Wasn't there also a novel crossover between the X-Men and TNG? Planet X or something? I gotta find that one.
JJ-Trek/ IDW Continuity and Discontinuities
- Thread starter Jsplinis
- Start date
There were two comics crossovers and one novel. The first comic crossed TOS with the classic '90s team, while the second crossed TNG (immediately after First Contact) with what was then the current comics team, with Wolverine and Storm being the only characters in common. The end of the second comic led directly into the novel (yes, Planet X, by Michael Jan Friedman) from the X-Men's perspective, though it was set a year or so later from the TNG characters' perspective due to time travel. But they told unrelated stories aside from that.
So it seems this new assertion that the Kelvin Timeline was different even before the emergence of the Narada has only served to widen the divide between the alternate universe vs. branched off timeline camps. Now that we can seem to guess that Star Trek Discovery will take place in the Enterprise-to-TOS gap, and that it is stated to be in the Prime Timeline, I can only imagine the two camps will be even farther divided.
If the Kelvin Timeline branched from the Prime Timeline significantly before the Narada's emergence then nothing in Star Trek Discovery would need to line up with anything in the Kelvin movie continuity. But if we go with the idea that things only changed from the destruction of the Kelvin, then this new series will take place equally in both timelines. What will the producers of the show's take be on this question? What canonical info will we be able to add to the discussion once we see Star Trek Discovery? If the question isn't settled definitively, I can see the two theories continuing on with each side growing more entrenched.
If the Kelvin Timeline branched from the Prime Timeline significantly before the Narada's emergence then nothing in Star Trek Discovery would need to line up with anything in the Kelvin movie continuity. But if we go with the idea that things only changed from the destruction of the Kelvin, then this new series will take place equally in both timelines. What will the producers of the show's take be on this question? What canonical info will we be able to add to the discussion once we see Star Trek Discovery? If the question isn't settled definitively, I can see the two theories continuing on with each side growing more entrenched.
^ And to make matters worse, it looks like virtually no reference to Simon Pegg's offscreen comments regarding the retroactive pre-2233 timeline changes actually made it onscreen in this new film from what I could tell (apart from maybe the weird USS Franklin-backstory), which is only going to further complicate issues.
Not that this philosophy won't be used going forward in Star Trek XIV if Pegg and/or Jung are given a crack at that movie's screenplay or anything, but we'll probably waiting another 3-4 years for onscreen evidence of this at the absolute minimum. And if they're hypothetically not involved at the screenplay level, then whoever comes in after them can take still a third, completely different, approach to the whole thing if they so choose.
Not that this philosophy won't be used going forward in Star Trek XIV if Pegg and/or Jung are given a crack at that movie's screenplay or anything, but we'll probably waiting another 3-4 years for onscreen evidence of this at the absolute minimum. And if they're hypothetically not involved at the screenplay level, then whoever comes in after them can take still a third, completely different, approach to the whole thing if they so choose.
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I don't get that. If anything, it's a merger of the two ideas. It's a branched-off timeline in which the changes propagate in both directions, so it was effectively alternate from the start. So it's a branched timeline in cause and an alternate all along in effect. The best of both worlds. Or the something of both worlds, anyway.
Seemingly, but that's not a given. It assumes that Starfleet registry numbers increase in an orderly fashion, and we've seen plenty of examples to the contrary.
As fans, we can debate the logic and ramifications of the differing timeline theories all we want, but I think that the creators have more practical considerations in mind. Effectively, the show and the movies are from separate creative teams and production entities. The movies are from Paramount and Bad Robot; Discovery is from CBS Studios, Secret Hideout, and Living Dead Guy Productions. Creatively and logistically, it's most practical for both teams to keep their realities separate and do their own things. I believe that's why the Beyond filmmakers adopted this refinement of the theory to begin with -- so that they'd have greater independence from Prime continuity. Certainly the film drew on a lot from Prime, specifically ENT-era history, but it put its own spin on things. And it was able to do so because ENT has been off the air for quite a few years now. Coordinating between two ongoing, contemporary productions from separate production companies is tricky. It's probably best for both teams if they take advantage of the separate timelines to do their own separate things.
