It’s About Temporal Mechanics
“Time travel. Since my first day on the job as a Starfleet captain I swore I’d never let myself get caught in one of these godforsaken paradoxes – the future is the past, the past is the future, it all gives me a headache.”
–Kathryn Janeway Star Trek: Voyager “Future’s End: Part 1”
We’ve talked several times on episodes of Dork Trek about time travel and the new JJ Abrams Star Trek movie. We’ve briefly mentioned alternate timelines and what is “real” Star Trek so I thought I’d take a minute to posit a different take on the matter and perhaps make peace with Space Adventure Movie 2009.
Today I’m ready to say that JJ Abrams didn’t destroy the original Prime Timeline of Star Trek. It had already been done almost 13 years earlier in a more devious, quiet move by Rick Berman, Brannon Braga and Ronald D. Moore, the team behind most of Star Trek: The Next Generation!
Read the details after the break.
Time Travel in Star Trek
Time travel has been a part of the Star Trek mythos since the earliest days of the franchise. From the first mention of traveling through time in the Original Series episode “The Naked Time” through Star Trek: Enterprise’s “Storm Front” there were 53 instances of time travel of some type. FIFTY THREE. With that much mucking about with the sands of time there are going to be some mistakes.
Some in the Star Trek community use all of this time travel to their advantage by using it as an explanation for the little inconsistencies with continuity we notice from time to time in the various episodes. The Butterfly Effect could explain why things that we know happened, happened just a little differently when mentioned later.
But with all this change the Prime Timeline remained pretty much intact. Every time someone traveled through time they always made sure to set everything back in order by the end of that week’s episode, or so it seemed.
A New Timeline
Many listeners have heard me complain about the new JJ Abrams Star Trek movie and how it destroyed my precious timeline. After close examination of the Timeline I’ve discovered a new and disturbing fact. The Prime Timeline was changed forever by Star Trek: First Contact!
We all know that time travel played a huge role in the 1996 film. During yet another Borg invasion of the Federation the ENTERPRISE-E and her crew follow a Borg Sphere to 2063 to stop the Borg before they prevent the first warp flight by humans and enslave the human race as Borg Drones. During the initial attack the first warp capable vessel is damaged and it’s up to our heroes to stop the Borg and get the timeline back on track.
In the original timeline Zefram Cochrane and his flight crew made their warp test flight and with it unlocked the universe. Earth grew as an influential power in the galaxy and within a century the United Federation of Planets was formed. In the new First Contact altered timeline Cochrane and his assistant Lily Sloane interact with the crew of the ENTERPRISE. This exposure to the future contaminated the timeline.
I propose that this contamination was enough that it destroyed the timeline as we knew it and when the ENTERPRISE crew returned to the 24th Century it was a new and altered 24th Century much like the one they left but changed forever.
Click image to embiggen the picture I made for you.
Proof
Even though it was long established in Star Trek that the NCC-1701 was the first starship ENTERPRISE we are introduced to an earlier starship ENTERPRISE in the series Star Trek: Enterprise. This ship has technology that looks out of place in a world that’s supposedly a century before the Original Series.
Through out the ST: Enterprise series we meet aliens we shouldn’t know yet and see a starship on adventures it should have yet all the while using technology well ahead of it’s time. For instance, it was clearly stated that during the Earth-Romulan War neither side had the ability for ship-to-ship visual communications, yet the ENTERPRISE does just that almost every week.
Then let’s bring the JJ Abrams Star Trek movie into the discussion. Defenders of the film will explain away any differences from the original timeline as being due to the NARADA arriving in 2233 and altering time. From that point on technology is taken in a new direction in response to the NARADA’s arrival and we end up with an NCC-1701 that looks like the next version of the Apple Store.
But consider the USS KELVIN. This is the starship we see at the beginning of the movie. This ship would have been built long before the NARADA’s appearance in 2233 yet it looks far more advanced than the original starship ENTERPRISE launched twelve years later. Why? It’s because of Picard and crew exposing Cochrane and Sloane to future technologies. Because of this Earth was much further ahead technologically by the 2150s when ST: Enterprise is set. Carry this technological advancement forward and we end up with a Federation that that is far more advanced than the original timeline in 2233. When ENTERPRISE is launched sometime between 2254 and 2258 in the Abrams movie she is light years ahead of her original timeline counterpart.
In Conclusion
I still think the JJ Abrams Trek Movie was a huge change for Star Trek and I don’t think it’s anything like the Star Trek I grew up with other than sharing names and places. I enjoyed it as a movie and feel that it’s just another thing called Star Trek that I can like eventually. I have my Star Trek forever preserved as VHS, DVD, countless books, technical manuals and fond memories. It’s time to accept the change and move forward with the new franchise.
Next time we can discuss what didn’t change after the JJ Abrams Star Trek movie. Until then, join me in the Dork Trek forums and let’s discuss this. What do you think?
