Except when this movie bombs, or doesn't make it's to some self prophichied prediction, It will be the fanboys fault when and if the movie falls on it's face.
Alternate timeline = Not the same Kirk, Spock, et al.??
- Thread starter Jackson_Roykirk
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Except when this movie bombs, or doesn't make it's to some self prophichied prediction, It will be the fanboys fault when and if the movie falls on it's face.
Even if we expect that the timeline is not altered, the Kelvin doesn't quite look like a starship from TOS as much as it might be from one of the films -- something from between TOS and the first film. And the uniforms don't look quite like the ones from Pike's era, though at least the collars are the same color as the rest of the uniform shirt. So, even if we're supposed to accept that time diverges from the point when the Kelvin is destroyed, the Kelvin itself already seems to reboot the past as we glimpsed it in TOS, at least in visual terms.
^ I don't care what timeline this is. It's how the characters act, that's important to me.
Wired's review of the movie was basically that the timeline would get all screwed up and it would be up the younger cast to reset it "as close as possible" to the original.
Which, basically means that it will be used to explain any and every discrepancy between this movie (and any possible sequals) and the original.
Somebody suggested some time ago that this movie would be less the issue than any subsequent movies that may be created off of it, as it will essentially give them license to alter it even more down the road.
There are very few circumstances that you can come up with that would explain Spock attacking a fellow Starfleet officer as he does Kirk. We've even seen Spock in alternate universes with Mirror, Mirror, and even those versions were very much like the original.
The "badass" version of Sulu can only be justified in an alternatie "Yesterday's Enterprise" sort of way that can only be corrected by a reset button at the end (along with the fact that nobody on that ship should know what a Romulan looks like by the end of the movie).
There are personality traits in the trailer that already conflict with the characters as we've known them. It can only get worse from there.
Onset of pon farr?
Kirk allowing Nero to destroy Vulcan, Sarek and Amanda? (Perhaps, as in "The Entropy Effect" novel there are several unsuccessful attempts to reset the timeline.)
Putting on a hate act to fool Nero?
I can think of more.
Or, perhaps, there are several unsuccessful attempts to reset the timeline, and an angry young Sulu, and an older-than-usual Chekov, are the results?
Or, JJ is just toying with us. That's why some trailers are called "teasers".
Not for a few more years yet.
While that might actually make for a decent story line (even though it was already done in Voyager), not likely.
It's unlikely that a Romulan would be fooled by such an act, especially one from the future. He's had far too much experience with them.
I'm sure you could. But, Abrams has already explained it. Kirk and Spock don't get along.
A badass Sulu is far easier to explain than Spock attacking Kirk in a rage. As I said, Sulu is easily explained in an alternate timeline. The only problem I have with it becomes what to do with Sulu after the fact.
We already know what type of character Sulu is, and badass isn't it. So, unless they decide to throw everything we know about Star Trek out the window (which some people here seem to be totally willing to do) then Sulu has to fall more in line by the end of the movie.
Might work fine for the action-adventure/Star Wars flic that Abrams is trying to turn this into, but if he has any hopes of doing sequals the character will seem boring by comparison.
My biggest problem with this Jet Li encarnation of Sulu is that it plays right toward the racial/ethnic sterotypes that Rod sought to avoid with TOS.
If he had wanted an Asian guy who was a martial arts expert on TOS, he could have picked Bruce Lee to play the part. They were roughly the same age (in fact, Lee was 3 years younger) and he had come to the states to do a different TV show at the time. Roddenberry went an entirely different direction with the character. I'd hate to see that lost.
The irony is that given that Asians are more than half of the human population, there's a lot more diversity to employ with them than most groups of people -- if numbers are important, certainly moreso than with the significantly smaller numbers of Europeans. Yet, we have one character who apparently was meant to represent billions of people, to the degree that it didn't seem to matter whether he's of Japanese or Chinese ancestry, or any of the other dozens of distinct Asian ethnic groups. (Made all the more bizarre because he's really an American.)
But in fairness, Star Trek employed stereotyping with others, from the absurdly ethnocentric Chekhov to the hard-drinking engineer Scotty. We didn't really have any goose-stepping Germans or sissy Englishmen that I can recall, but Kirk was depicted as the "all American" white guy, even having --albeit Aryan ideal -- blonde hair and blue eyes in his current representation.
But in fairness, Star Trek employed stereotyping with others, from the absurdly ethnocentric Chekhov to the hard-drinking engineer Scotty. We didn't really have any goose-stepping Germans or sissy Englishmen that I can recall, but Kirk was depicted as the "all American" white guy, even having --albeit Aryan ideal -- blonde hair and blue eyes in his current representation.
