmanned space plane prototype that it's since developed).

In the context of the literature, we've already made a similar retcon, positing the existence of the Daedalus class before NX-01. So in the Litverse, it is established that there was a fair amount of pre-Warp 5 starship development going on in the years we didn't see. And in canon, we have evidence of pre-NX-class ships like the "Warp Deltas" and the Neptune class. I don't think it's that hard to fit the Franklin into that period. It's new information, but I don't see it as a contradiction.
 
(maybe Edison was one of the MACOs on Enterprise but we never saw him on camera).
This I'm not so sure about. Edison's rank at the time the MACOs were disbanded was Major, which makes it clear he was an officer. However, other than Major Hayes, none of the MACOs on Enterprise were officers. In fact, out of all the MACOs identified by rank, aside from Hayes and one Sergeant, they were all Corporals.
I just accept on face value what Edison said about the Xindi and Romulan Wars.
All he said was losing millions to the Xindi and Romulan Wars. One possible interpretation is that he is referring to the Romulan War as Romulan Wars, which has been done before in Trek. And we do know the death toll from the Xindi attack was seven million. So, he lost millions to the Xindi, and lost more during the Romulan Wars. Sloppy, but workable.
 
I'm wondering if there's any room in season 3 to retcon more human-Xindi conflicts into existing canon. For instance, in "Zero Hour" when the Xindi superweapon arrives in Earth orbit and blows up that random space station, how come there's nobody there to fight back? Could it be that, while the episode cut back to what Enterprise and T'Pol were doing in the Expanse, there was an unseen battle between the superweapon and Earth's defense fleet?
 
Edison could've been promoted to major after (due to) the Xindi Crisis.

Also, I think the Franklin fits comfortably into the established history. But Christopher's idea of a MACO ship s cool.
 
I'm wondering if there's any room in season 3 to retcon more human-Xindi conflicts into existing canon. For instance, in "Zero Hour" when the Xindi superweapon arrives in Earth orbit and blows up that random space station, how come there's nobody there to fight back? Could it be that, while the episode cut back to what Enterprise and T'Pol were doing in the Expanse, there was an unseen battle between the superweapon and Earth's defense fleet?
That's not illogical. Like in STID when no one on Earth came to save the Enterprise. Somethign must have caught the rest of Starfleet's attention.
 
And the existance of the Franklin in the Starfleet production lineage we currently know would require a bit of squinting. It's totally possible to make sense of it, but it doesn't have an obvious and easy explanation.

I think it's a pretty obvious and easy solution: The Franklin was built before the Enterprise, survived, and was commissioned into the Federation Starfleet. ENT already established that the United Earth Starfleet had a number of different starship classes before the NX class.

I'll add here that my biggest comment on Beyond would be the awesomeness of the Beastie Boys saving the day. In Voyager or the other 24th century series there would have been a complex technobabble solution to their problem. But in Beyond, while there was a technical explanation given, it boiled down to the plan being "Roll down the windows and blare Beastie Boys at them while we floor it!!!!!"

I did love how Pegg and Jung subverted the entire ST trope of technobabble there. :bolian:

That's not illogical. Like in STID when no one on Earth came to save the Enterprise. Somethign must have caught the rest of Starfleet's attention.

I just assumed Admiral Marcus had ordered all Starfleet vessels to stay away from the Enterprise to try to prevent word of his attempt to provoke a war with the Klingons from reaching anyone else.

(Also, for better or worse, one of the central conceits of the Kelvin Timeline version of ST seems to be that space is a lot more empty, a lot harder to navigate, and a lot harder to detect things in, than the Primeverse.)
 
Regarding uncertainties about Edison's line referring to losing millions to the Xindi and Romulan Wars, as Christopher said, errors like that happen all the time, and have happened several times in the shows. Heck, earlier in Beyond Krall said to Uhura, "For centuries the Federation has pushed the frontier..." (I can't remember the rest of the line), when we all know that the Federation has only existed for just over one century by the time Beyond takes place.
 
There is also the fact that the First World War and the Second, although (kinda) separate, when talking about both of them, they're wars, so it could be a case of one Xindi war and one Romulan War collectively would be the "Xindi and Romulan Wars".
 
The official word on the Kelvin Timeline, from the new Star Trek Encyclopedia:
IMG_20160806_082408.jpg

Data's head is probably not under San Francisco with all his memories up until TNG season 5 :(
 
Some words are missing there, but it looks like it's agreeing with Pegg's assertion that the timeline changes can, in at least some cases, ripple backward as well as forward in time. Maybe Pegg got it from here in the first place.
 
Regarding Edison, I foresee two possibilities:

- he was always part of the MACO contingent aboard NX-01 but given a battlefield commission as an officer soon after Major Hayes' death

- he transferred aboard NX-01 from another posting
 
I assume Edison was part of the MACO contingent aboard the NX-01 whom we did not see onscreen.
 
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