It isn't. That's my whole point. It's being treated as the solution in this specific case. The fact that other stories did things differently has nothing to do with it. This is this story, not those.
It's a part of the reality that those other stories belong to, though, and was designed to from the beginning, once they chose to tie it back with a time travel accident involving the original Spock. That never changed in Pegg's model -- which isn't even canon to begin with, so the TV shows and movies have canonical seniority. (If there was ever a space Pope for
Star Trek, the Protestant Reformation happened a long time ago.)
But you can't expect the entire franchise to shape itself purely to satisfy your own preferences. You are not the only person who's entitled to enjoy Star Trek. The reason the franchise has been so successful is because it's always appealed to a wide variety of different tastes. It's offered different things to different people. You don't have to like every single part of it, because it's diverse enough to have a lot of different parts with different emphases. That's the beauty of it. Each part is different, so collectively they satisfy a larger audience. Infinite diversity in infinite combinations.
Sorry a tangent that was more to explain why I'm not big on these movies in the first place, not an argument to explain my opinion. Obviously, none of us can expect the franchise to cater to us, but we can still discuss why we don't like it, and all that.
No, The Wrath of Khan did that. TMP was made for the pre-1977 SF-movie paradigm, a thoughtful, intellectual, idea-driven story, but almost every movie from TWOK onward has been pushed into the Star Wars mold of space battles and explosions and evil enemies.
Not sure I quite agree with that.
Star Wars has a lot more than just more space battles. It takes more from the fantasy genre then
Trek does, tends to focus on variations of the "Hero's Journey," and the clash between good and evil.
Star Trek isn't that big of scale, and even the latter stuff never was.
Star Wars also deals a lot with destiny; Anakin is destined to fulfill a prophecy, Luke is destined to become a Jedi and play a part in defeating the Sith, etc., a far cry from the repeated message we get in
Star Trek that people make their own decisions about their futures, self-determination is the way, even showing mere mortals sometimes stopping the gods themselves (through the Prophets in "Reckoning" [DS9]).
And what do we get a lot of in the Abramsverse? A lot of discussion of how Kirk is destined to be more than just a common kid. How Spock is destined to be the first officer on the
Enterprise, etc. That's
Star Wars stuff, not
Star Trek stuff. (Not to mention Abramsverse loosey-goosey fudging of science is more up
Star Wars' alley then the technobabble explanations and puzzles of traditional
Trek.)
(Ironically,
Force Awakens has far less to do with people being destined; Finn choses to not live the life of a solider that he was trained to do, Rey needs to decide to take the Jedi path for herself, etc. So, is
Star Trek rubbing off on
Star Wars a little bit?)
Almost every Trek movie since 1982 has been more dumbed-down and violent and superficial than television Trek, because that's what society has expected of big-budget science fiction movies ever since Lucas and Spielberg came along and shifted the paradigm.
Hmm,
The Voyage Home,
The Undiscovered Country,
Generations, and
Insurrection come to mind as not being overly dumbed-down, and asking questions that the franchise is known for. In all honesty, the only
Trek movies I've seen that fit your description are
Nemesis (and even that had some token effort at being more than that),
Star Trek (2009), and
Star Trek Into Darkness. Besides, space battles were a part of
Trek since "Balance of Terror."
Have you seen Beyond yet? I agree with most of the reviewers that it feels a lot more like classic Trek than the previous two movies did, although it retains a lot of the usual action-movie excesses that have been part of the franchise since TWOK.
Not yet. I'm debating, since I've heard it's generally better than it's predecessors (and the trailers do have me curious), but as I've made clear, I have found this installment in the franchise to be not to my tastes. (If it's closer in tone to the original stuff, which is what I've been wanting these movies to be, regardless of continuity, I might have to check it out.)
Once more, it doesn't have to. This is imaginary. This is a storytelling choice to free the writers of future movies from the arbitrary and limiting constraint of exact adherence to Prime continuity -- a constraint they never really followed anyway, except in lip service.
Yeah, they only paid lip service to it by addressing some of the bigger mistakes, referencing previous events in later episodes, making several theatrical sequels to TV episodes, etc. Sorry, I'm not buying it.
