Into Darkness and the novelverse [SPOILERS]

[DarKush]

Christopher,

While Ricardo Montalban was a European immigrant, he lived in Mexico, identified as a Mexican, and faced a level of discrimination that Cumberbatch never had to deal with (nor did white male British actors of Montalban's era either). Montalban briefly discusses some of the hurdles he faced and his feelings about the lack of positive portrayals of Mexicans in this video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8b1xi414MLI&list=PL1D822A9B48AFEAD1

He talks about leaving the US to go back to Mexico due to the lack of roles for Mexican actors around the 10:40 mark and he talks more in depth about Hollywood's negative portrayals of Mexicans around the 18:45 mark. Now, I'm sure some might reply well Khan isn't a Mexican character. Of course that is true, but that's not the issue I'm getting at here. I think the issue is that Montalban had limited opportunities due to his ethnicity being different enough, not WASP enough, that he had to leave the US for a period. This is something I haven't heard any white British actors-then or now-have to contend with and certainly not for the color of their skin.

So while Montalban might be ethnically closer to Cumberbatch than the character he played, he was a person of a darker hue, and he faced hurdles due to that that Cumberbatch or a white male actor of his era would not. Heck, I might be ethnically closer or genetically closer rather to many whites than I am native-born Africans-but that doesn't mean I might be treated the same as whites in this country. And there's a lot of information on racial disparities that would likely show how that is.

And before someone rejoins that Montalban's issues were so long ago, I recommend they check out this link.

http://racerelations.about.com/od/h...Latino-Stereotypes-In-Television-And-Film.htm

Further, I was reading about recent criticism of Eva Longoria's Devious Maids TV show.

http://www.tribute.ca/news/index.ph...r-devious-maids-show/2013/06/06/#.UbeTypzm3dk

The issues of negative portrayals plus overall access to roles still plague Latino actors decades after Montalban raised many of these same issues. Even some of the stereotypes he points out in the video are the same ones that fall under the common Latino stereotypes and it shows how little that has changed.

Where am I going with this you might ask? It gets back to the idea of having more people of color in movie/TV roles than less. There was no need to whitewash Khan. Khan was a major character in sci-fiction, one of the best roles ever played by a person of color in a sci-fi film, heck, in a film period, and it could be an inspirational thing, a point of pride to many people. Further it hinted at the idea that a superman, a human that's the next level isn't a WASP male, which was subversive back in the 1960s and even today. While one might say that Cumberbatch's turn could do some of the same things, it likely won't since we have tons of white male actors in all kinds of roles on TV and in the movies. Did a white actor really need to be Khan too?

As for the evil brown guy terrorist thing, part of the concern there is how Into Darkness wrote Khan. They made him more of a contemporary terrorist than he was in "Space Seed". He took on some terroristic (sp) actions in "Wrath of Khan" but that was more of a kind of space opera/space adventure sort that didn't echo 9/11/War on Terror. If anything Khan was a product of residual World War 2 fears and it was Abrams, etc. that decided to turn him into a War on Terror analogue.

Since Khan's character was established long before as a person of color I don't think the concerns about having a person of color play him in Into Darkness were going to whip up any frenzy.

I agree with how the blogger Arturo said that smart writing could compensate for whatever possible negativity might occur from having a browner actor play Khan in Into Darkness, from the Racialicious website.

"The point was raised, astutely, by several commenters in Monday’s thread that casting a South Asian in the role ran the risk of taking the character into problematic territory from another direction. But I continue to feel that having the franchise’s seminal villain resurrected with appropriate casting and smart writing might have mitigated those concerns, at least partially."

http://www.racialicious.com/2013/05/22/table-for-two-star-trek-into-darkness/

I think these paragraphs, from Racebending. com says it better than I can:

"But all of that will be marred by having my own skin edited out, rendered worthless and silent and invisible when a South Asian man is portrayed by Benedict Cumberbatch up on that screen. In the original Trek, Khan, with his brown skin, was an Übermensch, intellectually and physically perfect, possessed of such charisma and drive that despite his efforts to gain control of the Enterprise, Captain Kirk (and many of the other officers) felt admiration for him.

