After Romulus

[The Nth Doctor]

Am I the only one who doesn't assume the destruction of Romulus is an automatic given in the main continuity we've been following all these years?

A number of people see it the same way you do, but it doesn't track with what we know. The intent of the filmmakers was that Spock Prime came from the same reality we've been following from the start -- that Romulus was destroyed in that reality, causing Nero and Spock Prime to go back in time and split off a new, altered reality in parallel with it. The whole reason they included the time-travel aspects and coaxed Leonard Nimoy out of retirement was to make the new timeline a direct continuation/offshoot of the old rather than something completely unconnected to it. If that hadn't been their intention, they wouldn't have bothered with all that messy time travel at all. The Spock that Nimoy played in 2009 is the same Spock he's been playing since 1964. He's just living in a different timeline now. But that only happened because Romulus was destroyed in his original timeline.

Which sucks. :/

It does suck, I agree. It sucks Romulus has been destroyed and it sucks that Spock is probably forever gone from the "prime" timeline. However, the books managed to make great opportunities out of the mess Nemesis left behind and I can only hope the books will do the same with the destruction of Romulus when they "catch up" with that moment in the timeline.

 

[Nerys Myk]

The way DC chose to do things has nothing to do with how Bad Robot chose to do things.

Especially since DC repeatedly wipes out its entire continuity, ALL THE FUCKING TIME. They don't let three or four years go by before they do some damned 'Crisis' that resets everything back to square one. And they keep doing it. There was Crisis on Infinite Earths, then Zero Hour, Infinite Crisis, Final Crisis, Flashpoint, New 52, ad nauseum. So they don't have the chance to build up anything meaningful anymore, because we all know they're just going to reset the whole damned thing again.

Nothing about the Abramsverse is even close to this level. That timeline can coexist with the prime one; can't say the same thing in DC, not by a long shot.

That's what parallel Earths are for. One upon a time DC's Golden Age continuity ( or a reasonable facsimile) existed in a parallel universe. With an infinite number of universes out there, all of DC's various continuities can co-exist.

 

[Edit_XYZ]

The way DC chose to do things has nothing to do with how Bad Robot chose to do things.

Especially since DC repeatedly wipes out its entire continuity, ALL THE FUCKING TIME. They don't let three or four years go by before they do some damned 'Crisis' that resets everything back to square one. And they keep doing it. There was Crisis on Infinite Earths, then Zero Hour, Infinite Crisis, Final Crisis, Flashpoint, New 52, ad nauseum. So they don't have the chance to build up anything meaningful anymore, because we all know they're just going to reset the whole damned thing again.

Nothing about the Abramsverse is even close to this level. That timeline can coexist with the prime one; can't say the same thing in DC, not by a long shot.

That's what parallel Earths are for. One upon a time DC's Golden Age continuity ( or a reasonable facsimile) existed in a parallel universe. With an infinite number of universes out there, all of DC's various continuities can co-exist.

The parallel universe system is based on the many worlds theory - which states that for any possible outcome of every wave-function collapse, a new 'world' is created.
Which means that any possible course of action happens.
Which in turn means that any decision the DC or Trek characters - or you or I, for that matter - make is meaningless; it's not a choice but a 'world' (existing alongside ALL possible worlds) you just happen to be in, before you again are fragmented into countless universes at the next wave-function collapse (the next thermodynamically irreversible quantum event - which includes every single choice).


PS - The many worlds theory manages to solve the measurement problem only if for EVERY SINGLE wave-function collapse possible outcome, a new 'world' is created.
If, even for one such wave-function collapse possible outcome, a new 'world' is not created, the many worlds theory doesn't solve the measurement problem any longer - becoming useless as an explanation.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

That's what parallel Earths are for. One upon a time DC's Golden Age continuity ( or a reasonable facsimile) existed in a parallel universe. With an infinite number of universes out there, all of DC's various continuities can co-exist.

Well, yeah, but they already had as many parallel worlds as they wanted - even before the Crisis on Infinite Earths. That series was supposedly created to *eliminate* all of those parallel universes and combine them into one coherent new one. (Zero Hour was apparently for cleaning up the mess afterwards.) But they ended up bringing them all back anyway, so what's the point?