Well, of course they weren't going to talk about it overtly, because the comparison between timelines was not a plot point in any film except the first. But it was certainly implied by the details about the Franklin that didn't perfectly line up with what Enterprise showed. Certainly those details could be shoehorned into the existing continuity -- we've certainly had plenty of experience shoehorning inconsistencies together in Trek -- but they could also be taken as evidence of the subtle differences between the continuities.
As I've said, I think it's in the filmmakers' self-interest to free themselves to reinvent the universe's past and future in whatever way serves the stories they have to tell. That pragmatic priority to serve the story is always going to trump any fannish obsession with continuity details. Fans have that luxury because they aren't getting paid for any of this. Really, every new Trek production has redefined the universe to fit its creators' needs and interpretations, and we fans have just done our best to gloss over or rationalize the inconsistencies. Now these filmmakers are doing the same thing all their predecessors did, but without the pretense that it all fits together, which makes it a lot easier for the fans to deal with.
^ Just coincidentally, I actually edited my earlier post with thoughts on the USS Franklin-issue (meant to include them initially, but forgot to) probably not long after you started typing, Christopher, but before you posted, there. And yep -- another thing I thought about adding earlier (but didn't) was that the storyline of Beyond didn't necessarily directly lend itself to a side discussion-scene about the timeline changes at all.
But yeah -- otherwise, totally agree with your thoughts.
But yeah -- otherwise, totally agree with your thoughts.
Well I meant mostly the people who embraced the different theories, rather than the explanations themselves. Those like me who never accepted that the Kelvin existed in the Prime Timeline now have the film creators on their side. But many won't accept this off screen explation and instead hang on all the more to the idea that the Narada incursion was the only change. It's awesome to me to see people like you who have actually changed sides and admitted that the previous behind the scenes explanation was always flawed.
I don't see it as changing sides; I see it as thinking like a scientist, following the evidence as it stands and revising one's model in response to new evidence.
I always felt the behind-the-scenes explanation was "flawed," as you put it; I just felt that it was no more flawed than any prior attempt to pretend that different Trek productions shared a common history. There have always been fans who wanted to believe that the movies or TNG or VGR or ENT or whatever were in a separate reality from what came before; but the people making the shows and films were operating under the assumption that they were a shared reality despite the inconsistencies, and so that was what would dictate future stories. It wasn't about what I personally wanted to be true; it was about what I understood and expected the producers' approach to be. While Abrams, Orci, and Kurtzman were in charge of the movies, their stated approach was that the timeline diverged after 2233. I always recognized that there were issues with that interpretation, but it was the official approach as far as I knew, and it would've made no sense to deny that objective reality. Now we have a statement that the official approach has changed. And so I acknowledge the change, just as I would with any other retcon. No taking sides, just being an analyst on the sidelines, reporting on the rules by which the game is being played.
I'd be more likely to accept Pegg's explanation if he was in any way retaining creative control over the next Kelvinverse film. He isn't (and in fact never did, all he did was write one specific film). I mean, I don't mean to sound like I'm digging my head in the sand, but I see no particular reason to put a lot of importance on this.
Unless Pegg manages to get the ST4 screenwriters on his side, which is certainly possible.
Unless Pegg manages to get the ST4 screenwriters on his side, which is certainly possible.
Poor choice of words on my part. More like, why is this being treated as the only solution?
Using your ice cream analogy, is the Star Trek franchise like an ice cream parlor, where a wide variety of stuff is served, or is it like a specific item on the menu, where orders of it will usually only vary slightly from the baseline?
