If Kirk was in the Delta or Gamma Quadrant, dealing with the Borg or Dominion, or started going transwarp speeds it would be confusing for all. That's my point, stories have been retold and retold long before Star Trek's been doing it. Just because Pocahontas was made didn't stop Avatar from being one of the top ten grossing movies of all time.
Not the best example actually, the last two films in the series re-rebooted and where set back in the Victorian era after the war series didn't go down well with audiences. I bought the box set months ago that has them in the original order, it's rather strange going from a war torn WWII London film to one set directly after the Adler affair back in Victorian times. Even more so as in several scenes he goes between his Victoran and wartime hairstyles with little continuity.
Are you sure they reverted back to Victorian times? Granted, some of the later movies are less obviously concerned with the War and are more generic Holmes mysteries, but I don't believe they ever literally switched back to the gaslight era. (A foggy English estate, or dockside warehouse, looks much the same regardless if it's 1889 or 1945.) For what it's worth, Wikipedia states explicitly that "the writers of the Universal series never reverted to the Victorian setting." Even if Holmes stopped fighting Nazis. So no return to the "prime timeline" in that case either!
But there has to be a unique spin or other hook to get the audiences to come in. And there is one undeniable truth about the Trek spinoffs: with each new iteration, they became less and less successful. They go to another galaxy and encounter yet another group of people with stuff glued to their faces isn't exactly going to be a recipe for success.
The last two movies produced did not mention a war, nazies, or anything past the 1900 mark. The first opens with Watson mentioning Irene Adler, implying the adventure with her occured between the last specifically war themed movie and that one. They were based off of the books again, not new war themed stories, so even if Universal doesn't state it explicitly, it's the intention of the penultimate and final movies.
Some of the mudslinging towards newer fans that came in through the JJ movies really irks me. Star Trek is not the pinnacle of intelligent sci-fi. There are so many superior examples of that, and it is embarrassing to hold Trek up high at a level that it is not meant to be at. What Trek is is entertainment: adventures with phasers, starships, alien planets and all, and the characters that go through those adventures together. So as to which universe Future Trek should be set in, I don't mind either way, but I do think the alternate reality is the way to go. It's already been set up and a series set in the same universe has the potential to go anywhere in terms of world-building. At this point I think I'll be happy with whatever new Trek we get.
But Irene Adler never appeared in the Rathbone movies, so we have no idea when that timeline's version of her story took place. If Moriarity and Lestrade and Mrs. Hudson are all running around in the forties, there's no reason Irene Adler couldn't have been as well. Maybe Rathbone's Holmes stopped Irene Adler from blackmailing Winston Churchill. And just because they didn't mention Nazis, and referenced characters from the books, doesn't mean that, hey, they're back in the 1880s again! Granted, it's been a few years since I've seen Terror by Night or Dressed to Kill, but are they really catching horse-drawn cabs and eschewing electricity in those films? And why would Universal, which had NEVER set their Holmes films in anything but the present-day (as opposed to the first two films from Fox) change course at that late date? My understanding is that they kept the movies set in the present but gradually segued away from wartime themes. Universal often took a laissez-faire approach to settings back in that era. Just try to pin down exactly when their Frankenstein or Wolf Man movies took place; they're mostly set in some foggy, timeless, mythical Eastern Europe that has modern-day phones and trains--and superstitious peasants and roving bands of gypsies. And don't get me started on the chronology of the Mummy series, in which decades pass between the movies ("Twenty years ago, your father uncovered an Egyptian tomb . . . ") and yet it always seems to be the present-day 1940s! Clearly, there was no internet back then. Can you imagine modern-day fans trying to make sense of those "timelines"? ("But wait! How can Moriarity be working with the Nazis in the forties when we clearly saw him stealing the crown jewels back in Victorian times? Canon violation!")
Agreed. I like Trek, and have for over 40 years now. But I realize that it is (for the most part) just space opera. The main bitch against JJ Abrams and his version of Trek seem to boil down to: "They're not liking Star Trek the right way!" To one degree or another the same basic crap has come everytime there has been a new version of Star Trek. TAS, TMP, TNG, DSN, VGR, ENT, ad nauseum. There were all met with the cries of panic and derision that they were "ruining ST", and how dare they, and we want the "real" Star Trek back. A lot of Trek fans really do not handle change in their world too well at all. It really gets tiresome. There's a lot of Star Trek I personally don't care for, so I tend to not pay too much attention to it. Star Trek: Voyager, for example. there are big chunks of it I've not seen to this day. Might get around to it someday, maybe not. But I got nothing against folks who think it's the alpha and omega of all things Star Trek. Get over it already. No matter what happens on-screen (or in print), Star Trek is still whatever Star Trek is to you. No nobody is gonna come take away your DVDs or the stack of books over there on the shelf. Or erase your memory. So just knock it off and go enjoy whatever flavor of Star Trek you happen to like, and don't worry about the people that like other flavors of Trek. And to answer the OP: No, because the "prime timeline" hasn't gone anywhere. Folks need to stop trying to stir up controvesy where there ain't any to begin with.
Don't get me wrong, I like NuTrek, "In to Darkness" too, but back then, show like TOS and TNG opened viewers minds, braking racial barriers, broadening their imaginition, with a moral base (and it got a bit preachy at times). Television had this revolutionary idea that the TV should educate rather then just entertain. Then reality shows popped up and people became more concerned with who is going to stab who on Big Brother. People hold it in a high regard probably because it's somthing that modern TV is just missing. Prime trek doesn't mean the same old stories. I stated that in my Opinion to your post in this quotes link: I'm not saying go back to the way they were, because those ships have passed, I'm saying press forward. They could have and still can, we'll see after the next NuTrek installment.
