The Xindi War and the Kelvin Timeline
- Thread starter Captain Alan Wayne III
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I suppose it kind of depends on whether anything in the film was said that requires him to have personally and directly fought the Xindi as an individual, as opposed to simply having been part of the "team" that they scored hits against. (Even having seen the film twice now, I can't exactly remember. If not, then his "lots of off-world combat experience" could all have come subsequently and elsewhere.) And it also depends upon how possible/plausible the proposition of other engagements with the Xindi not seen in context of ENT Season 3 actually are. (I haven't yet reached this point in my own re-watch, so I can't be sure yet.) And of course, it depends on whether the history really is the same in both realities.
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Given that was the only ship fighting the Xindi, he'd kind of have to be if he did indeed fight them. Unless we're entertaining the idea the Xindi conflict went differently in the Kelvin timeline.
On his deathbed Hayes recommends Corporal McKenzie succeed him as commanding the MACOs, despite the fact Sgt Kemper is still around, as confirmed by Reed in the very next scene when he's informing the other MACOs that Hayes has died.
Every MACO identified by rank other than those two are identified as Corporal. I remember joking once that the Enterprise writers must have had a "Corporal button" on their keyboards, given how many times the word is used in Enterprise's third and fourth seasons, hell by season 4 we were even running into Starfleet personnel ranked Corporal.
There is apparently a single chevron rank insignia worn by several MACOs throughout Enterprise's run, which would presumably make them Privates. Still, based on the rank insignia, Hayes is still the only officer ever seen among the MACOs on Enterprise.
-Warp 4 fits in fine between breaking the Warp 3 barrier and the launch of Enterprise.
-NX number is no biggie, it's not like regular old NCC numbers ever made much sense, and we can chalk it up to something as simple as Starfleet renumbering ships after Romulan War, going several iterations of how they wanted prefixes to work, or any number of things really.
-Xindi War/wider Xindi conflict - also not a problem. The Xindi story arc just sorta ended with season 3. We have no idea if there was further conflict between Earth and the Xindi afterwards, or concurrent with the Earth-Romulan War.
-NX number is no biggie, it's not like regular old NCC numbers ever made much sense, and we can chalk it up to something as simple as Starfleet renumbering ships after Romulan War, going several iterations of how they wanted prefixes to work, or any number of things really.
-Xindi War/wider Xindi conflict - also not a problem. The Xindi story arc just sorta ended with season 3. We have no idea if there was further conflict between Earth and the Xindi afterwards, or concurrent with the Earth-Romulan War.
There may have been other engagements outside of the Expanse. But, I'm of the opinion that Edison didn't fight the Xindi, but did fight the Romulans.
Did Edison get famous for fighting in the ranks of MACO? Or did Edison just get famous in Starfleet, and angry for fighting in the ranks of MACO? Or famous in Starfleet, experienced in the art of war in the ranks of MACO, and angry mostly for all those wars he never fought in?
The dialogue mentions Edison being a famous early Starfleet captain. It also describes his career as a MACO, and how he feels about those old conflicts. This still leaves open at least all the above three interpretations..,.
As discussed above, there probably wouldn't be anything to explore, not within an area already explored by the Vulcans. Surveying, perhaps: analyzing of the known, checking the actual facts against the reported ones. But there would be no opportunities to go where no one has gone before, only where someone the Earthlings know has gone before and written a book on it.
Frustrating in itself. Especially frustrating when one cannot make any sort of land claims, or claims to discoveries, or practice an independent foreign policy without the Vulcans already having been there and made their own deals. And it does seem Starfleet or the UE never got to make any of those things before Archer's voyage.
Timo Saloniemi
The dialogue mentions Edison being a famous early Starfleet captain. It also describes his career as a MACO, and how he feels about those old conflicts. This still leaves open at least all the above three interpretations..,.
As discussed above, there probably wouldn't be anything to explore, not within an area already explored by the Vulcans. Surveying, perhaps: analyzing of the known, checking the actual facts against the reported ones. But there would be no opportunities to go where no one has gone before, only where someone the Earthlings know has gone before and written a book on it.
Frustrating in itself. Especially frustrating when one cannot make any sort of land claims, or claims to discoveries, or practice an independent foreign policy without the Vulcans already having been there and made their own deals. And it does seem Starfleet or the UE never got to make any of those things before Archer's voyage.
