Spoilers ENT: Rise of the Federation: Live by the Code by Christopher L. Bennett Review Thread

Thanks so much. After recent events, I could really use some cheering up, and this helps.

 

Christopher, just wondering what your thoughts may be on including any subtle references to the Franklin or the crew uniforms featured in Star Trek Beyond in future RotF novels.I know the author's hands are often tied in terms of presenting material from the Kelvin Timeline, but I know you've snuck in sly references to tatted Romulans and even Red Matter before, and I know we know next to nothing about the Franklin or her crew, but just was intrigued by an ENT era ship and uniform variant being featured in this film and was curious what your thoughts were. I realize too that you have a list of events that hover around the ENT years, so I'm sure it's crossed your mind.

 

^Too early to say. Haven't seen the movie yet. And the whole "The Kelvin timeline was retroactively changed so it was different even before 2233" idea that Simon Pegg recently put forth complicates matters. (Or simplifies them, depending on how you look at it.)

 

I think Pegg, Jung, and Lin made a narrative decision and now they're kind of mishandling a sci-fi explanation for that decision and it's muddying the waters. I think the Kelvin was always intended to be the jump off point for the new reality in terms of where it deviates and will always generally be seen as such. Pegg felt the need to explain nu-Sulu's homosexuality in a sci-fi way and it didn't do much good in terms of in-universe clarity. (not making a statement about Sulu, but the nature of the alternate reality)

 

My view is it was originally a closely related universe to the Prime one. Nero's incursion method cause effects propagating both forward and backwards in time. YMMV.

 

I figure the "changes perpetuating forwards and backwards through time" thing was more just so that the movie team already has a built-in explanation should they feel the need to establish something in the pre-2233 days that differs from what was previously established. Doesn't necessarily mean that everything definitely happened differently, just that if they need something to have happened differently at some point, that's why it did.

 

Well, Pegg's the only one talking about it. So that's not on the others.

I think he's doing the same thing Orci did with the previous movies -- engaging with the fans as a fan as well as a filmmaker and trying to explain the film's choices for fans' benefit. I think Orci went at it based more on his readings of quantum theory, while Pegg's just being a bit more handwavey. But it's a trivial distinction, just inside baseball for the few who care about such arcane details.

Functionally, they were always going to be free to make whatever artistic and storytelling choices they considered best for the film. Handwaving the continuity is not a required step in that process, just a bonus gesture. I don't care that the exact terminology Pegg offered was kind of goofy; it's just a means to the end of explaining a story decision that I can entirely understand the reasons for.

And it's not like it's actually a part of the movie. There isn't going to be any dialogue about it or any attention called to it in the film. The Kelvin Timeline's relationship to Prime only mattered in the first film, to set the stage. Referring back to Spock Prime's history with Khan in STID was a needless distraction. The responsibility of the filmmakers now is to carry forward with the series they're making, and to make decisions that are strictly about what's needed for its stories, without interference from what came before. This is a way to achieve that end more successfully than the previous model, and that makes it a better approach creatively and logistically, however clumsy the attempt to justify it scientifically.

Exactly. It's just a way of setting themselves free from the cataloguing of "So how does this reconcile with what TOS did or what ENT did in such-and-such" and lets them focus entirely on telling stories in this reality.

 

Once you see the movie would you make any reference to the Franklin in any upcoming Rise of the Federation novels?

 

For me when the alternate timeline began does not really matter. Spock Prime was included to show it was not a pure reboot and everything that happened in the other tv shows and movies did happen. That is all that matters to me and anything that predates Kelvin shown in new movies can now be filed under "could have happened in Prime timeline".

 

Too early to say means too early to say. But given the licensing situation regarding the movies, I'd think any references would have to be indirect at best.

