What is the current philosopohy of canon?

The NX-01 didn't appear on the list of ships called Enterprise in TMP though! Alternative time I'm guessing?
JB

 

In my novel Ex Machina, I explained it as a mixup on the part of whoever prepared the display. Another possibility is that the images cycled between various different ships. Some people are far too hasty to create entire new universes to deal with things that can be far more easily explained.

 

In my novel that I never wrote, I explain it as the Enterprise NX-01 isn't nearly as famous as some fans make it out to be. It wasn't on the TMP display wall, and it wasn't on the TNG (series) conferance room display wall.

It wasn't the first Starfleet vesel, and it wasn't the last. It's in the overall mix.

It's Captain did good, they named a system and a planet after him, might have gotten a few decorations too.

 

Or he never existed in the original prime universe? Sorry Christopher, I did read your post!
JB

 

Despite the time-travel elements foisted on them by the network, the intention of Enterprise's creators was always, always to show the origins of the Starfleet of the Prime universe as we knew it from TOS, TNG, and after, not to create an alternate timeline. Surely all the continuity-heavy episodes in season 4 reinforced that, since they were largely about showing the progression from the way things had been in ENT to the way they would be in TOS, e.g. the Vulcans' reforms, T'Pau's rise to power, the origin of the smooth-headed Klingons, and of course the prelude to the Romulan War and the founding of the Federation.

 

So future guy was JJ Abrams. I knew it.

 

I always had the impression that because of the temporal cold war 'all bets were off' in terms of what timeline they were in, and the timeline they were in was actually subtly shifting and changing around them without their knowledge or notice. This isn't to say Enterprise wasn't set in the Prime timeline, just that we shouldn't think of that timeline as immutable (I mean TNG jumps timelines at least twice, right?), but rather something that distorts and changes based on incursions into the past- a ball of 'timey-wimey stuff', as it were.

 

The TCW was forced on the producers by execs who mistrusted the prequel idea and demanded some sort of tie to Trek's future. What the producers actually wanted was to lead into the TOS/TNG/etc. continuity, not away from it. One of the problems with the TCW was that it muddied that and led to the common misapprehension that ENT changed the timeline.

The thing to remember is that when it comes to time travel, any perception of which event comes "first" is subjective. Just because we saw TOS first doesn't mean it's the "original" version of history, since after all we saw it out of order relative to ENT. While ENT did show some aspects of history being changed from the future Daniels came from, I've always interpreted that as changing it to the Prime timeline we know, creating it in the first place. After all, as I said, the fourth season of ENT did make a point of showing events converging toward what we knew from TOS.

 

And because it was a prequel to TOS as well.

 

Right. Those events were part of what was supposed to happen. It’s a common misperception that time travel is disruptive, as it can be restorative in some cases (e.g., Spock preserving his own existence in “Yesteryear”).

 

Or just self-consistent, like Kirk & Spock's presence being part of what "always" happened in "Assignment: Earth." Because of things like that and "Yesteryear," it's erroneous to assume that the TOS/TNG/etc. timeline was ever "pure" of temporal contamination. The timeline we saw from the start was already affected by time travel. See also "Yesterday's Enterprise," where the Enterprise-C's trip to and return from an alternate future was part of the sequence of events that led to the TNG timeline as we know it. So there's no reason to rule out the possibility that the Prime timeline as we originally saw it was also already shaped by the actions of time travelers as seen in First Contact and ENT. Just because we didn't know about it yet, that doesn't mean it hadn't "already" happened.

I had a character in my e-novella Department of Temporal Investigations: Shield of the Gods point this out to Agent Lucsly:

"Time travel is simply part of the universe. Once it exists, it has always existed and always will. There has never been such a thing as a timeline unaffected by time travel. Even without technological intervention, there have always been natural phenomena that allow the transmission of matter and information back in time—wormholes, cosmic strings, retrocausal waves, and the like. The reversibility and mutability of time are fundamental parts of its nature."

 

What do we want? Time Travel!
When do we want it? Irrelevant!

 

I like this quote. I mean think about temporally unbound beings, like the Prophets, or Q. So Q shows up and throws the Enterprise in front of the Borg, before they were 'meant' to. Who is to say the 'present' is the 'present' to Q, who can jump forward and backward in time at will? He doesn't really have a 'present', he just shows up where he wishes to. So from the Enterprise's perspective it was just 'a thing that happened' but from Q's perspective he could have gone BACKWARD to set in motion events hundreds of years down the track. Similar to how the Prophets 'made' Ben so they could talk to him "later". It is all one to them.

 

There will be a meeting of the Time Travelers' Association last Thursday...

 

Yep, I'm supposed to give a talk then. Good thing they filmed it, I can study what I'm going to say.

 

^Stephen Hawking played a practical joke like this on his friends. He sent them invitations to his birthday party after it happened and then stated that time travel into the past must be impossible because none of them showed up.

 

my thought is that the prophets interacted with sisko for years (sisko's perspective) prior to creating the events leading to sisko's birth.

 

Lots of deceased kittens out there then!
Just saying..... .. ..
And sorry to all cat lovers

 

By being fired out of a cannon?