Kirk is Kirk, and so on, but the TOS Kirk we know (I at least know, I won't be presumptuous) was very applied, self-assured, and focused, with a healthy ego and libido to match. Under different circumstances, that talent (but not the ego or libido) could be stilted. So, in this movie, we see "stilted Kirk." If the timeline stays this way, he'll still be James T. Kirk. But he'll be just a little different than the Kirk we knew. Like a Kirk from another dimension or something.
Except that there's no evidence so far that the intention of the filmmakers is to change the characters themselves. This is in fact the very point that Abrams is making when he says that he's presenting the same characters in a new way. It's a different story, but the same people.
The same people? Same characters? Let's see here...
TOS Kirk: A fine, upstanding Federation citizen. One of the most revered Captains in Starfleet history. In his youth, a 'stack of books with legs' who already could outthink most other officers twice his age. Pretty much a living god as far as the rest of the fleet is concerned.
ST XI Kirk: A bitter, drunk, womanizing, immature jerk who gets into barfights at the drop of a hat (over Uhura, of all people), who has apparently never even set foot aboard a starship before the Enterprise, who doesn't even enter the fucking Academy until his twenties - when TOS Kirk was already at least a full Lieutenant - and who is outranked in the film even by CHEKOV!!!!
Now tell me, how are those the same?
To put it another way: The same person, raised in one situation, grew up to be Jean-Luc Picard. In another, Shinzon. Not exactly the same there, huh?
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Because JJ says so.
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Kirk is Kirk, and so on, but the TOS Kirk we know (I at least know, I won't be presumptuous) was very applied, self-assured, and focused, with a healthy ego and libido to match. Under different circumstances, that talent (but not the ego or libido
Except that there's no evidence so far that the intention of the filmmakers is to change the characters themselves. This is in fact the very point that Abrams is making when he says that he's presenting the same characters in a new way. It's a different story, but the same people.
The same people? Same characters? Let's see here...
TOS Kirk: A fine, upstanding Federation citizen. One of the most revered Captains in Starfleet history. In his youth, a 'stack of books with legs' who already could outthink most other officers twice his age. Pretty much a living god as far as the rest of the fleet is concerned.
ST XI Kirk: A bitter, drunk, womanizing, immature jerk who gets into barfights at the drop of a hat (over Uhura, of all people), who has apparently never even set foot aboard a starship before the Enterprise, who doesn't even enter the fucking Academy until his twenties - when TOS Kirk was already at least a full Lieutenant - and who is outranked in the film even by CHEKOV!!!!
Now tell me, how are those the same?
To put it another way: The same person, raised in one situation, grew up to be Jean-Luc Picard. In another, Shinzon. Not exactly the same there, huh?
Not to beat a dead horse, since I posted my comment a while back, but I think Babaganoosh and Polaris didn't quite get what I meant. No, the characters don't have to be changed. It can be the same Kirk, but in the circumstances of this movie, his life chances changed. His "toolkit" of skills and personality may be the same. He may be the same. But the Kirk in the movie became unfocused and underachieving. Only we know the future he has/had. But the spark to ignite that potential didn't happen, or more correctly, happened differently and later in his life. He'll probably live a different life throughout this timeline, but he'll be no less heroic, and no less the Kirk we know in character.
We're seeing how Kirk still could've become the Kirk we know even if his path wasn't the same as the one previously taken. To me, that's a bit of a cheat with continuity and backstory, but the story itself still needs to be judged on its own merits.
Think "Yesterday's Enterprise". In the war-time timeline, that was Picard and Riker. Period. It was them in different circumstances, and having lived different lives than the ones we saw more often. One could tell their relationship was strained. One could tell they didn't really like what they were doing. Now, while they were Picard and Riker in character, I guess the point I'm making is it's still possible to not think of them as the Picard and Riker we saw grow up on TV. Same with this Kirk.
See, that's what I have a hard time believing. If Kirk grows up to be such a drunk newbie loser, how heroic could he possibly be?
Well, Picard's Starfleet career was already well underway by the time of the divergence (2344), so he's not likely to be that different anyway. Riker - not so much (he was probably not even in his teens at the time) but then again, in a war timeline such as that, it's likely to produce even more seasoned Starfleet officers. So it's not surprising that Riker turned out the same either.
Kirk, on the other hand...it's not the same at all. His *entire life* will be different. Unless it's some staggering coincidence, I'm not seeing how a washed up angry loser like ST XI-Kirk could ever become anyone like the real Kirk. Again, I bring up the comparison of Picard and Shinzon. Those are exactly the same people, genetically, but their upbringings made them into polar opposites. Why is this any different?
