So why doesn't Spock save Vulcan?

The temporal prime directive would seem to oblige Spock to restore the timeline, which in effect is to stop the Narada from doing anything. I never liked that it never was brought up in the 09 film.

 

Meh.

I just need to look to Mirror Mirror or Yesterday's Enterprise to see the crew all (or at least mostly) coming together in a totally different timeline/alternate reality.

The logical side of me asks:
"How could this be? How did all of these Mirror Universe people all come together to be on the Enterprise -- AND Mirror Kirk, McCoy, Scotty, and Uhura just so happen to be beaming up from the Halken's planet AT THE EXACT MOMENT our heroes were?"

But then the part of me who just wants to enjoy some soft sci-fi entertainment tells that logical side of me:
"Shut up -- I'm trying to watch."

 

Doctor Who series came up with the Fixed Point in Time excuse.

 

Guys..guys...

He wouldn't save Vulcan by going back. He would just be creating a NEW timeline. Prime Vulcan would still be around. NuVulcan would be dead and NuNuVulcan would be saved.

I'm assuming these are the new time travel rules since Prime Vulcan is around.

edit: Now granted, Spock may not be aware of these new rules...how could anyone? Unless there are some differences he may have discovered.

 

Even (and especially) if Spock watched all of Star Trek TV and films. The rules of time travel and alternate universes have always been all over the place.

I simply go with the specific rules/explanation being provided in the specific story I am watching at the time.

 

The intent of the movie was to reboot the franchise so that just was not going to happen.

 

Agreed ^ and a major change the reboot accomplished is changing the way Time Travel works in Star Trek.

It has rebooted the single timeline staple of Trek TT with many worlds theory which means any attempt to TT will result in the traveler switching timelines just as Nero, his crew and Spock did. Any attempt to "go back and repair" something in a travelers timeline of origin will only screw up (alter) things in a new, innocent timeline.

For the purpose of this topic we have to understand, (and accept) a fundamental change in the way "Spock" thinks after coming through the blackhole. He longer thinks of TT in the same way many fans still do; the single timeline. "Going Back and changing the past" is no longer how he understands Trek TT science. His way of thinking has been converted (rebooted) to align with Many Worlds Theory and therefore he now knows any attempt to TT will not achieve the desired goals in the timeline he now occupies. His best option, to avoid screwing with other timelines, is to make the best of his current situation.

I believe this to be one of the Paradigm Shifts they intended to achieve in Star Trek. All the above is, of course, my opinion.

 

Because it would be dramatically stupid.

That hasn't always prevented the Trek folks from doing a thing, but let's be grateful every time they decline to do so.

 

Yep.

Orci and Kurtzman pretty much said the same thing years ago. This is a new way of looking at time travel for Trek. It's also more theoretically acceptable these days than most of the other ways Trek looked at time travel.

In this way of thinking, if Spock "went back in time" to save Vulcan from being destroyed, he may well succeed, but restores nothing in the timeline he came from. Instead, he just creates a new timeline where he lives with an intact Vulcan. Vulcan in the timeline he came from is still destroyed.

It's the same reasoning for how Spock Prime "going back" in time in ST09 changed nothing about the future from that point on in his old timeline.

At Delta Vega, Kirk simply wasn't technically correct when he challenged Spock Prime about going back in time and "changing history" and "cheating." Spock Prime even more or less joked about that to Spock at the end of the movie when he said he let Kirk infer certain "universe ending paradoxes" would occur if Kirk divulged that Spock Prime existed. They won't. Spock Prime belongs in that universe just as much as Spock does.

There is no "in-universe" reset button.

 

Exactly. It's akin to the crap they pulled at the end of DS9 - Having the Defiant destroyed was a hugely dramatic moment...and then the next episode introduces the new Defiant, an identical ship to the first solely so they could re-use all the stock footage of a battle from a previous episode for the finale, and the characters didn't even bat an eye about the loss of the old ship. Intensely dramatic moment gone in one week. Fail.

Why would they have Vulcan destroyed just so that Old Spock can go do some "simple" calculations and bring it back into existence? It would be a cop-out, just like every single other tired reset button in Trek.

 

Magic!

Although I think the idea was to show that if there are infinite universe, there are infinite possibilities, so they get some slack. It only starts to get weird when they revisited (and kept revisiting that universe) and mirror counterparts exist for every character 100 years later.

STXI was a little bit different though in that it wasn't addressing infinite possibilities, just one. That changes expectations a little.

I think mostly because it conflicts with WWSD (What would Spock do? ) in the show. This is just one of those moments that people need to realize that this is a reboot (or that it's just fiction). These characters behave differently than their counterparts that we saw decades ago so it can't really be treated as some sort of strict continuity.

 

Imagine if they had ever pulled something like that with the original Enterprise.

 

No, the Star Trek universe admits of BOTH branching and single-timeline time-travel.

Slingshot time-travel (and a few other methods) keeps you in the same universe. In Star Trek IV, City on the Edge of Forever, etc., the narrative depends strongly on time travel involving changes to only one timeline.

