I've seen lots of posts complaining about how the original universe was destroyed and that it's completely wiped out 40 years of canon etc., but Abrams, Orci's logic is correct: it is a new timeline, and the old one still stands.
Nope. His logic is bull. He problem didn't see the timeline CHANGE around the Enterprise-E when the Borg sphere disappeared through their time vortex. If the sphere simply went to another timeline, the Earth in the timeline we're in, wouldn't have changed to a Borg-assimilated world.
There might be ANOTHER alternate timeline that is the same as the timeline of the 24th century where Nero and Spock went back through time, but where this even does NOT happen and thus in that way the events of timeline we're following are still out there, but that's not the timeline that got changed, that's not the Star Trek reality we've been following for 40 years. It just happens to be the same up until that point in time, and continues onward the way the Star Trek reality should have been.
The thing is; I don't give a shit about this new pile of shit, empty, heartless, Trek Wars timeline. I won't be bothering with it.
The time travel science they used is somewhat similar to a real concept that's been kicked around. Quite simply, it's this: how does the universe avoid a paradox, if, for example, you travelled back in time and killed your own grandfather. If time is strictly linear and immutable, you've created a cause without effect, but yet it happened, and there's no way out.
However, the answer is resolved by the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics: the death of your grandfather merely creates a new, separate timeline. Your father never existed in this new timeline, and you are still in existence due to the fact that you hail from a different, seperate timeline that still exists. This theory hasn't been explicitly tested, but the many-worlds interpretation crops up an awful lot in quantum mechanics so generally we can rely upon it, especially for story purposes.
There is no paradox. The universe doesn't give a shit about paradox. It's only our, or rather a giant subsection of our species', limited primitive view of time as some ridiculous continuous unbroken line. It simply isn't, and quantum mechanics even tells us so, but people are incapable of grasping what it means. Time is discrete. There is not continuous line. It's just a whole slew of tiny tiny discrete moments linked in a chain. We don't notice the stops in between them, but they're there.
Result being, a time portal pops up, the universe doesn't give a damn where it comes from. Whether it's from the past, the future - and the dude that pops out of it is the grandson of some guy walking around now - an another reality, universe, dimension, timeline - or if it literally just popped out of nowhere, the universe, that section of space and time doesn't care. Obviously, it's not alive, it can't care. To that section of space-time, that discrete moment, it is indeed as if that time portal simply popped into existence out of nowhere.
And whether that person kills his grandson or not; doesn't matter. That person kills a person, and that's it. And whether the future that the time portal came from still exists as it was before, and that dead person had to father children for the person that's there to be born - the universe doesn't care. Whether that person came from another universe, came from the future, or just popped into existence - the universe doesn't care. He's there, and that's all that matters.
A prime example of this is the post-FC timeline. In Q Who?, the Enterprise has never seen the Borg before, but yet according to something that happened chronologically earlier, Regeneration, there should have at least been something within the ship's computer. Plus in numerous Voyager episodes it was established the Federation was vaguely familiar with the Borg before the events of Q Who?.
Nope; there is such a thing as: classified.
Either from a production point it's inconsistent, but this is resolved by the fact that as soon as the Borg sphere in FC shelled Cochrane's hometown, the universe was changed by the interaction and an alternate timeline which makes the above inconsistencies explainable within canon. The separate timeline allowed writers to do whatever the hell they wanted with the universe and get away with it once, and it can do it again now.
Nope. The moment Q Who tells us that Guinan's race was annihilated by the Borg and that she and other's reached the Federation decades ago as refugees, everyone should have known, that the Federation already knew about the Borg since the time she and others arrived in the Federation. They would not have stayed quite; not all of them, at least one would warn the Federation people what's out there, so they can go and prepare to fight them.
And that's exactly what the Federation did; they just did it classified, clandestinely, and in secret.
Here's the chief reason why I like Abrams' Trek, in addition to many of the oft-repeated structural reasons. I'm 24 tomorrow; my exposure to TOS, which I always liked but appreciated in a historical sense, has been through the reruns. For the first time, ever, Star Trek brought to visceral life the true spirit of TOS, made those characters interesting, exciting, and full in the way that they must have been for those who watched TOS in the late 60s (I've always been partial to the TOS films). This movie made possible for me to experience what so many people felt 43 years ago, and made the Trek of yesteryear strong enough to carry the Trek of today.
Except that it does not. The movie doesn't even come close to what Star Trek was and is. This movie takes the true spirit of TOS, rips it to shreds, and tosses it out the window. TOS was all about secular humanism, about people - not destiny - about people working hard to get where they are and doing things. And at the same time, the stories touched about our present real life.
This movie is just a bunch of empty meaningless SFX scenes stuffed together, strung together by jokes.
and then happily went to make Galaxy Quest 2; except worse. Galaxy Quest was better Star Trek movie than Star Trek was. It had more thought, intelligence and downright heart to it, than this empty SFX-fest will ever have.