Timo Saloniemi
Ah, but the Vulcans were not freely sharing their discoveries with us before "Broken Bow":
TUCKER: Since when do we have Vulcan science officers?
ARCHER: Since we needed their star charts to get to Qo'noS.
TUCKER: So we get a few maps, and they get to put a spy on our ship?
And moreover, many (I daresay perhaps even most) of the places NX-01 herself explored thereafter on her "history-making" voyage could already be found in their database; once available to him, Archer readily used it as a guide for where he would take the ship next. Going places you and your people/culture/organization haven't been before and learning things about them you didn't know, or knew only from secondhand accounts, doesn't cease to be an act of exploration just because others have in fact been there before. It's much the same situation as with the milestones of warp development previously discussed: Vulcan achievements aren't what "count" from the perspective of our human explorers. The Vulcans were already surveying our solar system by 1957, years before we'd set so much as a single foot off the planet! Not to mention the countless explorers throughout human history who have pressed into "unknown" regions of the planet itself to find, more often than not, other humans already there!
Further still, there were many things of great interest to humans that Vulcans considered mundane and unworthy of detailed investigation and study. They were positively mystified at what Archer found so amazing about that comet in "Breaking The Ice" for example. Starfleet would absolutely not take "the Vulcans have already covered this ground" as good enough reason to not bother checking it out for themselves.
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That there could be something there to explore theoretically doesn't mean anything was explored - again, we have no indication anything was. It was all in the databases already, after all, and "database" is pretty much synonymous with "Vulcan database" in the episodes.
Further proof that nobody before Archer had done any exploring... If they had, what would be so amazing about it?
Finally got to see the episode again. So, not in so many words. All he gasps is "Use McKenzie" - perhaps only because otherwise the Starfleet heroes might have been left with the mistaken impression that Hayes' constant berating of McKenzie was because he thought she was a poor soldier, and not because he was secretly sleeping with her.
We never learned of any sort of a successor to Hayes. In "Zero Hour", the MACO are under the direct command of Reed...
Timo Saloniemi
Further proof that nobody before Archer had done any exploring... If they had, what would be so amazing about it?
Finally got to see the episode again. So, not in so many words. All he gasps is "Use McKenzie" - perhaps only because otherwise the Starfleet heroes might have been left with the mistaken impression that Hayes' constant berating of McKenzie was because he thought she was a poor soldier, and not because he was secretly sleeping with her.
We never learned of any sort of a successor to Hayes. In "Zero Hour", the MACO are under the direct command of Reed...
Timo Saloniemi
For what it's worth, Memory Alpha does claim McKenzie did indeed succeed Hayes as CO of the NX-01's MACOs.
http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Corporal
It's funny that McCoy could never figure out the neck pinch even with Spock's katra inside of him while Archer picked it up in an instant, that and the mind meld. Isn't it something!
It's funny that the actor doesn't even appear in the finale, let alone sporting some sort of an indicator of increased status...
If we ignore the idea that Hayes would have wanted McKenzie to succeed him, do we have any reason to think the MACO teams didn't have Lieutenants in charge? The MACO rank insignia were more or less invisible even in close-up.
Timo Saloniemi
Yes, when I said "their database" I was referring to the Vulcan database.
The first point is that this resource was not accessible to Starfleet prior to "Broken Bow" (access was initially conditional upon T'Pol being aboard). Up to that point the Vulcans shared with us only what they deemed to be "pertinent information" on a need-to-know basis, and as far as they were concerned the less the better. So we would have been reliant upon our own forays, irrespective of what the Vulcans had or hadn't explored and charted. The NX-01's purpose was to explore farther from home than any Earth vessel had yet ventured, not close to it. The latter is what slower Starfleet ships such as the Neptune-class would have been doing prior to that. The indication they were doing it is that NX-01 wasn't intended to.
The second point is that once he did have access to this Vulcan database, Archer often utilized it in guiding NX-01's own explorations—even nearly full a year into her mission, at a distance of 90 history-making light-years from Earth, beyond that which any human vessel had yet reached, she was still covering ground already known to the Vulcans when she visited Risa in "Two Days And Two Nights"—yet they were considered no less a worthwhile or significant pursuit because of this.