And that’s why the role has been taken away from actors of colour and given to a white man. Racebending.com has always pointed out that villains are generally played by people with darker skin, and that’s true … unless the villain is one with intelligence, depth, complexity. One who garners sympathy from the audience, or if not sympathy, then — as from Kirk — grudging admiration. What this new Trek movie tells us, what JJ Abrams is telling us, is that no brown-skinned man can accomplish all that. That only by having Khan played by a white actor can the audience engage with and feel for him, believe that he’s smart and capable and a match for our Enterprise crew."

I enjoyed this whole piece, "Star Trek Into Whiteness" from which the abovementioned paragraphs are taken.

http://www.racebending.com/v4/featured/star-trek-whiteness/

Finally, on to Uhura...

I can agree with you that Spock was the breakout character on TOS, but I think it debatable that Kirk and everyone else revolved around him. Kirk was a pretty well developed character without Spock and part of Spock's greatness derived from his interplay with Kirk and McCoy. If Spock was so essential why would they eventually start looking to do the aborted second TV series without him? It's likely Nimoy didn't want to come back, but that didn't stop them from going forward with the show and casting a new Vulcan. Further the success or at least the continuation of the 24th century Trek shows were largely done without the involvement of Spock and all three lasted several seasons longer than the original.

Now regarding Uhura, despite the wonderful work that has been done to make her character more important she is still too defined by her relationship with Spock. You can't refute that, so you posit that everyone else is defined or revolve around Spock. That does nothing to support the idea that Uhura can stand on her own without that relationship with Spock. If anything, your argument reinforces it, maybe even endorses it.

As for the essay you posted regarding the relationship before, I thought the writer made some good points, but I don't necessarily see Uhura being in a relationship with Spock as any more empowering than being single. I do think the relationship gives the character more screen time and attention and it is a good thing to see a black woman being portrayed as smart, capable, and desired by arguably the most popular character in the movie and one of the most popular in sci-fi. But if her relationship with Spock ended tomorrow, where would this character be? Because a lot of the screen time she has gotten thus far usually has her pissed, making googly eyes or fretting about Spock.

If I recall correctly I read somewhere that Saldana said she didn't think Spock and Uhura were going to last. So it will be interesting to see what would happen with the character if that happened.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Hmm. All valid points, Christopher. Perhaps Sarek's well-known comment about Tellarites applies to me: I don't argue for reasons; I simply argue. And I grant that in Yesteryear, there could very well be a Spock whose sehlat died emerging into a timeline in which that sehlat is alive and well. Or in which it died of old age. And likewise, Crucible:McCoy is certainly appealing.

Part of my objections to the Abramsverse may come from my intense dislike of reboots and revisionism in general: in Disney's Return to Oz (which I generally liked), I groused as much about the nods to the 1939 MGM film of The Wizard of Oz as i did about things like Langwidere being conflated with Mombi. And don't get me started on Maguire's "heresies." (I'm still debating whether to get the DVD of the new Oz prequel movie.) Likewise, the 2008 Get Smart is entertaining, but would have been so much better if it had followed established canon, instead of being an outright reboot. (Even The Nude Bomb [with Max working for an agency called PITS, and no explanation of what happened to 99] was not entirely irreconcilable! And Terence Stamp's Siegfried even had a profoundly wrong accent, yet Bernie Kopell was obviously still alive and available [and even had a cameo].) And I don't think I've seen a new Bond film since the second one with Dalton.

At the same time, I also have an in-universe objection to the Abramsverse:
What happens when the Blastoneuron Plague hits Deneva? Would greenhorn-Kirk be able to stop it there? Is Sam even a Denevan resident in the Abramsverse? And what happens when V'GER comes home? Is a still-almost-brand-new Enterprise going to be hanging around Earth orbit, cleaning up after the heavy refit the Prime Enterprise needed after the combined wear-and-tear that April, Pike, and Kirk put on it? And then, what happens when a probe shows up in Earth orbit, trying to figure out why it lost contact with all the Humpback Whales? Is the Abramsverse Federation still viable? Will it survive long enough to produce its own Picard, Sisko, and Janeway?

 

[F. King Daniel]

^To that I reply, "what happened to Nibiru in the Prime universe?" - it goes two ways.

 

[JD]

Deneva and V'Ger already been addressed in the comics. I haven't read any of them myself, but I'm pretty sure I've seen references to V'Ger being in the Nero comic series, which covers what Nero was up to between the opening of the movie and the main story. They did an adaptation of Operation: Annihilate as the 5th and 6th issue of the new ongoing comics series.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

^To that I reply, "what happened to Nibiru in the Prime universe?" - it goes two ways.