 

[Christopher]

^The point is, partly, that they don't assume the same people are reading comics decade after decade. The reboots are usually done in order to make the continuity more accessible to new readers, to make a fresh start as a jumping-on point for an audience that might otherwise be scared off by all the complicated backstory. Comics have a lot of trouble attracting new readers these days, so they'll do whatever they think can help them do so, even at the risk of alienating the old guard.

In particular, the New 52 reboot was done for the sake of the emerging digital comics market, to allow digital-only readers who were trying the comics for the first time to come in at the beginning of the story rather than having to come in at the middle and play catch-up. Although exceptions were made for the already highly popular stuff like Grant Morrison's Batman and Geoff Johns's Green Lantern, which were allowed to keep their continuities and story arcs largely intact.

Although usually what happens is that new readers don't come onboard to the extent they were hoping, while the established fanbase continues to read the comics, and new creators and editors come in who were fans of comics growing up and want to read stories like the classics, so they reintroduce the old ideas that previous creators and editors got rid of.

 

[Ronald Held]

Continually rebooting the DCU shows how things have changed for the worse over the decades.
No one has come up with solving the measure problem for a multiverse.
The Hobus supernova would be expected to disrupt the RSE and their leading role in the TP(should it still exist by then).

 

[Hartzilla2007]

Although exceptions were made for the already highly popular stuff like Grant Morrison's Batman and Geoff Johns's Green Lantern, which were allowed to keep their continuities and story arcs largely intact.

Of course Morrison's stuff doesn't really impact the current Batman comics outside of Batman Inc. much and whatever does is pretty easy to explain I mean Batman #1(2012) pretty much covered a decent chunk of it anyway.

Though I don't know about Green Lantern as I haven't actually been following that.

Continually rebooting the DCU shows how things have changed for the worse over the decades.

Or it shows that people are more interested in making money instead of minutia that only a small chunk of fans care about

 

[Christopher]

Continually rebooting the DCU shows how things have changed for the worse over the decades.

Hardly, since DC's universe reboots go as far back as 1956 (the debut of the Barry Allen Flash, which is generally considered the start of the Silver Age). The fiction that the present is worse than the past is a well-understood psychological illusion, a consequence of the fact that we tend to gloss over the annoyances and unpleasant bits of the past in our memories, while those in the present are more immediate. That, plus the fact that our tastes tend to be set early in life, so as society evolves and tastes change, we tend to find the newer stuff less appealing. But that doesn't mean it's objectively worse, just different.

 

[Ronald Held]

Before the Crisis, the Golden age characters still existed, just on another Earth. Every Crisis after that made more changes away from that multiverse.
I will agree that the newer stuff is different.

 

[JWolf]

I'll never understand fans who think the original timeline was overwritten. I think some people forget that this is all just made up. The rules are whatever the storytellers want them to be. And no storyteller is going to want to say that the Star Trek we've been fans of for 45 years has somehow "ceased to exist." The whole reason Abrams & co. created the alternate timeline in the first place was because they wanted to leave the old timeline intact and unaltered. (Also because they're using plausible, informed physics in which different timelines always coexist rather than overwriting each other.)

Also, remember the TNG episode where Worf got out of sync with the universe and kept bouncing around to different universes. Then we saw a number of Enterprises from different universes appearing together. So what's to say that something like what happened in Star Trek XI didn't cause any of those to come into being?

 

[JWolf]

The way DC chose to do things has nothing to do with how Bad Robot chose to do things.

Especially since DC repeatedly wipes out its entire continuity, ALL THE FUCKING TIME. They don't let three or four years go by before they do some damned 'Crisis' that resets everything back to square one. And they keep doing it. There was Crisis on Infinite Earths, then Zero Hour, Infinite Crisis, Final Crisis, Flashpoint, New 52, ad nauseum. So they don't have the chance to build up anything meaningful anymore, because we all know they're just going to reset the whole damned thing again.