To me, it's honestly the latter. When I go to watch something called "Star Trek" I'm going to watch something that another one of the "decades of movies and shows," as you put it. When I don't want to, I pick something else. The Abramsverse basically remade Trek in Star Wars's image. Now I like Star Wars an awful lot (in fact, of the two franchise, I think that Wars is currently subjectively and objectively better), but when I want to watch something like Star Wars, I pick the real deal.
It didn't help that the marketing for the '09 movie wasn't very helpful in pointing out the franchise's new direction. It was all about how we were getting the origin story, the never-before-told story, etc. I pretty much went in thinking that this was a prequel continuation of the TOS TV show and previous movies. So, you may imagine that it was a rude shock when it turned out to be anything but.
And on top of that, I don't think they're good movies period (putting continuity to one side). Compare to Abrams' work on Force Awakens. Even taking into account the years in between and improvements in special effects, I don't think there anything in the '09 Trek movie and Into Darkness that Force Awakens didn't do better. (As an example, the characters feel more like real people and have better development over their one movie than anyone got in the first Kelvin Trek movie, maybe even the first two combined -- although Kelvin Kirk did do the same character arc twice, though.)
I think I like the second model slightly better, since the earlier one seems to have more theoreticals and assumptions that we wouldn't get from the onscreen evidence, while the latter addresses question that would arise, since those loops were broken, to some extent, so we have evidence onscreen that there could be changes to the past retroactively. The former also doesn't seem to work quite as well at addressing why some things are the same, while others are radically different in a way with no rhyme or reason.
I don't think it's bad to bring real-world info into Star Trek, but Trek has always broken real life rules (warp drive, transporters, lots of alien culures, etc.). So, I think the question is, does Pegg's idea fit within the fictionalized science that the franchise has built up?
Interesting point, should we be taking this literally, or as a general "Wish you well wherever you end up after this is sorted out?" To the best of my knowledge, Spock's practical experience with time travel to this date did not work off the idea that alternate timelines would continue to exist after the original was fixed -- in fact, most of the TOS time travel episodes went out of their way to indicate that only one could survive, like "City on the Edge of Forever" and "All Our Yesterdays" (at least to the extent that time travel keeps the travelers in the same timeline).
Now, Spock would be vindicated by the fact that different quantum realities are formed by the different possible outcomes in life ("Parallels" [TNG]), meaning that several copies of Thelin's timeline would hang around. But, since "Parallels" points out that this knowledge of quantum mechanics was still very theoretical even during the 24th century, I seriously doubt Spock would be aware of it.
(Since the Guardian's time vortex is described as "the focus of all the timelines of our galaxy," is it possible that "Yesteryear" was written with the assumption that Spock and Kirk had accidentally slipped into a pre-existing timeline instead of changing their own? The "timeline focus" idea wasn't established in the original Guardian episode, so it seems an odd statement to put here, esp. since it doesn't seem relevant to the story and is more complicated then telling the audience that the crew is using a time machine to study the past.)
The trick, IMHO, is finding out what is handled the most consistently, and time travel not creating parallel realities (excusing the alternate quantum realities that naturally unfold over the course of life), much less rewriting all of history from beginning to end, is one of them (as far as I can tell). Emphasis on the "most consistent" part. There have been deviations from time to time, but is the most consistent, the thing that seems most likely the Powers That Be were using as the working assumption?
Since red matter was not designed for time travel, but to make black holes, does it really work that well as the special circumstance, since the time travel was an accident? (It has a pretty specific purpose, so taking on extra stuff to that function adds to the required suspension of disbelief.) I mean, how have black holes worked with time travel before? The only one I can recall was the "black star" from "Tomorrow is Yesterday" (TOS), and that resulted in the crew getting to the past of the prime universe, no parallel universe created.
I'm not sure it is a better explanation (it explains everything, and thus, explains nothing), and excusing those couple of stuff you brought up, what were the big goofs, beyond Chekov's age? IMHO, most of the mistakes where in the characterization, the temporal mechanics, and some of the geography (all stuff that has little to do with the premise that pre-2233 was ostensibly the same in both).