Well, there is a line in NEM where Picard reminds Shinzon that despite their upbringings, some of what made Picard what he is was in Shinzon, too. If this is the Jim Kirk we came to know, all he needs is a knock in the proper direction. He won't be the same, but his life could still be as good.
Let's say Kirk was a famous professional athelte in the timeline in which we first knew him. In another timeline, he never gets the scholarship that sent him on his way to greatness. Instead, he goes to a community college and manages a supermarket while playing in a city league on weekends. Does that mean he's not destined to be a great athlete in that timeline? No. He's the same man, with the same drives, he'll just have to be put on track differently and have a different outcome. Or, yes. There is always the possibility this Jim Kirk never met his true potential. Not from squandering it, but from never getting a break. They're the same men with different destinies. Who knows what would've happened to TOS Kirk had he not joined Starfleet?
Also, I imagine there is a universe somewhere where the Kelvin is destroyed and the Jim Kirk that grows up in it stays a loser and a lout all his life. That is, if quantum theory is correct.
I don't think there's anything Spock Prime can do to set future history back to the way we've known it to be. I'm guessing that by the time Spock Prime travels to the past, the damage has been done (Nero attacking the Kelvin) and now all he can do is get the Enterprise crew to stop Nero before he tampers with the timeline any further.
If you watch the most recent trailer, Spock is rescuing his parents from Vulcan as it's being torn apart by Nero's device. They're older than they were in an earlier scene from the trailer, where Amanda is cradling Baby Spock while Sarek sits with them. From that, I can figure that the Enterprise doesn't time travel back to when the Kelvin is about to be attacked. That wouldn't work anyway because in order to restore time, the Enterprise and its crew would have to sacrifice themselves to kill Nero and save the Kelvin and its crew, as doing so would reset time to how we've known it to be. So instead, the Enterprise crew comes together (with Spock Prime's help) to stop Nero, and I don't think it would be risky to bet that they will.
However, because the Kelvin (and Kirk's father) was still destroyed by Nero, and (this is all supposition, but bear with me) Starfleet, not having dealt with a threat like Nero's before, had to make a lot of changes to ensure they'd be able to face such a threat, the end of the movie would not see Kirk, Spock, and the gang lead the same lives previously established in Trek past. Any movie or television series that follow up that movie will be kept in that timeline.
If you watch the most recent trailer, Spock is rescuing his parents from Vulcan as it's being torn apart by Nero's device. They're older than they were in an earlier scene from the trailer, where Amanda is cradling Baby Spock while Sarek sits with them. From that, I can figure that the Enterprise doesn't time travel back to when the Kelvin is about to be attacked. That wouldn't work anyway because in order to restore time, the Enterprise and its crew would have to sacrifice themselves to kill Nero and save the Kelvin and its crew, as doing so would reset time to how we've known it to be. So instead, the Enterprise crew comes together (with Spock Prime's help) to stop Nero, and I don't think it would be risky to bet that they will.
However, because the Kelvin (and Kirk's father) was still destroyed by Nero, and (this is all supposition, but bear with me) Starfleet, not having dealt with a threat like Nero's before, had to make a lot of changes to ensure they'd be able to face such a threat, the end of the movie would not see Kirk, Spock, and the gang lead the same lives previously established in Trek past. Any movie or television series that follow up that movie will be kept in that timeline.
But that's the thing - this isn't the same Jim Kirk. How could it be?
It's not just a matter of getting a scholarship or whatnot - Kirk's entire life will be different. Remember, Nero's interference starts at the moment of Kirk's *birth*, if not before that.
It's all up for grabs, what kind of person Kirk turns out to be in the new timeline. He might not be the same man, might not have the same drives (if indeed he has any at all). I don't see how this Kirk could turn out anything like the real Kirk without one whopper of a coincidence happening.
Oh, I know what you're saying, now, and you're right. Where we differ is I think it's the same Kirk in the sense that all that makes Kirk himself is there, but he's living a life that exploits his "skills" differently (squandering them at first, it seems) under much different circumstances than Kirk in the TOS timeline.
The Kirk we see in the movie will NOT (very likely) lead the same life as TOS Kirk. But he IS Kirk in EVERY way the TOS Kirk is, but he is ANOTHER Kirk living ANOTHER life in ANOTHER timeline apparently created by Nero. I'm undecided myself about whether or not I find that approach satisfying in a story touted to be about how these people we watched on TOS came to be (if I'm even right about it).
How can those two go together?
