Temis, you're right about Trek's time travel rules being loose-to-nonexistant but, with the possible exception of TVH, Trek has always made restoring a timeline polluted by time travel the point of all its time travel adventures.
No, many "Trek" episodes permanently change the past, and then continue on in that new timeline, just as this new movie does.
In "Yesterday's Enterprise," Lt. Yar left her original timeline, where the Federation was at war with the Klingons, and she stayed in that new timeline and lived to have a half-Romulan daughter. No one fixed that change to history.
In "Endgame," Admiral Janeway went back in time and helped the U.S.S. Voyager defeat the Borg and get back to Earth 20 years early, and she stayed in that new timeline. No one fixed that major change in history. In fact, "Star Trek: Nemesis" took place in that new timeline, since we saw Admiral Janeway at Starfleet Command in that movie. (In the original timeline, Janeway was still stuck in the Delta Quadrant.)
In the "Enterprise" episode "Shockwave," a Paraagan mining colony is destroyed by the Suliban, following directions from FutureGuy, to implicate Starfleet. Daniels, from another future timeline, states that the colony was not destroyed in the original timeline. Even though everything works out for the Enterprise crew in the end, the Paraagan colony was still destroyed, and thousands of aliens were still dead -- much like this new movie; Ambassador Spock got the crew back together and the Enterprise's mission continued, but Vulcan was still destroyed.
My point is: Everything that happened via time travel in "Star Trek XI" has happened in a half-dozen episodes before.
Sometimes they try to "fix the timeline" (like in "Star Trek: First Contact" and "The City on the Edge of Forever"), but other times one or two characters will go back in time, screw up history, and just leave it that way, as Yar did in "Yesterday's Enterprise," Janeway did in "Endgame," and Spock did in "Star Trek XI."
it's quite possible that Spock Prime wasn't the Spock we knew, either. He could be from any of a near-infinitude of universes adjacent to the one we we're familiar with.
Well, technically, the Ambassador Spock we saw in this movie was from the alternate timeline created by Admiral Janeway in "Endgame," and which continued in "Star Trek: Nemesis." Those two episodes are the only ones that take place in the timeline where the Voyager got back to Earth before the destruction of Romulus. In the original timeline, the Voyager was still in the Delta Quadrant on Stardate 2387.
This Spock is from a different timeline than the one we saw in "Unification, Part II." That Spock was also in an alternate timeline -- the one created by Lt. Yar in "Yesterday's Enterprise," since Spock met Sela, the daughter of Yar from the original timeline, in "Unification, Part II," so that Spock was in a different timeline than the Spock we last saw in "Star Trek VI."
So the last four times we have seen Spock, they have each been a Spock from an alternate timeline. (1. STVI-Spock; 2. "Yesterday's Enterprise"/"Unification"-Spock; 3. Post-"Endgame"/"Nemesis"-Spock; and 4. Post-Nero/Quinto-Spock)
What's the point of following characters over a long time if there are a bunch of existing possibilities? I think fiction, even SF, shouldn't go too far, especially since the hopeful premise of Star Trek is that it is the future we will grow into; multiple timelines increases the fiction at the expense of the message and closeness to us.
Well, "Star Trek" has never been about our actual future, at least since 1996, when Khan and the Eugenics Wars were not front-page news.
Maybe we are living in an alternate timeline created by three time-traveling Ferengi crashing in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. ...
If you pay attention to all the time-travel stories over the past 40 years, history has been permanently altered repeatedly in "Star Trek."
Usually it's something small, like Sisko's photo replacing Bell's photo in history books, or Edith Keeler dying with three Starfleet officers standing over her instead of dying alone, and the new future is pretty much the same otherwise.
But other times, such as in "Endgame" or "Yesterday's Enterprise" or DS9's "The Visitor," we see the original timeline play out for several decades, only to have a time traveler go back and make a major change, setting history on an entirely new course. This new movie fits into that category.
We can still care about these characters from the original timelines, like Lt. Yar, Admiral Janeway, old Jake Sisko, or Ambassador Spock, even if they create a whole new timeline where their futures will never happen.
I really don't like the idea that going back in time creates a new alternative reality because I don't like the idea that in one timeline the crew never returned to their future in TVH and everybody on Earth died.
As we saw in TNG's "Parallels," there are many timelines where bad things happened (e.g., Picard was killed by the Borg, the Borg assimilated the Federation, etc.), but there are also many timelines where good things happen (Worf's birthday cake was chocolate instead of yellow -- yay!).
So there could very well be a timeline where there are no whales, and everyone on Earth dies. But there was also a timeline where a Klingon Bird-of-Prey brought some whales to the future just in time. There is a timeline where Picard visits Vulcan in the 24th Century, and another timeline where Vulcan is destroyed on Stardate 2258.42.
"Star Trek" established long ago that there are many alternate realities, from the Mirror Universe to the timelines depicted in "Parallels" and the pocket universe in TNG's "Remember Me." They do not diminish the dramatic impact of the characters and stories; to the contrary, having multiple timelines and duplicates of many characters makes the "Star Trek" universe that much more interesting.