Even if the Vulcans had explored the living shit out of our immediate neighborhood long before we got there and handed over all their data on a silver PADD, we would still want to go there ourselves. We'd want to see it with our own eyes, not take their word for it. And we'd want to catch what they'd inevitably missed. From "The Andorian Incident":
TUCKER: Maybe it's just me, but it seems like these Vulcan star charts take all the fun out of it. We're supposed to be explorers, aren't we?
ARCHER: That's the general idea.
TUCKER: Where's the exploration in going places people have already been?
ARCHER: Well, for one thing, we've never been to these places. For another, remember that proto-star we ran across last week?
TUCKER: Yeah...
ARCHER: I'm not seeing it here.
TUCKER: Are you saying those Vulcan star charts aren't all that accurate? If that's true, good luck getting them to admit it.
ARCHER: I always wanted to chase a comet. Maybe we should spend a few days following this one.
T'POL: Vulcan and human scientists have researched hundreds of comets. They've proven to be little more than rock and ice.
ARCHER: Except this one's bigger than any comet humans have ever seen. That's got to be worth a look.
But the comet itself is not really the point; I was just using it as a convenient example to show how humans and Vulcans have different sensibilities as to what's interesting and worthy of attention and investigation:
ARCHER: I thought you might want to take a look at the data we collected. You helped us bring it back; it's the least we can do.
VANIK: As your science officer told you, we have little interest in comets.
So in addition to what was deliberately withheld and what was omitted by oversight or error (or due to changing conditions in the environment itself), there would be what was overlooked through Vulcan bias and lack of human curiosity and enthusiasm to be discovered. If we could be enthralled by an oversized drifting lump of ice and rock, there must be any number of phenomena Vulcans would consider unremarkable enough to pass by without a second glance that we could find equally enthralling within the range of Warp 2 ships. And as a practical matter, we'd be covering as much as we could manage before the Warp Five Complex yielded results, so that when NX-01 and her sisters finally were ready, their way would be clear to dive straight into the deep without having to putter around in the shallows for years first.
Quite. Hayes tells Malcolm to "rely on her" because "she knows the team"; no one said anything about putting her in command of them. Their Memory Alpha articles have been amended accordingly.
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One of the things that angered Edison was being forced to "break bread" with former enemies. I think we can be reasonably confident that wouldn't have been the Romulans, which would imply that some of Franklin's missions involved peace efforts with the Xindi.
This I guess is the telling bit. If Earth had done any exploration at all before NX-01, they would already know this much. That is, Tucker wouldn't be making sarcastic remarks about a well-known fact, because those would be old jokes, so old that the entire UESF organization was founded on them!
No, the gaps in the database are only revealed for the first time here, because our heroes are the first to explore anything at all. Naturally, this does not come as a complete surprise to them, and naturally, previous crews on other sorts of missions have revealed telling but not so blatantly conclusive evidence, but Archer's team is the very first to make discoveries that count.
Timo Saloniemi
...have it at their general disposal as a point of comparison. (For the third time! We seem to be talking past each other a bit here.)
But as far as we know, the only thing about the database they haven't had access to so far is the route to Qo'noS (and data on the stars more or less en route like Rigel).
Conversely, as you say, they haven't had access to the real data even within the region covered by the database. They express frustration at this wherever they go. It looks much more like them being the first to go to places covered by the database in general than like them being the first to go to those specific places while other explorers have gone to other specific places a bit closer to home before.
Humanity might have explored despite being handed over (parts of) the Vulcan database. They certainly would have wanted to. It just seems they didn't get the chance, not before they got an engine that could take them beyond the immediate reach of the Vulcans, and a mission excusing such a maneuver.
Timo Saloniemi
Conversely, as you say, they haven't had access to the real data even within the region covered by the database. They express frustration at this wherever they go. It looks much more like them being the first to go to places covered by the database in general than like them being the first to go to those specific places while other explorers have gone to other specific places a bit closer to home before.
Humanity might have explored despite being handed over (parts of) the Vulcan database. They certainly would have wanted to. It just seems they didn't get the chance, not before they got an engine that could take them beyond the immediate reach of the Vulcans, and a mission excusing such a maneuver.
