Alternate reality vs. altered timeline
- Thread starter lorrak7
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They did a good job of making not sound like continuity porn then.
Eh? I misunderstood you. Spock Prime came from the Prime Universe - that universe was not actually depicted in the film at all. I thought that's what you meant.
It's true that we have no way to verify that Nimoy is playing the same Spock as he has played before. It's not like he can talk to the audience and say, "yeah I'm the same guy, calm down and just eat your popcorn!"
So we can believe whatever we like. It makes sense that JJ meant for Nimoy's Spock to be the Spock we all know and love, and I'm pretty sure that's what he intended. Good enough for me.
Arguing about Spock - which is unprovable one way or the other in the context of the story - is a lot less interesting to me than arguing whether we're dealing with an alternate timeline or alternate reality.
Not necessarily. Every time Our Heroes though they were restoring the timeline, they may have simply been catapulting themselves into a different reality in which the timeline had never been broken. It remains broken in their original reality, but since the new reality looks exactly like their original one, they are none the wiser.
And when ya think about it, that makes more intuitive sense than the absurd notion that you can break the timeline and then restore it precisely to what it was before. That's like unscrambling an egg. Even though it's the dominant (but not sole) time travel logic employed by Star Trek, that doesn't mean it makes any damn sense. Not that any of it makes any damn sense...
I also like the idea that the Starfleet dolts have been deluding themselves all along that they have the godlike power to retore a whole frakkin' timeline. What arrogance!
That's exactly what I said up there somewheres - if we're talking timelines, Spock has a moral responsibility to do that Starfleet restore-the-timeline schtick. But if we're talking realities, the heat is off and he isn't forced into that tired routine.
That's why JJ & the gang shoehorned that weird dialogue into the story that implied that the characters had a preternatural knowledge that they were dealing with different realities rather than timelines. That really smacked me in the face when I heard it - how the frak could they know?
Which clued me in that there was some meta agenda here. JJ was signalling to the audience that "no, we aren't doing the reset-the-timeline thing again. Eat your damn popcorn already!" By letting Spock off the hook, JJ & co were letting themselves and the audience off the hook. They made the right choice! Does anyone really want to revisit such a tired storyline?
The writers do have to make a decent attempt to sell their ideas in the storyline and not just tell us what they intended in interviews. However, the Trek XI writers have done a respectable job. Maybe there are little boggles here and there that can be cobbled together into a contrary argument, but I'm willing to overlook the small stuff as long as they take care of the big stuff.
The big stuff is: we get a new Trek universe to play with, with hot young actors playing beloved old characters, in which new and unexpected things can happen, and nobody is being railroaded into boring resetting the timeline antics. Compared with that, any mistakes are small potatoes.
Trek XI does not deal with time travel. It deals with travel between alternate realities. Even if Star Trek had logical, consistent rules about time travel, they wouldn't apply to Trek XI.
They can't. The "meta" dialogue between Kirk and Spock was as far as JJ & co could push the breaking-the-fourth-wall attempt to directly tell the audience what was going on and pre-empt threads like this. It didn't rule out the notion that Spock is, say, actually Spock from the MU, who did a really bang-up job destroying the Terran Empire and turning his universe into a doppleganger of the Prime Universe and then blowing up Romulus and bopping into an entirely different universe for an encore. And somewhere along the line he married Marlena Moreau (after she killed MU Uhura in hand to hand combat) and lost the goatee. A fun topic for a fanfic perhaps, but as part of the movie franchise, it's a non-starter. So it can't be what JJ & co. intended. Why fuss over it then?
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Well, technically, it was depicted to an extent through Spock's mind meld. However, the thrust of what you're saying is sound, IMHO.
I still hold that the official story is correct, and actually the simplest logical conclusion:
The Alternate Reality was created in 2233 when the "Lightning Storm In Space" appeared.
The simple fact that Spock remembered Kirk mentioning his father, and Kirk's father being part of Starfleet firmly established him as being from the Prime (TOS) timeline/reality.
Before 2233, everything was actually the same universe.
It is that simple.
The Alternate Reality was created in 2233 when the "Lightning Storm In Space" appeared.
The simple fact that Spock remembered Kirk mentioning his father, and Kirk's father being part of Starfleet firmly established him as being from the Prime (TOS) timeline/reality.
Before 2233, everything was actually the same universe.
It is that simple.
Yes, it is.
The Spock in "Star Trek XI" could very well be the same Spock from the "Star Trek: Nemesis" universe -- but remember, that universe was itself an alternate timeline.
In the final episode of "ST: Voyager," we saw the original timeline, where the Voyager was lost in the Delta Quadrant for 20 years. By the time they got home, Romulus would have been destroyed for over a decade. But then Admiral Janeway went back in time, altered the past, and got the Voyager back to Earth 20 years earlier.
In that new timeline, Captain Janeway was promoted to Admiral and sent the Enterprise-E to Romulus on Stardate 56844.9, as we saw in "Star Trek: Nemesis." So everything depicted in that movie takes place in the alternate timeline created in "Endgame."
So if Ambassador Spock who appears in "Star Trek XI" is from the future of that alternate timeline, he is not the same Spock who existed in the original timeline depicted at the beginning of "Endgame" (when the Voyager was still in the Delta Quadrant for 20 years at the time Romulus would have exploded).
