this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2025
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TenForward: Where Every Vulcan Knows Your Name
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Wibbley-wobbley canon
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXJS4wpY2PY
Cool, this works for both at the same time...
"how can a simple Space Opera with blinking lights and zap guns and a Hob Goblin with pointy ears Reach Out And Touch the hearts and minds of of literally millions of people?"
Original Prime Timeline: Star Trek, The Animated Series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, & the first nine movies (and all related canon material)
New Prime Timeline: Enterprise, Discovery, Strange New Worlds, Lower Decks, Picard, & Prodigy (and all related canon material)
Kelvin Timeline: Enterprise, & the last three movies (and all related canon material)
Three timelines, deviating from one master timeline.
There are two focal points for the splits. The first is the events of Star Trek First Contact, going back in time permanently changed the future even though they mostly repaired the damage, but it isn’t THAT Enterprise-E’s future - That ship went back to the original Prime Timeline and the new branch created a timeline where history unfolds slightly (or drastically) different.
Because the future events of First Contact is connected with the new timeline, that branch reconnects to the original timeline at that point in the future before splitting off again. This is why the New Prime Timeline references things from the Original Prime Timeline, but in a different way, and other things are completely different. (The Enterprise-D in “These Are The Voyages…” is the closest we get to seeing the altered version of original TNG (Riker comes to terms with Pressman’s choices in a different way than he did in TNG, Troi’s hair is different, etc., but almost everything else is the same.)
The second focal point is weird because the Original Prime Timeline interacts with the New Prime Timeline. The Kelvin movies heavily reference Enterprise and its alternate past, but Spock and Nero are from the Original Prime Timeline, as indicated by the Countdown comics prologuing the movies and Spock’s belongs in Star Trek Beyond.
The events of the Kelvin movies are what happens when the New Prime Timeline is invaded by Spock and Nero. The New Prime Timeline is what happens when they don’t.
There’s a lot more to it, but this is the best way I have been able to ratify all Star Trek canon without throwing anything away. I even saved the Enterprise finale and Picard!
These are just my conclusions and opinions, feel free to adopt or reject them at your convenience. What’s important is that we have choices. Pick one timeline, pick them all, mix and match pieces at your discretion.
I’m of the mind that some Star Trek is better than others, but I also believe that:
Bare in mind, The Janeway also disrupts the Prime Timeline before both First Contact and Kelvin.
Oh, there are hundreds of thousands of little transgressions. Janeway only caused a recursion a few decades long, and only for one ship. Those get cleaned up by Daniels and his band of merry time police.
But these two major crossroad events in particular created such strong branches that Temporal just had to massage it as much as they could and live with the functional damage.
Red Matter: Not even once.
SNW explicitly says that the timeline is always in flux because of time travel.
Spoiler
For example Khan's birth keeps getting postponed
Even after what I said, that’s just weak writing. Or maybe just wishful thinking on their part.
They (“they” meaning Alex Kurtzman & Akiva Goldsman) keep pushing that and other major events back because they want our timeline to be the Star Trek timeline. It is not, it was never suppose to be. (A crying shame, but I digress.) Star Trek’s timeline deviated from real life back in the 1970s. Which means all potential timelines that forked from it also deviated.
I worry they’ll keep pushing things back until they no longer means anything to that timeline’s lore. shrug
I’m in favour of the sliding timeline. Star Trek was always supposed to be about our future, and I personality prefer that it stay that way.
But the SNW explanation makes no sense. A massive global conflict can just be postponed for forty years and that change has no significant downstream effects? Ridiculous.
I prefer how they handled it in the DS9 and Voyager. Just quietly retcon when the eugenics wars happened and try not to call attention to it.
Honestly, TOS had the right ideas when they first gave us a stardate instead of a year. It’s the far future, that’s all we needed to know. Perfect solution if they had only stuck to it.
Oh, I don't know. At the end of the day the core story of James R. Kirk and his Vulcanian first officer exploring thousands of light years a day on behalf of the United Earth Space Probe Agency has remained wonderfully consistent over the years.
I recognize most of those as things from early TOS episodes that were contradicted even in later TOS episodes. Is that "thousands of light years" thing also an example of that?
I think it's the episode By Any Other Name where the Enterprise explicitly covers something like 1000 light years in 8 hours. Plus there's the trip to the edge of the galaxy in TOS, then to the galactic centre in TAS and again in the films. Pretty hard to square any of it with Voyager's 75 year trip home.
And them casually going back in time to observe Teri Garr
Yeah, that was wild. In City on the Edge of Forever, Kirk was so emotionally scarred by what he did to repair the mess they'd made of Earth's history that he abandoned an timeless artifact of unimaginable scientific value while it was offering him the secrets of the universe. Gene had to fight the suits to let them use "hell" as profanity just to drive home how hurt he was.
One year later and he's casually jumping back to the 1960s just to kinda, y'know, see what was up?
One year later and he’s casually jumping back to the 1960s just to kinda, y’know, see what was up?
The intro of that episode just casually mentioning that they voluntarily went back in time as if it was just some common routine was rather jarring to me. Until then, time travel occurring in Star Trek had always been some kind of unintentional anomaly.
“Haven’t you heard? The time barrier’s been broken.”