Timo Saloniemi
The argument that when Nero arrived in the past, it wasn't his own past because he immediately created a new timeline in which future predestination paradoxes will have already happened, isn't how time travel is typically depicted in "Star Trek."
In "Yesterday's Enterprise," Lt. Yar took the Enterprise-C back in time and changed her own past, erasing the past 20 years of the Klingon-Federation war. In "Endgame," Admiral Janeway went back in time and permanently erased her own history, getting the Voyager back to Earth decades earlier than in her original timeline. And in "Star Trek" (2009), Nero went back and killed Kirk's father, Spock's mother, and destroyed the planet Vulcan, completely erasing his own history.
These are just three examples of major time travel events where characters went to the past, and permanently screwed up their own history so that their future would never happen again. That is the complete opposite of a predestination paradox.
We did see a predestination paradox of a sort in "Time's Arrow," where the discovery of Data's head in a cave on Earth from 1900 led to a chain of events where Data would travel back to 1900 and lose his head. That two-part episode was really the anomaly, since it's the only episode of "Star Trek" in which time travel did not lead to the past being changed.
Remember Ambassador Spock has met Lt. Yar's half-Romulan daughter, Sela, which is only possible if he is already from the alternate timeline created by Yar in "Yesterday's Enterprise." And Captain Picard received his orders from Admiral Janeway on Earth in "Star Trek: Nemesis," so that movie was set in the alternate timeline created by Admiral Janeway in "Endgame." So the "Spock Prime" and Nero we see arriving in the past in Trek '09 are not even from the "original" timeline. They are possibly from some timeline resulting from the Borg attack in "First Contact" and the Temporal Cold War in "Enterprise" that we haven't even seen yet.
My point is there is no single "Prime" universe and the Abrams universe. There are dozens of alternate timelines created in dozens of episodes and movies, where the past was permanently changed and a whole new timeline branched off. That is the opposite of a predestination paradox, where time travelers are helpless to change the past, so all possible time travel that will ever happen will already have happened. In a universe where a time traveler can intentionally change the past (as Yar, Janeway, and Nero have done), you can't argue that the past has already been changed before anyone with a time machine decides to change it. Each timeline branches off from a specific point in history -- diverging from the time traveler's known history into a new future. Yes, there may be time travelers in that new future, but they will simply create new timelines that have nothing to do with this new timeline.
If Simon Pegg is saying that what Nero and Spock did is the same as when the U.S.S. Defiant from "The Tholian Web" phased into the past of the Mirror Universe in "In a Mirror, Darkly" (whose alternate timeline was already completely different for centuries before the Defiant even got there) I have to forcefully disagree. Time travel in "Star Trek," 99 percent of the time, has been depicted as creating a new and different timeline, branching off from the point where a time traveler changes his own history. The Mirror Universe aside, there's no interpretation for a time traveler going into a past that is already different from his own. To suggest such a thing sounds like a screenwriter's excuse for not wanting to do any canonical research, and explaining away any future continuity errors resulting from such laziness.
I get the feeling that predestination paradoxes really aren't your thing, @TrekGuide.com
Actually, I'd submit that Assignment Earth is also an example of a predestination paradox, as we are informed at the end of the episode:
And let's not forget Spock being required to save his own life in Yesteryear!
However, if we don't believe in predestination paradoxes, what's the alternative? Is it the single timeline model, which gets overwritten time after time like the contents of a floppy disc?
You raise several points here, but if I could address the last one first; the only way that their future could never happen again is if divergent timelines aren't a factor - as in never happen at all! All well and good if you believe in the "single timeline" model, but seemingly contradicted by your later paragraph:
So Nero's, Yar's and Admiral Janeway's timelines are continuing on in an alternate timeline, just without them involved. If all time travel achieves is the creation of divergent timelines, then what's the point? You don't save your own timeline, you just interfere in another! Altruistic maybe, but ultimately fruitless, as the people you really want to help (those from your timeline of origin) are no better off. Time Travellers in this sort of model have no more agency than those in a predestination paradox - equally helpless to affect their pasts.
