There is no prime timeline anymore

[Pingfah]

It's not that Abrams is lazy, it's that the target audience for a new Trek film, the millions of folks with millions of dollars who are culturally aware of Star Trek but don't consider themselves fans do not care about making it fit.

Making it fit is simply a waste of time and effort, and only restricts further ventures to trying to awkwardly slot into an already well established historical framework without offending anybody's precious sensibilities. It is only going to matter a jot to a small percentage of the bums they needed to get on seats to make this franchise financially successful again.

We were bogged down with canon enough already as it was, just look at the uproar when Enterprise changed a few details, why bother trying to please people who are famously impossible to please at the expense of the rest of the audience?

 

[CommanderRaytas]

Even if they'd done a TOS film set in the original timeline, adhering to "canon" would have been impossible and would have turned this film into a disaster. Imagine the riots breaking out all over fandom; would be worse than what we're having now.

 

[Cyke101]

And as Robert Orci said, "You'll notice that your DVDs didn't suddenly disappear when this movie came out."

Thats just a bullshit attempt at appeasement.

If that was a bullshit attempt, then why do my DVDs still exist? They didn't go poof. Orci was right!

 

[Captain Pike]

The Star Trek canon was in a mess and in need of a reboot.

Voyager essentially destroyed the TNG era, and Enterprise whole premise was terrible from the pilot episode. Its a real shame we didn't get more RDM Trek imo, what he did with Battlestar was great and I would've liked to have see Enterprise like that.

Actually, Enterprise had a very strong premise which it utterly failed to live up to.

 

[El Chupacabra]

If it doesn't interest you anymore, then why waste your time with it?

Because I am a Star Trek fan so if a new Star Trek comes out I would like to be able to like it. Seems obvious to me....

 

[Cyke101]

The Star Trek canon was in a mess and in need of a reboot.

Voyager essentially destroyed the TNG era, and Enterprise whole premise was terrible from the pilot episode. Its a real shame we didn't get more RDM Trek imo, what he did with Battlestar was great and I would've liked to have see Enterprise like that.

Actually, Enterprise had a very strong premise which it utterly failed to live up to.

I'll always argue that prequels by themselves are not a bad idea. It's just the execution that tends to go wrong. Enterprise could've been okay from the start, it could have hit its niche much earlier than 4 seasons, meh.

 

[24thcenstfan]

This all seems simple to me - the timeline branched when Nero and Spock arrived (or maybe branched twice) - he couldn't get back to the future because he would simply travel forward in that timeline not back to his own.

Does this fit with what previous series have said? who cares? Not me.

That is my interpretation as well.

I’m not even going to try to completely understand the many world mumbo jumbo. It was mentioned that the writers intended there to be two timelines, so I’m going to stick with that..whether it fits in with established scientific theory or not. It is fiction after all, and if it is presented in a plausible fashion in the story, I am willing to suspend disbelief and go with it.

 

[cooleddie74]

If it doesn't interest you anymore, then why waste your time with it?

Because I am a Star Trek fan so if a new Star Trek comes out I would like to be able to like it. Seems obvious to me....

Abrams TREK worked more than well enough for me. It's not as if I had NO issues with the film and it was a perfect movie. Don't get me wrong. It was missing things here and there that would have made it even grander and better. But for what it was...a reboot without having to actually reboot everything...it worked.

 

[Jolantru]

If it doesn't interest you anymore, then why waste your time with it?

Because I am a Star Trek fan so if a new Star Trek comes out I would like to be able to like it. Seems obvious to me....

I think you're being disingenuous about that....wanting to like it. I think you wanted to hate this movie from the first time you heard about it, and nothing was going to change your mind.

 

[Sci]

If it doesn't interest you anymore, then why waste your time with it?

Because I am a Star Trek fan so if a new Star Trek comes out I would like to be able to like it. Seems obvious to me....

In other words, you want to like it, but only if it is simultaneously new and original and exactly like what came before it.

 

[TrekGuide.com]

If someone watches a basketball game, and Team A beats Team B 110 to 100, would this event have been different because that person was there at that point in time?

Everything anyone does changes the timeline and you would be surprised at the small choices that people have made that because of those actions saved their lives, or had those lives lost.

I think this describes the "butterfly effect" pretty well.

In Chaos Theory, small changes to just a few air molecules will invariably lead to much larger changes at a later time.

In your example, a person watching a basketball game is displacing air, and breathing air, and interacting with everyone else at the game. If that person disappeared, then that would change the entire flow of air molecules in the arena, and over the course of an hour, those new air patterns might make the difference of a free-throw being missed, or a pass being intercepted.

Over the course of 25 years, a single person disappearing (or appearing) would invariably lead to monumental changes to the timeline, such that the molecules that make up everyone's DNA on Earth would be different. (It would be virtually impossible for the same exact sperm cell to fertilize the same exact egg at the same exact moment in this new timeline, where global climate patterns and sporting events have been altered for decades.)

That's why the Mirror Universe is so unrealistic in the face of Chaos Theory -- the same genetically identical people could not possibly exist in two Universes that have different histories. It would be like two people firing machine guns at each other, and every single bullet hits a bullet fired by the other person in mid-air. With all the random variables involved, it is just not feasible or believable.

 

[NiteTrek]

Someone asked in another thread about why Nimoy Spock didn't go back to his timeline at the end of the picture. I don't think there is anything for him to go back to.

 

[RandyS]

And as Robert Orci said, "You'll notice that your DVDs didn't suddenly disappear when this movie came out."

Thats just a bullshit attempt at appeasement.

If that was a bullshit attempt, then why do my DVDs still exist? They didn't go poof. Orci was right!

Actually, my DVD's DID go poof.....and a wad of $500.000 bills took their place.

 

[anothertrekfan]

Thats just a bullshit attempt at appeasement.

If that was a bullshit attempt, then why do my DVDs still exist? They didn't go poof. Orci was right!

Actually, my DVD's DID go poof.....and a wad of $500.000 bills took their place.

Tell me you didn't get rid of all your DVDs because you think this movie erases the canon? That would be very irrational.

 

[RandyS]

If that was a bullshit attempt, then why do my DVDs still exist? They didn't go poof. Orci was right!

Actually, my DVD's DID go poof.....and a wad of $500.000 bills took their place.

Tell me you didn't get rid of all your DVDs because you think this movie erases the canon? That would be very irrational.

Nope. I was making a joke.

 

[superdeluxe]

If anyone has ever heard of a Professor Kaku, he does not believe that lets say if you go back and kill your father, that you would disappear. He believes that if you killed your father, in a alternate (parallel world) reality, you would not exist. That a new parallel world would be created.

 

[cooleddie74]

If anyone has ever heard of a Professor Kaku, he does not believe that lets say if you go back and kill your father, that you would disappear. He believes that if you killed your father, in a alternate (parallel world) reality, you would not exist. That a new parallel world would be created.

Which is what I've believed about most TREK alternate timelines for years. The other(s) don't stop existing and continuing forward. It's just that now the person who changed history is stuck in the "new" timeline unless he or she can find a way out of it or to change it back to the original events sequence.