There aren't "new rules of time travel" in the Trek universe. Rather, we have discovered that there is at least one additional method to time travel which results in a branching timeline. NOTE: Mirror Universes are a little bit different since these branches are not created by a temporal incursion, but are rather preexisting timelines which we have occasionally visited (e.g., the Enterprise did not create an evil mirror universe in Mirror Mirror, but accidentally traveled to one).

The nuTrek universe has all the same physical laws as the old Trek Universe. Consider for example that complex formulas which depend upon finely grained balancing of physical laws still work in the nuTrek universe (e.g., impulse engines still work, warp drive still works, Scotty's delicate formula for transwarp beaming from the prime universe works in the nuVerse) and we obviously still have gravity, the weakforce, electromagnetism, oxygen, etc., etc. At the very least, the burden of proof falls on the person claims that this universe does NOT have the same physical laws as the prime universe.

From Spock's vantage point (which does not include narrative rules from Bob Orci or fanwanks about modified rules of time travel), he has every reason to believe the sling-shot method would work. And he has every reason to attempt it. Why save Earth, but not Vulcan?

 

This question is being asked about 47 years too late.

 

That was a different scenario entirely. We had to wait three years to see a new Enterprise. We waited one week to see a new Defiant.

 

Honestly, any episode where time travel apparently occurred within the same timeline could just as easily have been travel into an alternate but very similar timeline.

I disagree that the Defiant being replaced as quickly as it was necessarily reduced the dramatic impact, especially given that anyone viewing the series will realize that it was constrained by certain practical matters.

 

I don't really see why the billions of Vulcans who died in 2258 are more important than the countless lives that had been born throughout the galaxy (and the entire universe, for that matter) since the Narada arrived in 2233.

This is why Trek needs to move away from the time travel crap for a good, long while.

 

Ah, but the rules sometimes DO change in-universe and what happened before is swept under the rug. Look at warp speeds - Voyager slowed warp speed down to make crossing the galaxy a 75-year journey despite lots of evidence that such journeys would take a month or so.

Just some trivia: In the earliest concepts for what became "In a Mirror, Darkly", William Shatner's Tiberius Kirk would have created the mirror universe as a branching history, after the Tantalus device standed him 150 years in the past.

If the many in-universe reasons posted so far haven't scratched your itch for a plausible answer (and I think you're REALLY underselling how dangerous Nero was and how easily he could have succeeded) ...

 

Warp speeds have always been ambiguous in Star Trek, even between episodes in the same series. Warp speed has always been the speed of plot, which is faster than light, but not faster than the arrival of the 3rd act.

Also, Orci and company have gone to great lengths to insist that this is all in the same universe, that TNG is still "there" in an alternate timeline. If so, major narrative devices which enable time travel are still there. (i.e., devices which underwrote the possibility of time travel which were needed for a film or episode). That is, Star Trek IV still exists in Spock's memory along with the TOS episodes involving sling-shotting around the Sun. Spock, like everyone else in Trek, is fuzzy on details like how fast warp speed is, but NOT on the fact that one can use a star to travel back in time within the same timeline.

If Nero was so unbeatable, he wouldn't have been beaten by nu-Kirk and nu-Spock.

Spock has faced much more intimidating opponents and never backed down before.

What matters is Spock has a solid chance to save Vulcan. He knows Nero can be beaten. He knows how to sneak on to his ship. Hell, he's got the recipe for transwarp beaming, so he can beam aboard from a space-like distance while the Narada is at warp. It's nice big ship, but she has a small crew. nu-Kirk and nu-Spock were an effective boarding party. Take a hundred or so "emotionally compromised" Vulcans with you or beam aboard some H-bomb level weapons and detonate them, and the problem is solved. Vulcan lives.

 

OR, Spock Prime steps on a temporal butterfly, gets himself and his team killed. Bomb disarmed. Nero and his crew are more ready now and aren't stopped by the younger Kirk and Spock, and Vulcan is joined by the 130 other Federation planets.

And no, I'm afraid viable methods of time travel ARE as disposable as warp speed time/distance ratios in Trek's world. Just look at things like weapons - why weren't Genesis missiles shot at invading Borg ships in Next Generation, making cute little cuboid planets? Why didn't the Enterprise-E use the godmode armour and weapons Voyager brought home in "Endgame" to pulp the Scimitar in ten seconds? What ever happened to the Kelvan's warp drive upgrades given the Enterprise in "By Any Other Name"? Or the Enterprise-D's 300% shield upgrade in "The Nth Degree"? Or the ability for Klingon ships that could fire while cloaked? Or the wide beam settings on phasers, which could have ended "The Seige of AR-558" in two minutes?

Why didn't Spock use the Guardian of Forever (potential Harlan Ellison lawsuits aside)? Why didn't he go at warp 10 away from the supernova danger zone and slingshot back in time a single day and try again in 2387? Why didn't the TOS crew use their time travel abilities to undo the massive destruction wrought by the doomsday machine, Nomad, the the parasites on Deneva, the planet-eating cloud in the animated series? Etc.

Wow I just realized I know far too much about Trek.