They aren't going back to the Prime continuity, they simply aren't going to spend a hundred-million dollars to tie the hands their new show-runners because a few hardcore fans can't let go. Sorry.
Actually, no one can speak with any certainty on this issue whatsoever unless they happen to run either CBS or Paramount. If the next person after Abrams wants to revive the Prime continuity for TV, he or she will be allowed to do so because CBS isn't obsessing over continuity and other aspects of Trek trivia like only Trekkies are.
I'm not saying I'm against one with the Next Generation gang, or am closed to the possibility of one happening, I'm just saying to Timewalker that for now at this point in time and for the foreseeable future, this version of Star Trek is it, and he (as well as you) have to deal with it. For all we know, they might do a version of Star Trek set in the 23rd century, but focusing on a group of Starfleet Academy cadets, or one about a civilian spacer and their friend/first mate, that has adventures similar to the standalone Han Solo novels set before the events of Episode V. THIS.
Like I said before, they said the same thing you are now about Kirk's Trek. If you believe 40 some years down the line that a next gen reboot or throwback tv series is not even a possibility then try to open your mind a bit. EDIT: Heh, Echo.
I think maybe we're dancing around the fundamental questions now, instead of attacking them head-on. I think the questions we should be debating (because we may all have wildly opposite views on this) are: What parts of Star Trek are critical ingredients for you to be able to enjoy the commercial products of the franchise as Star Trek, and by how much? What parts of Star Trek can and should be cast aside in order to give the story the freedom to move in new directions and avoid casting new stories in old templates? Prior to the 2009 movie's premiere, the studio released posters showing those swatches of Kirk's and Spock's old uniform. The message at that time was, "We're making films with Kirk and Spock." I took that as good news because I believe the story is fundamentally about the characters, and incidentally or even parenthetically about the universe they're in. Then a few months later, we learned that the writers would use a clever technique to alter the characters' timeline, so that the slate would be wiped clean for them, and their actions would not be bound (chained) to the existing backlog of stories, many of which don't share continuity even with one another. I took that as more good news, because it would free the writers to take these stories in bold new directions. It wasn't "the prime timeline" that I wanted. It was the prime characters. And in the story we have now, the events which the writers staged to change the storyline have altered the characters so drastically that I do not perceive them as the same people -- just different actors wearing something reminiscent of their clothes. If some other writer had done this kind of thing to an existing body of work (e.g., "Hamlet: The Prequel," where when he was a baby, Hamlet's dad was killed in a freak windstorm and his benevolent uncle saves him from drowning in the river, becoming his best friend for life) we'd come to the conclusion that the story wasn't really about Hamlet, no matter what predicament he'd find himself in. The writer could argue, "But this is the same person, just one whose character was forged differently by a dissimilar chain of events." To which we'd respond, it was the original chain of events that made him interesting in the first place. And someone on the Hamlet BBS would ask, "Do fans want the prime timeline back?" Though we love any number of fictional characters, their personalities are the products of the story and their backstory. Maybe the backstory is not the fundamental aspect of what we enjoy, but when we change that backstory, either we're left with a character we no longer recognize, or one whose existence does not make sense given his circumstances. Or, in the case of Star Trek 2009, some of both. DF "Son, You Did a Bold Thing by Taking the Conn and Giving the Order to Fire. As a Token of My Appreciation, I'd Like to Give You My Ship." Scott
It's just that there always seems to be a whiff of denial to these debates, as though a certain segment of fans are still clinging to the idea that the reboot is just a temporary detour and we'll get back to the "real" Trek eventually. Which, from a practical standpoint, strikes me as unrealistic. We may well see a NuNuTrek someday, and maybe even a NuNuNuTrek, but a new TV show picking up where the Prime Timeline left off? I just can't see that happening, especially as time goes by.
I believe that your assesment is absolutely correct. But they ARE bringing Firefly back. Any day now! I can feel it! Joss wouldn't leave us hangin'. Agents of SHEILD is just a ploy to get his foot in the network's door so that he can...
And you just know that if they ever do go back to the old continuity, fans will just complain that they're not being true enough to it - see Star Trek: Enterprise. Hell - awhile ago some guy in the XI+ forum said he would never have recognized the Into Darkness Klingons as such if he hadn't been told that's what they were meant to be. Just imagine the outcry when they dare update the Ferengi or Cardassian makeup...
^^^ No doubt. Hell, it's been almost 34 years now, and there are folks who still don't accept the TMP klingons as really being klingons. And even though it's been explained on-screen, there are still people who cling (no pun intended) to incredibly convoluted theories to explian why there are two different kinds of klingons.
I think it really depends on who is behind it. If that person is a big fan of the Prime Timeline and wants to go back there, I don't think anyone is going to tell him or her no. I doubt they care--like the majority of non-Trekkies--if Kirk was born in Iowa or aboard a shuttlecraft from the Starship Kelvin, or what age Chekov was when he was first assigned to the Enterprise. That's stuff for Trekkies to fight over in places like this board. But ultimately, continuity is just a history of past events, and most of that can be condensed into a few words in passing dialogue (and only then if it's actually relevant to a current story). To that end, which continuity a new Trek series may be set in could be totally arbitrary and dependent on the personal preference of the person chosen to create it. In any event, the show will be made for the audience of its day, regardless of which version of NCC-1701 might be displayed in a Starfleet archive.