Well, there's a few ideas about time travel that they could have used. There's a great physics section on arXiv with a lot of time travel stuff, but basically, there's the many-worlds theory, which this film used to explain how everything in the prime universe isn't affected by the changes caused by Nero. That's one way of avoiding a paradox - the other is using something called the Novikov self-consistency principle which can be used to deal with things like this (and could in theory be used to match up this universe and the "prime" universe should it be so desired).
Basically, Nero's changes merely altered the way events occured, but didn't actually disrupt the flow of the universe enough to consider a paradox. For instance "Amok Time" still occurs, but this time on New Vulcan, and other Vulcan based stories can be moved to this new planet. The Dominion still exists in the Gamma Quadrant, and Voyager can still get sent to the Delta Quadrant, and (sigh) Nemesis can still occur, albeit with slight alterations to backstory. Plus, hopefully, Generations, Plato's Stepchildren and Spock's Brain all get invalidated too...
Basically, the time travel stuff has multiple ways of preserving the overall continuity of the universe, and the way it's been done ensures that there's quite a few ways to get out of future story problems while staying true to the overall mythos.
Actually, come to think of it, we've been through this before - First Contact had the Borg disrupting the original events that led to Zefram Cochrane's warp flight, thus causing the Enterprise to go back to a different universe than the one it came from. It shunted us into a new universe where Starfleet had knowledge of the Borg before Q Who? and thus was different to the original universe where that episode was the first encounter. Did anyone complain about that back then?
Last edited:
