I mean, it's been a while since I took my quantum mechanics class but that makes sense.
'Kelvin' Timeline was almost the 'Hobus' Timeline
- Thread starter Tuskin38
- Start date
The comics dealt with two separate Mirror Universe variations on the Kelvin Timeline.
"For any event, there are an infinite number of possible outcomes" - Data, "Parallels"
So there's a universe where the only difference is the socks Mr Spock wore in "Amok Time".
So there's a universe where the only difference is the socks Mr Spock wore in "Amok Time".
Which cascades into a snowball effect ultimately resulting in Picard wearing a long blond wig with his Romulan disguise in Unification.
Surely, the best of all possible universes.
Not sure, but don't call me Shirley.....
As Spock would say fascinating.
They use production/BTS names if there is no in-universe name.
we don't know that. In fact it wouldn't surprise me if
Michael's Mom
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And yet, they still refuse to use the name "Kelvin Timeline" because it was never spoken on-screen and is only a production/BTS name. Seems like a double standard if you ask me. And I do note no one did.
I find it kind of amusing that co-writer and co-producer of ST'09 Aklex Kurtzman treats time travel in the "traditional" Trek manner in Discovery after insisting that time travel split off new timelines in 2009 publicity tours.
(and in the rumoured plot for Bob Orci's unmade ST3, it was about a time travel device which could reset the timeline... and he was the other co-writer/producer of ST'09)
I guess the rules of time travel in Trek still change like socks.
So, Star Trek, then. Got it.
That's because the ST09 "split timeline"-idea was
- Bob Orci's idea, not his one, so it's easer to walk away from that, and
- dumb as rocks, and clashing with all previous portrayals in all of Star Trek and most SF media
I’ve never understood this issue. There are no “rules of time travel” in Trek. Braga or anyone else were always at liberty to invent the weird phenomenon of the week with phenomenon-of-the-week rules, so why shouldn’t Orci/Kurtzman have felt free to invent Hobus and red matter which just so happen to allow time travel combined with reality splitting?
Sure, you could always use the slingshot or other legacy means to go back in time, destroy the Narada and prevent the Kelvin and Vulcan from being destroyed, but then you’d just have altered the Kelvin Timeline into something resembling the Prime Timeline. Or you could go forward and somehow stop the Hobus phenomenon, but then you’d just be preventing the Kelvin Timeline 2.0 from being created. Classic methods, classic rules.
Sure, you could always use the slingshot or other legacy means to go back in time, destroy the Narada and prevent the Kelvin and Vulcan from being destroyed, but then you’d just have altered the Kelvin Timeline into something resembling the Prime Timeline. Or you could go forward and somehow stop the Hobus phenomenon, but then you’d just be preventing the Kelvin Timeline 2.0 from being created. Classic methods, classic rules.
Star Trek had the "Back to the future"-rules: It's only ever one timestream that changes. Apart from that, everything else was open. Weather the effects worked immediately, took their time to "ripple" through, predestination-paradoxes etc. But it always was one time-stream. No branching paths, no alternate or newly created timelines. If the Borg asked the past, the effects were immediate in the present for everyone else. Not in an alternate universe.
Except Picard picks up after the Hobus supernova and destruction of Romulus, and deals with the repercussions in the Prime universe. It's not dropped for forgotten, although I doubt it'll ever be explained.
But who said they were rules? It was just the sense of it acquired by writers following other writers when it came to developing straightforward time-travel stories, especially those that employed the same method such as the slingshot effect. Orci/Kurtzman needed the additional element of keeping their changes going, so in classic Star Trek tradition, they came up with “matter of the week” that can spawn a new reality on top of time travel (which worked out great since JJ was set on laying down his style anyway, rather than painstakingly interpolate 2233 between ENT and TOS, and of course Pegg would later imagine it was different in both directions).
It's the same type of "hard rule" like "you cannot beam through shields". It was explained so many times, and shown in a majority of cases to be specifically true, that any time it didn't applied it was quite obvious an oversight, a mistake or had some other, real-world reason.
That said: On Star Trek, they beamed plenty of times through shields. Even though it went directly against their stated rules. Sometimes they managed to clever "hide" it by other spectacle around. Other times they gave specific excuses why "this one time it's okay". You notice, from a story perspective, the times they gave an excuse (like O'Brien beaming through shields in "The Wounded" because he knew the shield configuration of the ship he once served on) were always better than when there was no explanation.
What made the ST09 abberration to baffling was that it wasn't explained at all why this time it was different - yet they put tremendous focus on it in real-world interviews and such. That's why it seemed stupid. There wasn't an in-universe reason for it. There was a clearly established opposite at work. And the only reason for were real-world reasons (wanting to make a reboot while preserving the original). They put a lot of effort to highlight something that they got wrong, without ever finding in-universe reasons for it being different this time.
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