We are all products of our upbringing. If you take a set of identical twins and raise them in completely different environments, they are not going to turn out the same - not even close. Same difference here. How can we expect the Jim Kirk raised by two loving parents to be anything like the one raised by an abusive, violent, drunk bastard of an uncle? Even assuming he still lives in the same city, attends the same schools, has the same friends, etc.?
To put it another way: "Mirror, Mirror". Those two Kirks were obviously nothing alike...
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Well if that is your standard for judging which characters are "real," then you haven't seen most of the "real" characters for a very long time.
In "The City on the Edge of Forever," the landing party saw a timeline in which Edith Keeler died alone, then they saw a timeline where McCoy saved Keeler and the Federation did not exist, and then they saw a timeline where Edith Keeler died with Kirk, Spock, and McCoy standing over her body.
It was that third timeline that they beamed up to at the end of the episode. So everyone on the Enterprise (Chekov, et al.) was from a different timeline than Kirk, Spock, and McCoy were from at the start of the episode. (Granted, the only difference is that Kirk, Spock and McCoy witnessed Keeler's death in the past of Timeline 3, while none of them were present in Timeline 1, and only McCoy was present in Timeline 2, but still, it is three different timelines, with three different pasts, even if all the characters are the same in the first and last timelines.)
Or, going back to the "Yesterday's Enterprise" example, Tasha Yar and her fellow officers on the Enterprise-D were as "real" as any other characters (in fact, if Tasha Yar looked in a history book, she would see that Edith Keeler died while three mysterious men stood on the side of the street and did nothing to save her). All the events shown in TOS were the past of the characters in "Yesterday's Enterprise."
When Tasha Yar (from "Timeline G") went back in time and changed the past, she created a new timeline ("Timeline H") where the Klingons were not at war with the UFP, Worf joined the crew of the Enterprise-D, and she, the time traveler, would have a half-Romulan daughter, Sela, who would later meet Worf and Picard of "Timeline H," which her mother created. This Picard of "Timeline H," after meeting Sela, would later travel back in time to 1900 (in Time's Arrow"), where he would meet Guinan, who would later meet this Picard again in the Nexus in 2300 (in "Generations"), and then, 70 years later, she would tell Tasha Yar to go back in time on the Enterprise-C, because the Picard and the timeline Guinan saw around her were not the same ones from the (at least) past two times when she had already met Picard from the timeline Tasha Yar had not yet created.
My point is that the "real" characters you remember from TNG (Worf, Sela, Picard, etc.) exist only because of the actions caused by Tasha Yar and the characters in "Yesterday's Enterprise." They are from different timelines, but they are all equally "real" characters. (If you choose to like the characters from one timeline, but not the characters from the other timeline, that's your personal choice, and has nothing to do with the quality of the episode or of the story the writers came up with.)
In the TNG episode "Second Chances," we learned that the Riker we had been watching all these years was actually a transporter-duplicate beamed up during a plasma storm, and the original Riker had remained trapped on the planet for ten years. They were both the same Riker, with the same memories and same DNA and same fingerprints, but for 10 years they both had lived with different experiences. Yet at the end of the episode, rather than pressing the Reset Button™ the producers allowed the second Riker to continue to live, and he would later show up on a DS9 episode. They were both "real" Rikers, and we could care about both of them, despite their different histories.
In the "Voyager" finale, "Endgame," Janeway and the crew of the Voyager got back to Earth after 20 years in the Delta Quadrant, but then Admiral Janeway went back in time, changed the history of all of those characters, and helped the Voyager get back to Earth immediately. So, in Janeway's original timeline, she would have been trapped in the Delta Quadrant during the events of "Star Trek: Nemesis," but in the new timeline created by Admiral Janeway, her younger self returned to Earth and became an admiral at Starfleet Command 20 years earlier, as seen in "Star Trek: Nemesis."
So, in fact, the entire movie "Star Trek: Nemesis" takes place in an alternate timeline created by one time traveler in one episode of "Star Trek: Voyager" (in exactly the same way that the timeline in "Star Trek XI" was created by one time-traveling Romulan). So does that mean you shouldn't care about the Picard and Data and Riker and Worf in "Nemesis"? Maybe in Janeway's original timeline, Data lived for another 50 years, maybe Worf was a Klingon ambassador instead of an Enterprise-E officer, maybe Riker and Troi never got married. Who knows. (In the "Voyager" finale, we only learned the fates of the Voyager crew, not anyone else in the Galaxy, so we don't know to what extent history was changed by Janeway.)