We know from the various Mirror Universe episodes that a parallel universe can echo our own in weirdly specific ways (even when it shouldn't). We are shown in IAMD that time travel can sometimes lead to connecting with another universe in space as well as time. In fact, I think it's probably more common than many imagine - every time you travel in time you run the chance of skipping into an alternate universe.
How and why? Think of it like a causality safety valve. Our decisions, after all, are based on our experience of past events; and those on other events; and so on and so on, woven into the causality fabric of our universe. If those decisions lead to actions that would run contrary to the preexisting history by jeopardising future events through time travel, the incompatibility simply shunts the time traveller to an adjacent parallel universe where (not being native to that causality's future) they can be absorbed into events there instead. Result: no universe's futures are ever put in peril, and cross-universe predestination paradoxes permit time travel shenanigans that we see in Trek.
That's why the events of Yesterday's Enterprise giving rise to a divergent timeline have always been as oddball to me as Time's Arrow seems to be to you. In YE there's no time meddler from the future; there's no weird time experiment being conducted in the present; Enterprise-D just happens on a timey-whimey phenomenon which it turns out originated in the past. Later in the episode, Data speculates how the time jaunt of the Enterprise-C was caused:
The photorp explosion was the result of a battle in 2344, with contemporary participants. Without the presence of an external influence (which there actually was, in earlier drafts of the script) there is no reason why the Enterprise-C's journey forward 20 years and back would have had any effect on the timeline - it has all already happened (from the perspective of the Enterprise-D). Whatever the crew ultimately decide would by definition be the "right" choice, since it cannot historically be incorrect (since it's already happened).
That being the case, what do we (the viewer) spend most of the episode watching?
I think they are events occurring in an alternate universe, with the Ent-C from our universe travelling to the alt-universe, picking up Tasha Yar, returning to the battle, Yar getting captured and interrogated. Now, the knowledge she divulges is about a Federation future that will of course never come to pass. However, it is enough for a Romulan government sect to clone the young officer Picard as a means to force a political advantage (yes, I'm tying this into Nemesis!) The events naturally follow on from one another and all it takes is to substitute a troubled and illogical divergent timeline (that otherwise has it's origin point snuffed out if we take the end of the script literally) for a pre-existing alternate universe, the type of which we have a canon precedent for in Mirror Mirror and its sequels.
Actually, the multiple timeline model is only one interpretation of the episodes, just as my own predestination paradox ramblings are. Taken at face value time travel in Trek is extremely inconsistent - sometimes its the single timeline, sometimes the multiple divergent timeline, sometimes the alternate universe, sometimes the predestination paradox, sometimes something else altogether (I still have headaches about Tomorrow Is Yesterday!).
That's why we (as fans who want to make sense of it) need to dig deeper, sometimes looking as episodes in a different light to what the writers intended. For instance, the Borg attack in ST:FC seems bizarre on the surface - why use the time sphere only right at the end of the battle, and right next to earth? Why travel back in time to 2063 when the Earth could be much more easily assimilated at an earlier period? Why don't the Borg ever use time travel again?
It has been suggested by others on the TrekBBS that the whole adventure is the Borg fulfilling their role in a predestination paradox, (7of9 even refers to the event as such). The Borg Queen probably learned about this from the signal sent in the ENT episode Regeneration and realised that they were instrumental in setting the Federation up at all - and without the Feds there's be no juicy technology to assimilate!
It's not the only interpretation to be sure, but it beats the hell out of "the Borg are dumb!"
Posted this in another thread/forum but didn't feel like re-typing this on my phone.
The conceit for time travel in Trek, before '09, was that it happened in a "single timeline". For a long time, I used to engage in friendly debates with fellow fans about how the timeline was affected by this or that time travel event (in Trek and in other things). Over the years, though, I've concluded that almost no time travel story withstands scrutiny, certainly not any Trek one. As a result, I've long since decided to just accept the rules as the storytellers give them, regardless of whether they "make sense" in any "real world" terms (quotation marks for "real world", as time travel doesn't exist).
As my understanding of science increased (I'm not a scientist, but I'm a reasonably smart guy), it seemed to me that IF time travel ever does become real, then the branching theory used in '09 Trek is the only one that makes sense. Working from that, I've concluded (my own conclusion--not asking anyone else to accept it) that every single time travel incident, save a predestination paradox (and even those remain shaky to me), created a new timeline.