Well, presumably given a highly experienced Kirk-Prime (as opposed to the greenhorn Abramsverse-Kirk), and an Enterprise that was much smaller, yet not designed to survive planetfall, it seems likely that the problem would be solved in a way that saved the species without contaminating them. In fact, given that this might very well have happened on Pike's watch in the Prime Universe, well, he and his unnamed exec would bring even more experience to the table. Submerging a nearly-galaxy-class-sized ship on a populated planet is, after all, kind of a greenhorn approach.

And as to Deneva and the blastoneuron plague, I just read the synopsis of the comic on Memory Beta. Fascinating: Abramsverse-Kirk must have arrived a day or two earlier than Kirk-Prime did, if his brother was still alive and uninfected. Although all these comic book Abramsverse-rehashes are starting to remind me of all those amusing little hoaxes about there being Star Trek dime novels and Star Trek movie serials before Roddenberry penned The Cage. (At least they're not reminding me of a certain profoundly unamusing hoax called "Requiem for a Martian.")

 

[Christopher]

the Abramsverse also really is a horrific gut punch in its own way for Lucsly and Dulmer. They work tirelessly to protect the idea of a "natural timestream" but we, the audience, know that there's no such thing and that time-travel is just an ocean waiting to be explored.

Um, no, it's been around for the audience since TNG's "Parallels".

And arguably since "Yesteryear." Fontana's script implied/assumed the existence of many timelines that converged around the Guardian.

Not to mention that Lucsly and Dulmur have no way of knowing that the Abramsverse exists.

Christopher,

While Ricardo Montalban was a European immigrant, he lived in Mexico, identified as a Mexican, and faced a level of discrimination that Cumberbatch never had to deal with (nor did white male British actors of Montalban's era either).

I'm aware of that. But again, I'm not talking about the real world. I'm just talking about the issue of how to resolve the question of Khan's ethnicity in the new movie vs. his previous portrayals, and pointing out that since both his portrayers are actually both of European ancestry, there arguably hasn't been a significant change in the character's ethnicity -- just his accent. That's not in any way meant to dismiss or trivialize the discrimination faced by Latino actors in the real world; it's just talking about a different and strictly in-universe topic.

Where am I going with this you might ask? It gets back to the idea of having more people of color in movie/TV roles than less.

And you know I agree completely that that's a desirable goal.

There was no need to whitewash Khan.

No, there wasn't. But if they did sincerely go with the best actor regardless of his ethnicity, instead of favoring him because of his ethnicity, then I don't think it's fair to condemn it. Ideally that's how casting should always be done, in a colorblind manner. I think it's unfair to label it as "whitewashing," because that implies that race was the overriding reason for the casting choice, and I think that's the opposite of the truth here, given that every other actor we know of who was tested for the role was Latino or Spanish. So that means they made a final choice that was opposite to their original ethnic preferences, and that's pretty much the essence of colorblind casting.

Sure, it didn't do much to correct the ongoing disparity in opportunity for white vs. nonwhite actors, but look at the big picture. We've also had plenty of movies and TV shows with nonwhite actors cast in originally white roles -- Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury, Kristin Kreuk as Lana Lang and now Beauty and the Beast's Catherine Chandler (and for once her character explicitly shares her mixed ethnicity), Idris Elba as Heimdall, Laurence Fishburne as Perry White, Jamie Foxx as Electro, etc. Not to mention all the times Will Smith has played characters who were originally white -- Agent J, Jim West, Robert Neville. (Not to mention that we've finally, finally got a Sinbad TV series where Sinbad the Sailor isn't played by a white guy. Granted, his portrayer in this series seems to be Afro-British rather than Persian or Arab, but it's progress.) So I think to assess the fairness of the casting process, we need to look at all current films, not just a single one.

I can agree with you that Spock was the breakout character on TOS, but I think it debatable that Kirk and everyone else revolved around him. Kirk was a pretty well developed character without Spock and part of Spock's greatness derived from his interplay with Kirk and McCoy. If Spock was so essential why would they eventually start looking to do the aborted second TV series without him? It's likely Nimoy didn't want to come back, but that didn't stop them from going forward with the show and casting a new Vulcan.