Sure, but that's not the point. Yes, it's still true that Spock Prime and Nero came from the Prime Universe and their incursion in the past created the altered Kelvin Timeline. But now we know the additional information that the effects of the red matter wormhole were retroactive, changing things before 2233 as well as after. This could be due to some sort of quantum retrocausality effect, or due to the wormhole bouncing around in more places and times than just the two we saw, or due to a feedback effect in which the past is altered because certain future time travels (e.g. "City on the Edge" or "Past Tense") won't happen the way they did in Prime. In any case, it handily explains things that were hard to reconcile before, such as Pike being a decade or so older, San Francisco being so much more built up, etc.

What this means in-story is that we can no longer assume that any pre-2233 events established in Kelvin are also part of Prime. Sure, theoretically the Franklin or its class of ship could have existed in the Prime 22nd century, but we no longer need to assume it had to, at least not in the same form shown in the movie. All bets are off now. Kelvin's past can diverge from Prime as much as its future can. Which means, for instance, that if there's some major contradiction between my books and what Beyond reveals about the 2160s, I don't need to worry about it.

 

Why is everyone taking Pegg's comments so seriously? I mean, we don't "know" anything - he was just offering a suggestion. And it's not like he's writing ST4, after all. So why is anything he says now, considered binding?

 

Not to mention that statements made by cast and crew aren't even canon, anyways.

 

No, but it provides insight into the assumptions that the screenwriters had in place while writing the movie, which means that the movie will be based upon those assumptions whether implicitly or explicitly. It's not binding or canon, but if you know how a screenwriter thought something worked, then you have a better idea why they made the choices they did. And so there will likely be a consistency within the ideas in their work based on that foundation that, when expanding on their work, will be easier to work with than to fight since it's already underlying the piece.

If this is how Pegg sees things as going, then he wrote Beyond with that in mind, which means that any details in the script in that area are based on that assumption. Which means it all fits together in advance based on that interpretation of the changes to the timeline. So it would just save effort to use that assumption yourself as well instead of coming up with a new one. Not that you have to, just that why waste the effort unless what you have works better? And we can't know if what you have works better with Beyond until Beyond actually comes out, so at the moment literally any other interpretation is a "maybe works with Beyond" while Pegg's is a "definitely works with Beyond by definition".

 

It also could be the case that the universe Nero and Spock Prime entered was not a duplicate of the Prime universe but just a close copy.

 

The thing is, I don't think Pegg's model fits with canon information (regardless of whether it's the franchise on a whole, or even just the Kelvin timeline films). So, I have a hard time giving it any credence from square one. Also, I seriously doubt that they worked this up beforehand. I'm suspicious that they developed it after the fact to justify them changing whatever they want about the franchise, so that they have a blanket defense when the mistakes are pointed out.

(To be fair, the idea on paper has kind of grown on me, but as presented, I feel that they theory doesn't work, and, for all practical purposes, is a smokescreen for the shaky foundation and internal problems that this movie series has had from day one.)

 

So basically Time Boom.

 

Not certain about that. Although Trek is big on using MWI, I prefer the Big Bang and inflation paradigm to produce a large to infinite number of universes with the same low energy laws but different initial conditions.
There are Trek examples of effects propagating forward and backward in time.

 

The first point makes the second unnecessary.

If it was already a different universe that Nero and Spock emerged into, then there's no need for anything to propagate "backwards" (even if such a thing were possible). Just say it was always a different universe and leave it be. And as I said, Pegg's not writing ST4, so any thought processes he might have had while writing STB are not going to matter in future films.

Besides, since this is the Trek LIT forum, we should be concerned about how these changes Pegg is going on about, are going to affect the Prime timeline (if at all).

 

They aren't. I mean, if anything, holding to it means that the Kelvin timeline has even less impact on the Litverse, because if you take Pegg's interpretation, then there's no reason to assume that anything mentioned in the Kelvin timeline happened in the Prime timeline, even pre-2233 stuff.

 

Such as?

I still think it's much simpler to assume that Kelvinverse was already different even pre-Nero, but whatever... as long as it doesn't affect Prime, they can do whatever the hell they like.