In other words, if the movie "Star Trek: Nemesis" had taken place in the "original" timeline, Picard and Riker would be sitting around saying, "I wonder what ever happened to the U.S.S. Voyager 10 years ago. I guess we'll never hear from them again." Instead, we see the new, alternate timeline, where Picard gets a call from Admiral Janeway at Starfleet Command.
In the "Star Trek: Enterprise" two-part episode "In a Mirror, Darkly," we saw two hours of a story that took place entirely in the Mirror Universe, with alternate versions of the characters we knew. But, in my opinon, it was one of the most entertaining episodes of the series, and I was interested to see how Commander Archer and the other Mirror Universe characters would solve the problems they were faced with. Even though we were not watching the "real" characters in that episode, they were still connected with the rest of the "Star Trek" Universe, and in fact the episode had many nods to continuity in Trek history, even though we had never seen these characters before, and would never see them again.
So as we have seen in "Yesterday's Enterprise," and "Endgame," and "Star Trek: Nemesis" and all of the Mirror Universe episodes, we can still enjoy the story and watch the characters solve problems, even if they are different characters than those we have seen before.
If you think back to the first episode of TNG, Picard and Data and Worf were all new characters that we had never seen before, and the Enterprise looked different from any starship we had seen before, but we still learned to care about these characters and the problems they faced, and the time paradoxes they were involved in, because the writers wrote good stories that made us care about them.
Let's give Abrams and Orci the same benefit of the doubt that we gave Roddenberry and Berman when they created the first TNG episode.
Just because the movie is about new characters in a new timeline, that doesn't mean we shouldn't care about them and their problems. Lots of people enjoyed "Iron Man" last summer, even though they had never seen Tony Stark before. That's the point of ANY movie (including the last 10 Trek movies): to introduce the characters, present them with a problem, and make the audience care about whether the characters will solve the problem.
When Marty McFly got home at the end of "Back to the Future," his mother was thin and his father was a successful writer and Marty owned a new truck. He was clearly in an alternate timeline from the one he remembered, but he continued to live in that new timeline and have further adventures in it. And we continued to care about those characters, even if they now had different histories. I think that's exactly what the producers of "Star Trek XI" are going for: familiar characters, but different. But you can still care about them.
Trekguide.com that was an excellant post. You even have me convinced.
My only concern about this alternate timeline/universe thing is this: if there aren't changes in timeline(s) but universe(s), then why the hell does Spock go back in time to "fix" it? What is he fixing? Not his timeline according to what I've read. Am I wrong on this? He's going to fix the history of a new universe that was created because Nero tried to screw up the past. What would be the point of that? This new universe gets its own, new history (possibly a bad one where Nero is ruler????) It doesn't really make sense to me. Also, what happens to the "original" timeline in this theory? Apparently, what happens is...nothing? It can never be changed with time travel? If that is the case, then the original people (the one the OP says he won't recognize in this new movie) still exist there?
I'm completely confused about all of this.
My only concern about this alternate timeline/universe thing is this: if there aren't changes in timeline(s) but universe(s), then why the hell does Spock go back in time to "fix" it? What is he fixing? Not his timeline according to what I've read. Am I wrong on this? He's going to fix the history of a new universe that was created because Nero tried to screw up the past. What would be the point of that? This new universe gets its own, new history (possibly a bad one where Nero is ruler????) It doesn't really make sense to me. Also, what happens to the "original" timeline in this theory? Apparently, what happens is...nothing? It can never be changed with time travel? If that is the case, then the original people (the one the OP says he won't recognize in this new movie) still exist there?
I'm completely confused about all of this.
Trekguide.com that was an excellant post. You even have me convinced.
My only concern about this alternate timeline/universe thing is this: if there aren't changes in timeline(s) but universe(s), then why the hell does Spock go back in time to "fix" it? What is he fixing? Not his timeline according to what I've read. Am I wrong on this? He's going to fix the history of a new universe that was created because Nero tried to screw up the past. What would be the point of that? This new universe gets its own, new history (possibly a bad one where Nero is ruler????) It doesn't really make sense to me. Also, what happens to the "original" timeline in this theory? Apparently, what happens is...nothing? It can never be changed with time travel? If that is the case, then the original people (the one the OP says he won't recognize in this new movie) still exist there?
I'm completely confused about all of this.
Perhaps Nero's plan involves retrieving something from the past, which requires that he do the timeline altering stuff in order to get to it, so it's not really about killing George Kirk or blowing up Vulcan... they're just in the way somehow.
Sorta John Titor-y.
TrekGuide: How can you be sure that at least some of the examples you mentioned, were not in fact predestination paradoxes? Meaning, there was never any original timeline where they didn't happen, they were always supposed to occur. (Such as ST:FC)
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