Umm, I'm going to have to say that overall, the answer is "no." At least three of the original movies were sequels to TV episodes, and/or filled in continuity holes in the franchise. ENT drew heavily from the setup of First Contact and went out of its way to set up stuff that we saw in TOS, esp. in the last season. TNG, DS9, and VOY were heavily integrated, with some things, like the Maquis story, spanning all three series. (DS9 was also a sequel to a TNG episode, and all it's major Alpha Quadrant species, from the Bajorans to the Breen, were TNG races.
Look, I've poked around Memory Alpha, I've read the Encyclopedia, the Chronology, and have seen the vast majority of the shows. There are some inconsistencies, sure (some intentional, some accidental), and that can't be avoided in a franchise that's run this long and had so many iterations. But, don't go telling me that the pre-reboot shows and movies aren't designed to fit together as one whole and, with the occasional exception, hang together really well. I know better, I was there.
Comics aren't canon, so they're free to be whatever they want (and, I think, should be treated as such, the same way that the '80s novels shouldn't be dismissed as some decent stories just because they've since been overwritten by canon).
And does the new time travel model appease the "continuity-purist fans"? I don't know, since I haven't had a chance to talk to anyone in that camp, but I know my gut reaction was "that's really not how Star Trek time travel works," and while I've come to like the gist of the idea on paper, I still have strong reservations about it being consistent with the world building of the franchise it's a part of.
It isn't. That's my whole point. It's being treated as the solution in this specific case. The fact that other stories did things differently has nothing to do with it. This is this story, not those.
But you can't expect the entire franchise to shape itself purely to satisfy your own preferences. You are not the only person who's entitled to enjoy Star Trek. The reason the franchise has been so successful is because it's always appealed to a wide variety of different tastes. It's offered different things to different people. You don't have to like every single part of it, because it's diverse enough to have a lot of different parts with different emphases. That's the beauty of it. Each part is different, so collectively they satisfy a larger audience. Infinite diversity in infinite combinations.
No, The Wrath of Khan did that. TMP was made for the pre-1977 SF-movie paradigm, a thoughtful, intellectual, idea-driven story, but almost every movie from TWOK onward has been pushed into the Star Wars mold of space battles and explosions and evil enemies. Almost every Trek movie since 1982 has been more dumbed-down and violent and superficial than television Trek, because that's what society has expected of big-budget science fiction movies ever since Lucas and Spielberg came along and shifted the paradigm.
Have you seen Beyond yet? I agree with most of the reviewers that it feels a lot more like classic Trek than the previous two movies did, although it retains a lot of the usual action-movie excesses that have been part of the franchise since TWOK.
Once more, it doesn't have to. This is imaginary. This is a storytelling choice to free the writers of future movies from the arbitrary and limiting constraint of exact adherence to Prime continuity -- a constraint they never really followed anyway, except in lip service. The technobabble is just a rationalization for a decision that makes sense in real-world creative terms. Since the Trek universe is purely an imaginary construct, its "rules" work in whatever way the storytellers need them to work. That is especially the case with Trek time travel, where they have constantly reinvented the rules as they went along. I did my best in Watching the Clock to construct the illusion that the Trek universe has a consistent set of physical laws pertaining to time travel, but I can guarantee you that it does not. They've always, always made it up as they went along. Heck, the only reason I wanted to write that book in the first place was because Trek time travel was so inconsistent and self-contradictory that I wanted to try to bring some kind of order to it for a change.
Yes, that's exactly the point -- that it treated those two ideas as interchangeable. And realistically, that makes sense. You can't "erase" a timeline or overwrite it with another. If there are two different versions of the same moment in time, then by definition they exist simultaneously, side by side. One cannot "replace" the other, because they are simultaneous, not consecutive. So the sci-fi conceit of one timeline erasing another is stupid and wrong. It's dramatically useful because it creates higher stakes, but it's scientifically idiotic. Realistically, any timeline, even one created by time travel, would remain permanently in existence once it was created. (I did come up with a physics fudge to justify how coexisting alternate timelines could eventually merge together after the period of their coexistence, but I would've very much preferred to go with the permanent model, because it makes far more physical and logical sense.)
