Is there a major contradiction in "The City on the Edge of Forever"?

[Pauln6]

Outer limits beat them to it.

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Age restricted? You wussies!

Paul, it'd been 200 relative years aboard Annorax's ship.



Conservatively, considering how long it takes to do the math, if they had had two incursions a year for two hundred years, that's 4 hundred incursions. So we are lucky that Nicole Janeway wasn't in charge of Voyager.

The reason Janeway went around Krenim space in the end was because the border guard was friendly second time around... Four hundred and second time around... Compared to the bullying asshole from the beginning of the story.

Kathryn doesn't like being mansplained to by belligerent pricks. It makes her tetchy.



The Krenim boarder guard shoots Voyager and threatens Janeway with death, inspiring her to dominate this species because of their gall and presumption.

Take two.



Just words, a friend advisory from a local official about border safety. Janeway is not triggered. She reacts like a normal human being, and obeys the Federation laws about tresspass and respecting sovereign territory. Less like a crazy person, no?



I was Wrong.

It's the Zahl.

Janeway met the Zahl, who guaranteed Voyager safe passage through contested space without explaining that it was contested space, or that it was being contested by idiots with tech 3 hundred years behind the Federation, that no one took seriously, the Krenim, so it wasn't really being contested at all, but anyone that matters.

As far as Janeway was concerned she was not entering Krenim Space, she was entering Zahl space, but if the Krenim had taken the time to calmly explain who the lying bastard was, then Janeway could have gone around the contested area, because her permission to go there was not completely wholeheartedly legal, or it was, or it might not be.

She believed that her figurative Visa from Zahl was water tight in take one, meanwhile there was no Zahl in take two, so what the Krenim border guard said, was the law of the land, and there was no need to attack him, or bring the Imperium to it's bloodied knees.

So Kes wasted her time or the temporal police altered time so everyone forgot or season 4 is already in a different time stream? It's all very confusing.

 

[Guy Gardener]

So Kes wasted her time or the temporal police altered time so everyone forgot or season 4 is already in a different time stream? It's all very confusing.

If Janeway saved the day, what exactly did Braxton do after the fact?

Oh.

Braxton was there, as an extra, in the background pulling strings pushing Janeway towards the right answers that will have solved this conundrum, during the season four episode.

 

[Metryq]

It can easily be explained away by accepting that the way what we are seeing on screen is described is not actually time being overwritten but the viewer jumping tracks into an alternate timeline.

Exactly, which is why "The City on the Edge of Forever" defuses its own drama. Kirk, Spock and McCoy ended up in an alternate time line—which would not have affected the landing party around the Guardian, erased the ship and all the Federation. Also, Keeler would still be alive somewhere/somewhen. Kirk could have abandoned his command to follow Keeler into a history where she lives, but that would be as out of character as the Kirk depicted in TMP.

Maybe he could have kidnapped Keeler and brought her forward, to the future of his world and the future she imagined. But it was so ambiguous how the Guardian worked that we don't know how to arrange that. All we saw was that "when the mission was finished" they would return.

Also, the branch point was the very moment McCoy arrived, not the street accident at the climax. The arrival of Kirk and Spock would be another branch (prior to McCoy). Heck, Keeler dying in the street accident was probably a branch into several futures where she does not get into politics in any of them. No way Spock could have built a memory buffer to sort all that out with 1930s electronics.

 

[blssdwlf]

Yes, sci-fi forum

Your description of the multiverse doesn't describe "change history" but instead of "jumping to a timeline you want to be in"/"getting out of one you don't want to be in".

IMHO, the idea that a single timeline history cannot be changed or overwritten because of a paradox is negated by Star Trek's own fiction (when available). "The City on the Edge of Forever" has the Guardian describing time's shape changing and apparently protecting Kirk and the landing party on the planet from the timeline change. The crew of the Enterprise-E is protected from timeline changes by a "temporal wake" in "First Contact".

On the other hand, perhaps "The City on the Edge of Forever" is about some kind of multiverse that has our characters branching off into pre-existing alternate timelines. For example, each time the Guardian is used, the Guardian doesn't just take the character to the alternate timeline but also everyone on the Guardian's planet as well. When McCoy0 jumps through the Guardian, Kirk0+landing party everyone is jumped to the timeline that Keeler lived (and no Enterprise). When Kirk0+Spock0 jump through the Guardian they arrive in the timeline that McCoy1 later arrives and Keeler died. Scotty0 and landing party also are jumped to the same timeline (Enterprise is back). Kirk0+Spock0+McCoy1 is pulled back by the Guardian to Scotty0 and landing party and is almost immediate from Scotty0's POV. The timeline they've "returned" to is "close enough" although that ignores the Guardian's "Time has resumed its shape. All is as it was before." McCoy0 is stuck in another timeline. I'm sure other variations are out there.