Except, of course, they didn't. That version never got off the ground, and Spock did indeed appear in the movies, with most of the films revolving largely around him -- even the one he was barely in, since his name was in the title. (Note that Spock is the only TOS character who ever got his name in an episode or film title -- although the working title for "The Man Trap" was "The Unreal McCoy.") So we have no idea whether their attempt to replace Spock in Phase II would've worked at all. Lots of shows that have tried to replace their breakout characters have ended up quickly bombing when it turned out that audiences wouldn't accept the replacement.

And I'm not talking about how the characters were written in the show; I'm talking about how they were received by audiences at the time. Today's generation of fans seems surprisingly unaware of how passionate the audience reaction to Spock was. It was nearly as intense as Beatlemania. Nimoy was flooded with fan mail, the network wanted him emphasized and played up at every opportunity, and Roddenberry and Shatner had to fight against the tide of network and viewer pressure to keep Kirk central at all.

Now regarding Uhura, despite the wonderful work that has been done to make her character more important she is still too defined by her relationship with Spock. You can't refute that, so you posit that everyone else is defined or revolve around Spock. That does nothing to support the idea that Uhura can stand on her own without that relationship with Spock. If anything, your argument reinforces it, maybe even endorses it.

I refuse to have a discussion with you if you're going to accuse me of having dishonest or deceptive motives behind my arguments. I resent the implication profoundly.

As for the essay you posted regarding the relationship before, I thought the writer made some good points, but I don't necessarily see Uhura being in a relationship with Spock as any more empowering than being single.

I think the point is that it isn't any less empowering either. Surely an empowered woman is just as free to have a relationship as an empowered man.

But if her relationship with Spock ended tomorrow, where would this character be? Because a lot of the screen time she has gotten thus far usually has her pissed, making googly eyes or fretting about Spock.

She's also been established as a friend and gadfly to Kirk, and as an officer whose linguistic skills are useful to the plot. She's basically taken McCoy's place as the third lead.

And come on, Zoe Saldana's probably the biggest star in the cast. No way would they not find something else to do with her if she broke up with Spock.

Part of my objections to the Abramsverse may come from my intense dislike of reboots and revisionism in general: in Disney's Return to Oz (which I generally liked), I groused as much about the nods to the 1939 MGM film of The Wizard of Oz as i did about things like Langwidere being conflated with Mombi.

I don't understand opposition to reboots and revisionism. If not for the reimagining and reinvention of past works, we'd have no Shakespeare, no Arthurian canon, no Robin Hood mythos (or much less of one), no Ran, no The Magnificent Seven, no West Side Story, no Forbidden Planet, you name it. Heck, every "original" work ever made is a response to or reinterpretation of tropes from earlier works. Virtually all creativity is based in the appropriation and transformation of previous works.

(Even The Nude Bomb [with Max working for an agency called PITS, and no explanation of what happened to 99] was not entirely irreconcilable! And Terence Stamp's Siegfried even had a profoundly wrong accent, yet Bernie Kopell was obviously still alive and available [and even had a cameo].)

Now, there's a case where I much prefer the more authentic sequel movie, the TV film Get Smart, Again!, which reunited all the surviving cast. The problem with The Nude Bomb is that it's not really a Get Smart movie, it's a James Bond parody starring Don Adams. It's a good Bond parody, but it's not really trying to be Get Smart.

At the same time, I also have an in-universe objection to the Abramsverse:
What happens when the Blastoneuron Plague hits Deneva? Would greenhorn-Kirk be able to stop it there? Is Sam even a Denevan resident in the Abramsverse?

Issues 5-6 of the comic tell the Abramsverse version of that event, though it's inexplicably happening nine years earlier (although they do suggest that the parasites skipped over Ingraham B and came right to Deneva, so the timing can be reconciled).

And what happens when V'GER comes home? Is a still-almost-brand-new Enterprise going to be hanging around Earth orbit, cleaning up after the heavy refit the Prime Enterprise needed after the combined wear-and-tear that April, Pike, and Kirk put on it? And then, what happens when a probe shows up in Earth orbit, trying to figure out why it lost contact with all the Humpback Whales? Is the Abramsverse Federation still viable? Will it survive long enough to produce its own Picard, Sisko, and Janeway?