When the ship and crew relive the same few days in The Naked Time, they simply ended up in a new branch that was virtually indistinguishable from the one they left--so they don't notice. We (the viewer via the camera) follow the characters into the new stream. Same thing in the one with Capt. Christopher. The crew ends up in a new branch. And so on. City on the Edge of Forever seems to be different, but that relies on a god-like machine/being, so who knows what that means (though at that point--magic). Assignment: Earth is apparently a predestination paradox, if Gary Seven is correct. But almost all of them, even those where they "fix" the timeline, I submit, actually resulted in them ending up in a new branch. The biggest difference with '09 is there is no attempt to "fix" the timeline (Nero has no idea how, Spock Prime is deprived of the ability to do so and the new crew has no real incentive or ability--most other "fixes" were attempted very soon after the time travel event occurred, not decades later). Since no one tried to "fix" anything, the camera simply stays in the new branch--something no other episode in Trek time travel had shown.
Essentially, there is no way to "fix" the timeline. Predestination paradox is not a "fix"--it is the way it is supposed to unfold--and any other attempt to travel in time simply creates a new branch that is more or less similar to the one the travellers have left. The dramatic stakes are very different in this scenario (which explains its infrequent use in sci-fi and the appeal of the "fix it" stories), but the branches are the only version that are consistently explainable. But, as I said, I just go with whatever the storytellers tell me re: time travel rules. It's their story, it's all make-believe and my goal is to be entertained, not earn a theoretical physics degree. Also, my blood pressure remains much closer to optimal when I simply "go with the flow" with any time travel story (Trek or otherwise).
The conceit for time travel in Trek, before '09, was that it happened in a "single timeline". For a long time, I used to engage in friendly debates with fellow fans about how the timeline was affected by this or that time travel event (in Trek and in other things). Over the years, though, I've concluded that almost no time travel story withstands scrutiny, certainly not any Trek one. As a result, I've long since decided to just accept the rules as the storytellers give them, regardless of whether they "make sense" in any "real world" terms (quotation marks for "real world", as time travel doesn't exist).
As my understanding of science increased (I'm not a scientist, but I'm a reasonably smart guy), it seemed to me that IF time travel ever does become real, then the branching theory used in '09 Trek is the only one that makes sense. Working from that, I've concluded (my own conclusion--not asking anyone else to accept it) that every single time travel incident, save a predestination paradox (and even those remain shaky to me), created a new timeline.
When the ship and crew relive the same few days in The Naked Time, they simply ended up in a new branch that was virtually indistinguishable from the one they left--so they don't notice. We (the viewer via the camera) follow the characters into the new stream. Same thing in the one with Capt. Christopher. The crew ends up in a new branch. And so on. City on the Edge of Forever seems to be different, but that relies on a god-like machine/being, so who knows what that means (though at that point--magic). Assignment: Earth is apparently a predestination paradox, if Gary Seven is correct. But almost all of them, even those where they "fix" the timeline, I submit, actually resulted in them ending up in a new branch. The biggest difference with '09 is there is no attempt to "fix" the timeline (Nero has no idea how, Spock Prime is deprived of the ability to do so and the new crew has no real incentive or ability--most other "fixes" were attempted very soon after the time travel event occurred, not decades later). Since no one tried to "fix" anything, the camera simply stays in the new branch--something no other episode in Trek time travel had shown.
Essentially, there is no way to "fix" the timeline. Predestination paradox is not a "fix"--it is the way it is supposed to unfold--and any other attempt to travel in time simply creates a new branch that is more or less similar to the one the travellers have left. The dramatic stakes are very different in this scenario (which explains its infrequent use in sci-fi and the appeal of the "fix it" stories), but the branches are the only version that are consistently explainable. But, as I said, I just go with whatever the storytellers tell me re: time travel rules. It's their story, it's all make-believe and my goal is to be entertained, not earn a theoretical physics degree. Also, my blood pressure remains much closer to optimal when I simply "go with the flow" with any time travel story (Trek or otherwise).
Sweet shit! The timeline was different even before Nero's arrival. Simon Pegg said so. The upcoming officially licensed Encyclopedia says so. We don't need such TLDR posts debating the matter.
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