YMMV

No, a single timeline history cannot be changed or "overwritten." That is a paradox. C'mon, this is a sci-fi forum. Surely everyone here knows the "grandfather paradox"? One writer who tried to explain it away was Orson Scott Card in Pastwatch. The theory there was that time was made up of "quanta," or frames like a movie. With causality running only forward, the traveler could be displaced into the past and "change history." But he would not wipe out his own causality because his own "film," from the moment he traveled, had been displaced into the past, free of the forward-running domino effect. That's a shell game, taking the attributes of time and giving them to the mass that is changed by time.

This doesn't work for several reasons. First, it allows causality to run into the past (the time traveler), but prohibits that insofar as the traveler is concerned because it is inconvenient to the author. Second, it "nests" time within another dimension of time, again because it is convenient to the author. For example, in Back to the Future it took a week for Marty's interference to "catch up" with him and make him start to fade away.

But time does not "happen" anymore than the world appears one step ahead of you—unless you are Harold with a purple crayon. In order to "time travel" there must be past and future to go to. Edwin Abbott Flatland time: that means all of time exists as a 4-dimensional shape from deepest past to farthest future. Consciousness experiences duration. Time simply is. Mind-bender 2: time traveling into the past in a multiverse does not "spawn" a new universe, that "shape" was "already" there. (Hard to talk about time with tense-oriented language.)

Each Back to the Future movie was flawed all on its own. Taken together they are a total mess. But I enjoyed them for the human element. They are fantasy.

Why would time be one-directional? How about entropy? Some have suggested that entropy is not universal. Consider "evolution" of the Big Bang, if you subscribe that model. If everything were running downhill to a "heat death," where does "evolution" fit in? There might be a net loss so that a small fraction of the mass involved is "wound up" like a clock... Does that mean that an "open" Big Bang universe would result in a tiny fraction of mass in a highly evolved state? (Utopia/Nirvana?)

 

[Metryq]

IMHO, the idea that a single timeline history cannot be changed or overwritten because of a paradox is negated by Star Trek's own fiction (when available).

What? You mean you're invoking Dr. Burroughs's "fictons" from Robert Heinlein's novel The Number of the Beast/Pursuit of the Pankera?

I'll have to remember the "Star Trek's own fiction" argument next time I'm in a debate. Does it beat all in poker, too?

 

[blssdwlf]

What? You mean you're invoking Dr. Burroughs's "fictons" from Robert Heinlein's novel The Number of the Beast/Pursuit of the Pankera?

I'll have to remember the "Star Trek's own fiction" argument next time I'm in a debate. Does it beat all in poker, too?

LOL. It is kind of hard to discuss "The City on the Edge of Forever" and not point out that there is a paradox-negating mechanism at play. The Guardian even spoke of and apparently can measure the shape of time (or timeline?).

And no, it doesn't beat all in poker all the time. It doesn't work on Tuesdays.

 

[UssGlenn]

. For example, in Back to the Future it took a week for Marty's interference to "catch up" with him and make him start to fade away.

Thats not exactly what happened, but the presence of the fading photo makes it look that way. Marty started to fade away at the dance because that was when his mom decided to marry his dad. If he'd arrived a month before he still would have faded at the dance. The Photo of the McFly Kids would have just faded slower. However, they all should have been disappearing at the same time. His siblings disappearing first makes no sense.

 

[Pauln6]

Yes, sci-fi forum

Your description of the multiverse doesn't describe "change history" but instead of "jumping to a timeline you want to be in"/"getting out of one you don't want to be in".

IMHO, the idea that a single timeline history cannot be changed or overwritten because of a paradox is negated by Star Trek's own fiction (when available). "The City on the Edge of Forever" has the Guardian describing time's shape changing and apparently protecting Kirk and the landing party on the planet from the timeline change. The crew of the Enterprise-E is protected from timeline changes by a "temporal wake" in "First Contact".

On the other hand, perhaps "The City on the Edge of Forever" is about some kind of multiverse that has our characters branching off into pre-existing alternate timelines. For example, each time the Guardian is used, the Guardian doesn't just take the character to the alternate timeline but also everyone on the Guardian's planet as well. When McCoy0 jumps through the Guardian, Kirk0+landing party everyone is jumped to the timeline that Keeler lived (and no Enterprise). When Kirk0+Spock0 jump through the Guardian they arrive in the timeline that McCoy1 later arrives and Keeler died. Scotty0 and landing party also are jumped to the same timeline (Enterprise is back). Kirk0+Spock0+McCoy1 is pulled back by the Guardian to Scotty0 and landing party and is almost immediate from Scotty0's POV. The timeline they've "returned" to is "close enough" although that ignores the Guardian's "Time has resumed its shape. All is as it was before." McCoy0 is stuck in another timeline. I'm sure other variations are out there.

YMMV

Unless... the heroes start out in the timeline where things play out just as they do and the Guardian let's them jump tracks just to make sure Kirk understands why. Non-linear beings be tricksy.