I don't see how that's something to object to. On the contrary, it could be interesting to find out how those threats are addressed in this reality. That was kind of the point of the Myriad Universes series, exploring how certain events played out differently in different timelines. One of the MyrU novels, The Chimes at Midnight, actually does address how the events of the movies including the Whale Probe incident turned out differently -- and worse -- in the "Yesteryear" timeline, although it never addressed how V'Ger was defeated without Spock.

Sure, if the Abramsverse got as far ahead as 2273 and V'Ger just inexplicably didn't show up, that would be a problem. But the second movie ended in 2260. It'll be a long time before it becomes an issue, if it ever does. So what's the problem?

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Yes, Christopher, I also thought that Get Smart Again was far better than The Nude Bomb. And so, I believe, did Joey Green, author of The Get Smart Handbook.

As to ". . . no Shakespeare, . . ." and so forth, well, West Side Story is not a reboot of Romeo and Juliet; neither is The Magnificent Seven a reboot of The Seven Samaurai. it's an entirely different kind of reimagining, altogether.
(all together: "it's an entirely different kind of reimagining")
It's more along the lines of Benjamin Britten taking a single theme from Purcell's Abdelazer incidental score, and using it as the basis for a massive orchestral jam-session, following a series of variations with a fugue. Could The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra possibly be considered a "reboot" of Purcell's opus?

And while I don't have a problem with Disney's version of Cinderella, and actually prefer T. H. White's version of the Arthurian Legend (except why did he have to be so verbose!), those are single cohesive versions of stories from folklore, that lack any one authoritative canon, as opposed to, say, the Oz milieu, which has 14 canonical (albeit occasionally inconsistent) novels by a single author, and a whole lot of stuff that is non-canonical, and a fair amount that's actually anti-canonical.

 

[Christopher]

As to ". . . no Shakespeare, . . ." and so forth, well, West Side Story is not a reboot of Romeo and Juliet; neither is The Magnificent Seven a reboot of The Seven Samaurai. it's an entirely different kind of reimagining, altogether.

Only in that it tells the same story with the names changed, rather than telling a different story around the same characters and premise. It's not as huge a distinction as you think. Like I said, all creativity is about taking what's come before and doing something different with it. Whether you change the names or not is a superficial distinction.

And yes, in fact, virtually every Shakespeare play is exactly the kind of reboot you're talking about, taking a pre-existing story from fiction or history or mythology and telling it in a new way. Most human creativity throughout the entirety of history has been retelling and reworking pre-existing stories. The practice of inventing completely new stories is historically a recent innovation, only a few centuries old; the reason novels are called that is because when they first came along, it was unusual for a story to be new (novel) rather than a reworking of a pre-existing story, thus it was distinctive enough to name the form after that novelty.

I mean, obviously, before there was printing and widespread literacy, the only way a story could survive is if it was retold and reinvented, passed down through oral tradition and thus inevitably transformed in the telling. It's been the primary way that stories have been told for as long as humans have been capable of telling stories. It's something to be grateful for. It serves a valid and necessary purpose.

And while I don't have a problem with Disney's version of Cinderella, and actually prefer T. H. White's version of the Arthurian Legend (except why did he have to be so verbose!), those are single cohesive versions of stories from folklore, that lack any one authoritative canon, as opposed to, say, the Oz milieu, which has 14 canonical (albeit occasionally inconsistent) novels by a single author, and a whole lot of stuff that is non-canonical, and a fair amount that's actually anti-canonical.

Again, a trivial distinction. A difference in form, not merit or validity. Creativity is creativity. If you have a worthwhile and fresh story to tell, it doesn't matter one damn bit whether you give the characters new names or old ones. (Issues of copyright aside, that is.)

 

[Charles Phipps]

Um, no, it's been around for the audience since TNG's "Parallels".

The existence of parallel realities does not necessitate parallel realities from time-travel.

 

[F. King Daniel]

^To that I reply, "what happened to Nibiru in the Prime universe?" - it goes two ways.

Well, presumably given a highly experienced Kirk-Prime (as opposed to the greenhorn Abramsverse-Kirk), and an Enterprise that was much smaller, yet not designed to survive planetfall, it seems likely that the problem would be solved in a way that saved the species without contaminating them. In fact, given that this might very well have happened on Pike's watch in the Prime Universe, well, he and his unnamed exec would bring even more experience to the table. Submerging a nearly-galaxy-class-sized ship on a populated planet is, after all, kind of a greenhorn approach.