Nothing about the Abramsverse is even close to this level. That timeline can coexist with the prime one; can't say the same thing in DC, not by a long shot.

Just because DC repeatedly pulls a Dallas and frigs things up does not mean that Bad Robot did the same and made the same mess.

 

[Lee Son of Pete]

Am I the only one who doesn't assume the destruction of Romulus is an automatic given in the main continuity we've been following all these years?

No.

Apologies if I'm missing something, or this has been done to death (this is my first day on this board) but I think all we know for certain is that Nero, his crew, and Spok believe that Romulus is destroyed.

 

[The Wormhole]

Am I the only one who doesn't assume the destruction of Romulus is an automatic given in the main continuity we've been following all these years?

No.

Apologies if I'm missing something, or this has been done to death (this is my first day on this board) but I think all we know for certain is that Nero, his crew, and Spok believe that Romulus is destroyed.

Huh? Trek XI showed the destruction of Romulus.

 

[Christopher]

Apologies if I'm missing something, or this has been done to death (this is my first day on this board) but I think all we know for certain is that Nero, his crew, and Spok believe that Romulus is destroyed.

You're forgetting the chronology of events. First the supernova went off; then Spock undertook the red matter mission to try to stop it; but he was too late, and the "shock wave" hit Romulus before he could get there. Nero witnessed the destruction of the planet firsthand: "I watched it happen! I saw it happen! Don't tell me it didn't happen!" Spock then used the red matter to somehow "stop" the supernova at the source (even though that should've done nothing if the radiation had already spread far enough to affect Romulus), and in Spock's own words: "As I began my return trip, I was intercepted.... In my attempt to escape, both of us were pulled into the black hole."

Spock was apparently aware of the planet's destruction, since the next thing he said after relating it was "I had little time" to deploy the red matter, suggesting that he was hastening in reaction to the event. So we know that Nero (and presumably his crew) directly witnessed the destruction and that Spock was either notified of it by someone else or detected it on long-range sensors. That's enough corroboration to be confident that the event actually did occur as described.

 

[RPJOB]

The only way that chronology makes any sense at all is if we also take Spock at his word that the supernova was itself a threat to the entire galaxy and that he wasn't just talking about the political fallout of the destruction of Romulus. Why else would he "have little time" after the planet was destroyed and why would he even deploy the red matter if it didn't constitute an ongoing threat? Sadly, Romulus died because the movie needed a macguffin, something to tick off Nero and create a black hole.

I look forward to see if the effects of the loss of Vulcan are brought up in the next movie(s), particularly their effect on Spock. It's too bad that Bad Robot felt they had to take a parting shot at the prime universe on the way out the door.

 

[Nerys Myk]

"Parting shot"? It's just a plot device.

 

[RPJOB]

The point is that they didn't have to make a major change to a universe they had no intention of visiting again. It's like your kid trashing your house when they leave for college. Set things up for Nero vs Spock all you like. The big loss is that all of Spocks work on Reunification was just swept aside. Had to reunify with what is no longer there. There were better ways to do it. Unfortunately, it happened in a Big Summer Movie and that means blowing stuff up.

Don't assume i'm trashing the whole movie. I just found the whole Nero/Spock set-up as unsatisfying. Once the movie got to the new universe it worked extraordinarily well for the most part.

 

[Nerys Myk]

It was a plot device. A motivation for Nero to hate Spock and destroy Vulcan.

 

[RPJOB]

Nero was himself a plot device. This wasn't a character drama after all. It was a gathering of the troops/origin story. Nero was just the cardboard cut-put they used to to motivate the crew. It's not like he had a lot of depth. Pretty much everything we know about him we learned second hand.

Anyway, back to Trek Lit....

 

[Paris]

...The big loss is that all of Spocks work on Reunification was just swept aside. Had to reunify with what is no longer there...

I'd think it would be easier for the Romulan diaspora to reunify with their Vulcan cousins if there is no longer a Romulus. With Romulus destroyed, Vulcan in the prime universe could be looked at as the only ancestral home they have left.