Put another way, "pre-existing" is an improper term to use, because it assumes a subjective definition of the order of events, and is thus inapplicable once you step outside of time and "before" and "after" become interchangeable and relative. Nothing in the larger sweep of the timelines is "pre-" or "post-" anything. Timelines just exist. Before and after are just directions within them, relative to an individual worldline. So it's invalid to speak of them as absolutes.
I believe it was in Harlan Ellison's original script for "City." I remember reading the comics adaptation of that recently, and there were some lines that reminded me of that bit from "Yesteryear."
What's consistency got to do with it? Just because something is an exception, that doesn't mean it can't happen at all, just that it's unusual. Heck, warp drive and time travel are themselves extreme exceptions to the laws of physics. They would only be achievable in the most unusual of circumstances, by using exotic substances that don't occur naturally in order to bend the laws of nature to their greatest extremes. So if you wanted to limit yourself to what was consistent with the normal operation of physics, then that would pretty much exclude every Star Trek story ever.
More broadly, fiction in general is about the exceptions to the rules. It's about the cases where things go wrong, where missions aren't routine, where experiments fail, where disasters happen. Most stories are about extreme and atypical situations, because typical ones are boring.
Well, there's the fact that at least one comics storyline, "Live Evil," had "stardates" in 2263, putting it after this movie's stardate. But then, the comics have been a year too far ahead in the stardates ever since "The Khitomer Conflict." And I always say one shouldn't take stardates too literally.
I have to admit, I kind of don't understand why this argument over Pegg's statement is still going? In terms of my own opinion I think it's neat, but it is an out-of-media comment, so everyone is free to take it or leave it. But if you take it, why does it matter if someone else leaves it? And if you leave it, why does it matter if someone else takes it? 
From my point of view, the only reason it matters is for the purposes of Memory Alpha and tie in writers. Info from the new films shouldnt be included in Prime Timeline articles no matter if it's pre-Kelvin destruction or not. From what I've heard Memory Alpha isn't accepting this new paradigm.
Pocket Books shouldn't be required to accept that info either, especially since they are forbidden from referencing it. I personally would be ok with non even having to accapt the fate of Prime Spock or the destruction of Prime Romulus. Especially since being forbidden from referencing those events will someday put a big restriction on the ongoing "present day" storyline.
Pocket Books shouldn't be required to accept that info either, especially since they are forbidden from referencing it. I personally would be ok with non even having to accapt the fate of Prime Spock or the destruction of Prime Romulus. Especially since being forbidden from referencing those events will someday put a big restriction on the ongoing "present day" storyline.
Yeah, I saw that yesterday when I looked up its USS Franklin article. It treats it as a ship that existed in both timelines, and then talks about how it was found in the "alternate reality" (why oh why won't they use the official label?) and remains lost in the Prime reality.
I think that's an overly melodramatic way of putting that. More like we don't currently have a license to write fiction based on it. Which makes "accepting" it rather a moot point.
That's not supported by the new information, though. Spock Prime is still supposed to be our Spock, the link between the old reality and the new. A certain photograph seen late in the film illustrates that idea.
And Trek Lit has been written under restrictions before. That's just part of the tie-in game. As I see it, the majority of Trek stories aren't about Romulans anyway. Only certain threads of the narrative would be restricted. We could probably work around it otherwise.
Besides it would surprise me if those restrictions are going to be dropped in the future seeing as Star Trek Online just got permission to add stuff from the first two JJ films.
Completely separate and unrelated things, unfortunately. And STO has been able to reference stuff from them for a while, I thought?
Yeah, each company has its own distinct licensing agreement. For whatever reason, Pocket doesn't have a license for Kelvin Timeline stuff while IDW and STO do.