Pike seemed rather upset with Kirk for altering the planet's destiny - what makes you think he'd even try to save them? Even if Pike's Enterprise visited prior to the supervolcano's eruption, Nibiru Prime is most likely a wasteland.

 

[Christopher]

The existence of parallel realities does not necessitate parallel realities from time-travel.

No, but common sense does. The idea of one timeline "overwriting" or "replacing" another is silly if you think about it -- it requires a "before" and "after" version of a particular set of events, a particular span of time, and how can a single moment in time come after itself? If there are two or more different versions of a specific date or span of time, then by definition they coexist simultaneously. It may look to the time traveler as if one comes before the other, but that's just because the time traveler has gone back and experienced the same span of time again. The altered timeline subjectively appears to come "after" the original one, and thus the time traveler may perceive it as a "replacement" for the original, but as far as any objective observer of reality is concerned, the two versions of history exist at the same time, in parallel. A different timeline cannot be anything but a parallel timeline, regardless of how it was created.

 

[rahullak]

The existence of parallel realities does not necessitate parallel realities from time-travel.

No, but common sense does. The idea of one timeline "overwriting" or "replacing" another is silly if you think about it -- it requires a "before" and "after" version of a particular set of events, a particular span of time, and how can a single moment in time come after itself? If there are two or more different versions of a specific date or span of time, then by definition they coexist simultaneously. It may look to the time traveler as if one comes before the other, but that's just because the time traveler has gone back and experienced the same span of time again. The altered timeline subjectively appears to come "after" the original one, and thus the time traveler may perceive it as a "replacement" for the original, but as far as any objective observer of reality is concerned, the two versions of history exist at the same time, in parallel. A different timeline cannot be anything but a parallel timeline, regardless of how it was created.

I understand this. However, now I'm confused about DTI: Watching the Clock (It's been some time since I read that). Aren't Dulmur, Lucsly, Ducane, Daniels all trying to prevent some significant change made in the past by hostiles from wiping out the Federation or Borgifying the galaxy? If all changes to the past result in parallel timelines, then there's no need to worry right? Hence, my confusion.

 

[Christopher]

^Well, I was stuck with the premise that a timeline can "replace" another one, since Trek has used that plot device so often. So I had to find a way to reconcile it with the common-sense reality that alternate timelines would coexist. What I came up with, as explained in the book, was the idea that the original and altered timelines do coexist -- until the point in time when the original time travel occurred. For instance, go back in time from 2267 to 1930 and save Edith Keeler, then the Nazi-Earth timeline runs alongside the standard Federation timeline until the moment McCoy jumps through the Guardian in 2267 -- and then the two parallel timelines converge, with the Naziverse replacing the Primeverse. That is, only the Primeverse exists prior to 1930, then Primeverse and Naziverse coexist from 1930 to 2267, then only Naziverse endures from 2267 forward. Which is why the landing party saw the universe change around them right after McCoy jumped back -- they literally witnessed one timeline overwriting the other at that moment and not before. (Although it didn't really, since Kirk and Spock going back and restoring their original history is part of the whole mess too, so it's more like the original history was only temporarily suppressed and then restored.) It had still happened, nothing can undo that, but after a certain point, if Kirk & Spock hadn't undone the change, then nobody would've remembered anything from that version of history, so it would seem to them as if had never existed.

The thing is, quantum physics does theoretically allow for two divergent timelines to reconverge; it's just very, very unlikely, and since it entails reducing entropy, it would require some kind of immense exertion of energy/work to make it happen. And if it did happen, then quantum information theory demands that only one of the two conflicting versions of events could survive. So it's not complete nonsense that it could happen this way. It's theoretically possible, just extraordinarily improbable. I had to concoct some imaginary physics as a fudge factor to justify it happening in the Trek universe.

But still, that means that the natural, default outcome should be that the parallel timelines coexist indefinitely. If it takes a special set of physical circumstances to cause the altered timeline to reconverge with and overwhelm the original, then it stands to reason that if those circumstances aren't met, the two timelines can and will continue to coexist. So while the effective erasure of a timeline is a danger that can result from time travel in certain cases, there are going to be other cases where it isn't a risk. Which is why we see instances like "Assignment: Earth" or The Voyage Home where the time travel seems to have no effect at all on the timeline, or instances like the Abramsverse and implicitly "Yesteryear" where it creates a stable parallel.