Likewise, the Guinan in the original timeline shown in "Yesterday's Enterprise," who knew Lt. Yar and witnessed the Klingon-Federation war, was a different Guinan than the one who never met Yar and never saw a Klingon war in the new timeline created when the Enterprise-C went back in time, and Yar and Sela lived on Romulus.
Every time someone goes back in time and screws up their own history, they are creating a new timeline, as Guinan and Yar did in "Yesterday's Enterprise," Admiral Janeway did in "Endgame," and Nero did in "Star Trek XI." This latest movie did not show anything new or different in regards to altering past timelines.
Yes, there have been many episodes where the past is altered, and someone goes back to "fix" it, but there are just as many episodes where the past is permanently changed and characters continue to live in the new timeline, just like in this movie. It's not breaking any time travel "rules."
Between "Yesterday's Enterprise," "Endgame," "Star Trek: First Contact," and a dozen other time travel episodes, there could be a dozen different Spocks in a dozen different timelines. Even if it were demonstrated that Ambassador Spock in "Star Trek XI" is from the same timeline depicted in "Star Trek: Nemesis," that's still not the same timeline as we saw in "Unification, Part II" or "Star Trek VI" for that matter. But all of those Spocks in all of those timelines have similar memories, so they are basically the same character.
In the final episode of "ST: Voyager," we saw the original timeline, where the Voyager was lost in the Delta Quadrant for 20 years. By the time they got home, Romulus would have been destroyed for over a decade. But then Admiral Janeway went back in time, altered the past, and got the Voyager back to Earth 20 years earlier.
In that new timeline, Captain Janeway was promoted to Admiral and sent the Enterprise-E to Romulus on Stardate 56844.9, as we saw in "Star Trek: Nemesis." So everything depicted in that movie takes place in the alternate timeline created in "Endgame."
So if Ambassador Spock who appears in "Star Trek XI" is from the future of that alternate timeline, he is not the same Spock who existed in the original timeline depicted at the beginning of "Endgame" (when the Voyager was still in the Delta Quadrant for 20 years at the time Romulus would have exploded).
Likewise, the Guinan in the original timeline shown in "Yesterday's Enterprise," who knew Lt. Yar and witnessed the Klingon-Federation war, was a different Guinan than the one who never met Yar and never saw a Klingon war in the new timeline created when the Enterprise-C went back in time, and Yar and Sela lived on Romulus.
Every time someone goes back in time and screws up their own history, they are creating a new timeline, as Guinan and Yar did in "Yesterday's Enterprise," Admiral Janeway did in "Endgame," and Nero did in "Star Trek XI." This latest movie did not show anything new or different in regards to altering past timelines.
Yes, there have been many episodes where the past is altered, and someone goes back to "fix" it, but there are just as many episodes where the past is permanently changed and characters continue to live in the new timeline, just like in this movie. It's not breaking any time travel "rules."
Between "Yesterday's Enterprise," "Endgame," "Star Trek: First Contact," and a dozen other time travel episodes, there could be a dozen different Spocks in a dozen different timelines. Even if it were demonstrated that Ambassador Spock in "Star Trek XI" is from the same timeline depicted in "Star Trek: Nemesis," that's still not the same timeline as we saw in "Unification, Part II" or "Star Trek VI" for that matter. But all of those Spocks in all of those timelines have similar memories, so they are basically the same character.
That's not the original timeline either.
In the original timeline, the Federation and the Klingons engage in a protracted war in the 24th century.
It's only as the result of the actions of Captain Picard, who helps repair and sends the Enterprise C back in time to fight off a Romulan attack on a Klingon outpost that the Federation and the Klingons wind up as allies instead.
It's in that alternate, relatively peaceful universe that all of TNG and the shows which follow it play out.
Disillusioned
Commander
Given the Kelvin and the differences on the different planets depicted, I find it more likely that Nero's ship emerged in an alternate universe that only strongly resembled the one that's made up the majority of the franchise.
This kind of discussion is why I feel so much at home watching The Big Bang Theory. 
I suppose I really ought to watch that, one of these times.This kind of discussion is why I feel so much at home watching The Big Bang Theory.
I vote for altered reality.
It's nice and comfy.
It's nice and comfy.
- Vulcan always had the blue sky during certains seasons we simply never saw.
- The City where Spock was being tutored was simply never seen before.
- The sequence where Spock sees Vulcan implode was from a Mind Meld, and may have been more about Spock's knowledge of the event than how he actually saw it.
- San Francisco looked different because city planning proceeded upon a different path than in past depictions of 23rd Century San Francisco, and the city was never seen in the 2255-2258 timeframe anyway.
Beyond the above points, nothing seen in the movie has been depicted in the rest of Star Trek canon.
I subscribe to the Alternate Reality explanation, as that was clearly the intent of the filmmakers.
Maybe when both Nero and Spock came through the Black hole they took readings and it analyzed the quantum frequency of matter in the matter in the interstellar dust and it concluded they were in a different universe and Spock and Nero both knew they could make any changes and it wouldn't affect THEIR timeline....
I vote that it is an alternate reality too.
"James Kirk was a great man, but that was a different life."
I vote that it's a altered timeline...wait whose that, he looks just like me?
...OMG is this an altered timeline, or an alternate reality
!!!
...OMG is this an altered timeline, or an alternate reality
!!!
What color are your eyes?I vote that it's a altered timeline...wait whose that, he looks just like me?
...OMG is this an altered timeline, or an alternate reality
They're blue! Are they supposed to be blue! I DON'T KNOW
!!!
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