That's because Spock and Nero did not travel into their own past. They instead travelled into the past of an alternate universe, much like the Defiant did when it slid out from "The Tholian Web" and into "In a Mirror Darkly." That explains all the implicit pre-existing discrepancies between the new continuity and the old--they were never one and the same to begin with.
I prefer to think that the original timeline got screwed with Star Trek:First Contact rather then Star Trek XI. Think about it... that's when the Borg was first introduced before they should of been, and that led to the events of Enterprise.
Yes, "First Contact" started the alternate "Enterprise" timeline, perhaps influencing the naming of the NX-01. But even before "Enterprise," other factions in the Temporal Cold War caused the Suliban attack that led to premature first contact between the Klingons and Earth. That, alone, set "Enterprise" off in a different timeline from TOS. Not to mention the changes to the timeline in "Shockwave" and the Xindi attack on Earth in "The Expanse." If the Borg didn't knock "Enterprise" out of the original TOS timeline, then half a dozen other major changes to history certainly did.
By 100 years later, not only was there premature contact with the Klingons, but it's quite likely that humans also had premature first contact with the Romulans following the Temporal Cold War. So by the time Nero stumbled into history, he found himself already in the seventh or eighth deviation from the TOS timeline, even before he destroyed the Kelvin and Vulcan.
Even if Nero and Spock had not been in this movie, it would still be a SEQUEL to all the events in "Enterprise," not a PREQUEL to TOS, and so would still be in an alternate timeline that has nothing to do with Nero.
A straight-ahead reboot with no time-travel fig leaf (no Nimoy, sadly) would have been preferable but then it wouldn't give me this much fun puzzling over a nothing.
That already happened. It was called "Galaxy Quest." Just a completely new story borrowing characters and story elements from "Star Trek." But it wasn't a "Star Trek" movie, and wouldn't have been, even if they had called it "Star Trek."
The thing that makes "Star Trek" special, and sets it apart from "Star Wars" and "Battlestar Galactica" and "Space: 1999," is its 40 years of history and 700 episodes as an ongoing, continuous universe.
Creating an entirely new series, and naming it "Star Trek," but without continuing the same universe, would erase what makes "Star Trek" special.
"Battlestar Galactica" could get away with it because that original series only lasted for a year, with a lame follow-up series, and was forgotten for 20 years. But, aside for a couple five-year breaks, "Star Trek" has been on our big and small screens continuously for the past 40 years, as an ongoing narrative. This new movie did exactly what it needed to do: creating a jumping-on point for new fans, while remaining tethered to the narrative and characters that we have known for 40 years.
Yeah, but the idea that the timeline hasn't been replaced flies in the face of every time travel story Trek has in its canon
How do we know that our Chapel, Rand, Cartwright and Sarek didn't drown during the Whale Probe Crisis, when the windows broke apart, and Kirk and his crew returned to a different, parallel timeline and the whales spoke to a different probe than the one Kirk left in Earth's orbit?
Exactly. "Star Trek" has never had a rule book that defines the modes and consequences of time travel.
We always see the characters slightly confused about what will happen whenever time travel is involved, because every time we see time travel, it is through a different method, and the results are always different (change history, fix history, become trapped in a causality loop, visit an alternate timeline, erase yourself in a paradox, etc.).
If you ever think that you "know" the "Star Trek" Rules of Time Travel, then you have been tricked once again by the old "camera's point of view follows the time travelers' point of view" paradox. Whether a time traveler changes the past, or fixes the past, or circles through the past without affecting anything (as in TNG's "Time's Arrow"), the cameras always end up with the time traveler at the end, whether it's Lt. Yar in "Yesterday's Enterprise," Admiral Janeway in "Endgame," or Picard and crew in "Star Trek: First Contact."
So, even in contradictory situations, whether Janeway completely changes her past, or Picard "fixes" an already-changed past to resemble his original timeline, we tend to think that whatever timeline the cameras are showing at the end of the story is the "one true timeline," when in fact there could just as easily have been cameras showing two or three other timelines at the same moment.
Obviously, we only see one timeline at a time (except in "Parallels,"), so that creates the illusion that one timeline "erases" all others, because we only see the one being filmed at the moment. But don't mistake the camera's point of view for actual "Laws of Time Travel in Star Trek."
As for TAS, we do know that Spock returned to a different future in "Yesteryear": one where his pet sehlat had died several years earlier than he had in Spock's own childhood timeline.
Yes, that is one good example among dozens that history has been permanently changed, and the familiar characters are actually living in many different alternate timelines throughout the series.
Whether one sehlat died due to time travel, or the entire planet Vulcan was destroyed due to time travel, doesn't really make any difference in cosmic terms. They both are evidence that a new timline was created. While the same characters may exist in the same positions on the same starship, they are still in an alternate timeline. The magnitude of historical changes makes no difference in the mechanics of time travel.
Whether a time traveler goes back and steps on a single butterfly, or blows up the entire Galaxy, he is still creating a new timeline. In fact, just the act of going back in time with knowledge of the future changes the timeline, whether the time traveler intends to change anything or not.
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Well said. 