 

[rahullak]

^ Ah, got it. Thanks Christopher!

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Except that how do we know that the Prime universe doesn't vanish from the memory of the multiverse immediately after the Narada and the Jellyfish are swallowed by the red matter singularity?

Christopher, you are our resident Time Lord, so what is it that determines whether the revised timeline replaces the original at the incursion's entry moment (e.g., when McCoy entered the Guardian's portal), or becomes a stable parallel?

 

[Christopher]

Except that how do we know that the Prime universe doesn't vanish from the memory of the multiverse immediately after the Narada and the Jellyfish are swallowed by the red matter singularity?

Mainly because nobody wants it to. This is fiction, the rules of time travel are whatever we want them to be, and there's no reason why anyone would desire that to happen.

If you want in-story evidence, for one thing, we've seen several time travelers from the future who apparently consider the Prime universe to be part of their own history, such as the Vorgons and Captain Braxton. For another, as I said, the fact that Spock Prime is making no effort to "restore" his own history strongly suggests that he doesn't consider it to be in danger. Non-canonically, the Countdown comic showed the TNG crew continuing to exist after Spock and Nero fell through the black hole, and Star Trek Online shows the Prime universe continuing into 2409 and beyond.

Per the temporal model I constructed in Watching the Clock, a timeline created by time travel can only overwrite the original if the exchange of matter, energy, or information between them is two-way. For instance, the Guardian allowed people and information to travel both ways through it, as did the transporter time warp in DS9: "Past Tense." But since Spock and Nero fell through a black hole, we can assume the exchange of information was only one-way; thus the conditions for reconvergence do not exist.

Although sometimes two-way exchanges can potentially be stable too, as in the "Yesteryear" case, which I touched on in Forgotten History. Again, by all rights a stable coexistence should be the default outcome, so it shouldn't need a special explanation. Convergence should be the more exceptional outcome. It's just that we've been conditioned to expect it to be more common because fiction is biased toward situations of greater danger and greater exceptionality. (For instance, one assumes that holodecks rarely malfunction, otherwise they'd never keep them in service; but the times they work normally aren't as dramatic, so the storytelling is biased to emphasize the times when they go wrong. But that doesn't mean it's necessary to explain an instance where a holodeck doesn't malfunction.)

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

And there is also the possibility of non-destructive convergence, i.e., what happens when an altered timeline is "patched," and the actions of those "patching" it are incorporated back into the unaltered path (postulated, as I recall, at the end of Assignment: Earth, either in the actual script or in Blish's adaptation).

IS THERE AN ARCANIAN IN THE HOUSE? GRIFFIN?!?!?

 

[EliyahuQeoni]

I had to concoct some imaginary physics as a fudge factor to justify it happening in the Trek universe.

Which is something you do exceedingly well, I have to say.

 

[Christopher]

And there is also the possibility of non-destructive convergence, i.e., what happens when an altered timeline is "patched," and the actions of those "patching" it are incorporated back into the unaltered path (postulated, as I recall, at the end of Assignment: Earth, either in the actual script or in Blish's adaptation).

The idea in A:E was that, as Spock said, "It appears we did not interfere. The Enterprise was part of what was supposed to happen on this day in 1968." I.e. it was a self-consistent time loop, the time travel being necessary to cause the events that led to the travellers' established history in the first place. As with Spock's kahs-wan, if they hadn't gone back in time, that would've altered history. (Albeit only slightly, since Gary would then have been able to carry out his mission with no interference and the missile would've just blown up at higher altitude.)

That said, I did postulate in WTC that if a timeline were changed only slightly, just a minor perturbation that had no lasting impact on events -- like, say, O'Brien and Bashir being chewed out by Kirk after the bar fight on Station K-7 rather than the two other guys who were originally standing there -- then the resultant altered timeline spontaneously merges back with the main one, because the differences are too trivial to cause a divergence.

 

[DimesDan]

I had to concoct some imaginary physics as a fudge factor to justify it happening in the Trek universe.

Which is something you do exceedingly well, I have to say.

That's a matter of opinion.