Kelvin Timeline all but confirmed
- Thread starter captainkirk
- Start date
We almost never see the Federation take prisoners...usually, if there are lifeboats, they must leave them for their own groups to pick up. Space combat doesn't lend itself well to survivors and prisoners after all.
True but as has been stated, according to Star Trek Beyond, the MACOs fought in the Romulan War. Now, whatever your feelings on the Kelvin films are, it is onscreen, it's before the Kelvin incident, therefore it's canon in the Prime timeline.
This opens up a whole other issue of ground battles, very possibly in close quarters. Sure, Romulans wear helmets. But can we reasonably suggest that no human survivors ever managed to see a dead Romulan in a planetary battle? Beyond throws a huge wrinkle in this whole "we never saw the Romulans' faces."
Maybe only the Remans were used as ground troops. Maybe only drone ships were used in space conflict. That's all very possible. But if the Romulans are THAT technologically advanced, why did they lose the war? Why didn't they continue to use drone ships and Remans? There's a logical disconnect here that if you take everything in the Prime timeline so exactly, it doesn't quite work.
Just my $0.02.
I'm totally cool with that.
IMO this is just showing that the "timeline" is really just one of the many, many alt reality that Trek has shown that deviated far before the movie.
If you consider all of the incursions into the timeline from futures and despite the desire to keep it together and you consider the butterfly effect, that is definitely a possibility. The BoT timeline is the original and every other change before the Romulan War, absolutely. And it explains away any continuity error both visually and in the scripts.
I am more than okay with that too.
Is it? Is it really? How many little changes along the way are there that have happened? And when the people doing the time traveling to back, do they go back to their timeline or the butterfly effected timeline?
We do see other alt realities however.
It's quite often not repaired at all - Voyager in particular is a complete mess of timelines which happened in the unaltered 'prime' universe then got reset, changed, or overwritten. In fact, it's the whole plot of at least two episodes - Timeless and Endgame.
And alternate realities started with TOS.
Then you get the entire season-long Xindi arc which - explicitly - was an alteration to the timeline which is never repaired.
Yes. When Edith Keeler is saved by McCoy, history was changed, but when Kirk goes back and prevents her from being saved, history has been restored to what is was. The timeline where she lived no longer exists.
Or when Picard takes the Enterprise back to earth, and Riker and Geordi participate in the warp flight...it always happened that way. Same thing with Picard meeting Guinan in 19th century San Francisco. Guinan knew about it because she already experienced in the past, but Picard didn't know until he did it. It always happened that way.
You still have two pieces (at least) of changed information. The stealing of the clothes by Kirk and Spock, and the bum disintegrating himself with McCoy's phaser. Every time travel episode has these random threads that would change the course of time.
The opinion of Star Trek taking place across many timelines vs. a single timeline makes far more sense. Heck, when Cochrane looks out the window of the Phoenix and see the "E", from the angle it looks a lot like the NX-01.
Except the plot of that movie relies on that not being the case - history must be alterable for the Borg to be able to change the future. They change it, including some things that were never undone (we see several deaths in Montana for example), the the E-E crew change it again by going back and making the first warp flight happen.
With very few exceptions, you can't prove that any supposed changes to the timeline were not actually part of history all along (i.e. predestination paradoxes).
City on the Edge, Past Tense, and First Contact all suggest strongly otherwise. Times Arrow, on the other hand, agrees with you. Trek was anything but consistent on this score.
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