 

[Guy Gardener]

No parallel tracks.

Drug maddened McCoy Changed Time and the Enterprise in orbit of the Guardian disappeared. Kirk changed time back, and the Enterprise returned as if it had never left.

Reality past the eye of the storm, the Guardian itself, flickered about this way and that depending on what the time travelers were doing in the past.

 

[Pauln6]

No parallel tracks.

Drug maddened McCoy Changed Time and the Enterprise in orbit of the Guardian disappeared. Kirk changed time back, and the Enterprise returned as if it had never left.

Reality past the eye of the storm, the Guardian itself, flickered about this way and that depending on what the time travelers were doing in the past.

Just because a weird alien door tells you the Earth is flat doesn't mean it is flat when other evidence demonstrates unequivocally that it is round ish.

 

[Mytran]

Just because a weird alien door tells you the Earth is flat doesn't mean it is flat when other evidence demonstrates unequivocally that it is round ish.

I too am wary of taking the Guardian's statements at face value - it says what it needs to in order to achieve its own goals

 

[blssdwlf]

Just because a weird alien door tells you the Earth is flat doesn't mean it is flat when other evidence demonstrates unequivocally that it is round ish.

Sure you want to be skeptical about the Guardian's capabilities. How is the Enterprise able to detect "time displacement waves" and "ripples in time" from a "millions of miles away"? If the Guardian is merely swapping the timeline/universe and not affecting "changes in time" then the existence of these waves should not be present. But since the displacements are present that would imply that the Guardian is capable of moving through time or moving things through time vs a more natural slowing/accelerating time.

On the other hand, what if these displacements are actually rapid openings into the other timelines/branched universes? Each time the Enterprise passed through the time displacement they're jumped to another timeline/universe and then passes back out to their previous one. It appears to the Enterprise that they moved in time but the other timeline/universe is just at a different point in time. Or perhaps they never return to their previous one. By the time they beam down they could be far removed from their original timeline/universe.

Interestingly, the Enterprise appears to be capable of detecting other universes in "The Tholian Web" at the weakened fabric of space where the Defiant was trapped.

As Spock says: We exist in a universe which co-exists with a multitude of others in the same physical space.​

I wonder in TOS what is the difference between a branched timeline universe and the multitude of other universes? Are they one and the same or does TOS treat each universe as having their own timelines or some hybrid?

 

[Guy Gardener]

Just because a weird alien door tells you the Earth is flat doesn't mean it is flat when other evidence demonstrates unequivocally that it is round ish.

It's not what the Guardian told them.

The landing party who did not travel through time, did not know where their Star Ship was.

 

[Pauln6]

It's not what the Guardian told them.

The landing party who did not travel through time, did not know where their Star Ship was.

The landing party did not travel through time but they did travel into a different universe.

 

[Mytran]

The landing party did not travel through time but they did travel into a different universe.

The GOF could simply have prevented the landing party from detecting their ship in orbit. It's not like any of them went up there to check (in the final draft, anyway)

 

[blssdwlf]

The GOF could simply have prevented the landing party from detecting their ship in orbit. It's not like any of them went up there to check (in the final draft, anyway)

Surely they would've debriefed afterwards and realized the deception once they were back on the ship if that was the case...

 

[M'Sharak]

It's not like any of them went up there to check

To be fair, it's difficult to do that when no one in the transporter room is answering your hail.

 

[Guy Gardener]

The landing party did not travel through time but they did travel into a different universe.

Their universe became different.

Either is possible, and Canon supports both.

 

[Zapp Brannigan]

Their universe became different.

Either is possible, and Canon supports both.

The way I understand it, the universe became different around them, but they were unaffected because Carl is a zone of stability. It exists in all times and realities, at once.

KIRK: Are you machine or being?
GUARDIAN: I am both and neither. I am my own beginning, my own ending.

...

SPOCK: A time portal, Captain. A gateway to other times and dimensions, if I'm correct.
GUARDIAN: As correct as possible for you. Your science knowledge is obviously primitive.
SPOCK: Really.

I don't see a functional difference between "universe" and "timeline," really. They're both groupings of events from "cause" to "effect" viewed in three dimensions of space and one of time. The ordering of events changed when Keeler was saved, and therefore the universe around the landing party was different than the ordering of events from which they came.

 

[Tuskin38]

Back in 2006 there was a terrific Trek novel published that dealt with the issue of "what would have happened if Edith Keeler had lived".

Crucible: McCoy: The Provenance Of Shadows relates what happens when Kirk and Spock fail to rescue McCoy from the past, and therefore fail to ensure that Edith dies in the accident. The result is that McCoy is stranded, and experiences a life very different from the one he would have otherwise.

This is one of my favorite Star Trek time travel novels. I can't recommend it enough.

Adding that to the read list