Also, for the sake of discussion, I found these observations in an
essay on the fan website E
x Astris Scientia:
"As outlined in the article on the Realism of (Science) Fiction, Star Trek is designed as a TV series with internal consistency, as opposed to shows that are frequently rebooted or even take pleasure in creating deliberate continuity errors. During The Original Series' three seasons from 1966 to 1969 there was no obvious canon policy, like there was no particular attention to inter-episode continuity either. But as the fictional universe kept growing, it was necessary to come up with rules what has to be taken into account by future writers (the canon), as well as with a collection of such canon data for reference (The Star Trek Encyclopedia and a possible forerunner that may have existed behind the scenes for already some time). Keeping events in new episodes compliant with canon has become a quality mark of the show."
"Canon may be seen as an obstacle to creativity, simply because not all possibilities are allowed to be exploited. On the other hand, in a creative process canon boils down to a simple list of what has been done before and what not. This is not really a creative limitation. On the contrary, it can help avoid rehashes. Surely there is always a risk that writers consciously recycle plots just because they think it is a good idea to show familiar situations already established in the canon. Still, they better closely base their stories on canon events than just on clichés.
"The knowledge about canon may even have a quite beneficial impact on storylines. A prominent example is DS9: "Trials and Tribble-ations" with its slavish adherence to the canon events of TOS: "The Trouble with Tribbles". Another one is the Vulcan arc of ENT: "The Forge", "The Awakening" and "Kir'Shara" that successfully removes a previous continuity error concerning Vulcan Mind Melds from canon. These episodes are commonly said to be among the most creative and most enticing installments of all Star Trek."
Any thoughts or responses?
The technobabble is just a rationalization for a decision that makes sense in real-world creative terms. Since the Trek universe is purely an imaginary construct, its "rules" work in whatever way the storytellers need them to work. That is especially the case with Trek time travel, where they have constantly reinvented the rules as they went along.
But I'll say again, that there are some stuff that was done consistently enough that we can construct a time travel model that's the norm (like how time travelers are protected from changes to the future). Is there a reason beyond "well they didn't always follow it" that that's not a legitimate argument? We assume that the shields can't be beamed through despite the fact that some episode broke that rule.
I did my best in Watching the Clock to construct the illusion that the Trek universe has a consistent set of physical laws pertaining to time travel, but I can guarantee you that it does not. They've always, always made it up as they went along. Heck, the only reason I wanted to write that book in the first place was because Trek time travel was so inconsistent and self-contradictory that I wanted to try to bring some kind of order to it for a change.
I didn't know that that was part of the idea for that book. Interesting.
Yes, that's exactly the point -- that it treated those two ideas as interchangeable. And realistically, that makes sense. You can't "erase" a timeline or overwrite it with another. If there are two different versions of the same moment in time, then by definition they exist simultaneously, side by side. One cannot "replace" the other, because they are simultaneous, not consecutive. So the sci-fi conceit of one timeline erasing another is stupid and wrong. It's dramatically useful because it creates higher stakes, but it's scientifically idiotic. Realistically, any timeline, even one created by time travel, would remain permanently in existence once it was created. (I did come up with a physics fudge to justify how coexisting alternate timelines could eventually merge together after the period of their coexistence, but I would've very much preferred to go with the permanent model, because it makes far more physical and logical sense.)
I've been giving the episode more thought, and I'm starting to think that we're dealing with one timeline that's changing; why would Spock need to go back in time to Vulcan, if they were in a new timeline, and so would just need to get to the right reality? Also Kirk stayed behind in the Spock-less timeline near the Guardian and was when Spock returned after fixing things. If the Spock-less timeline was just another reality that always existed, wouldn't Kirk be still there, instead of back in his time time when Spock returned?
Put another way, "pre-existing" is an improper term to use, because it assumes a subjective definition of the order of events, and is thus inapplicable once you step outside of time and "before" and "after" become interchangeable and relative. Nothing in the larger sweep of the timelines is "pre-" or "post-" anything. Timelines just exist. Before and after are just directions within them, relative to an individual worldline. So it's invalid to speak of them as absolutes.
How does that work then, when characters work to make a change in the timeline, like the way the Borg-ified Earth and TNG crew-fixed timelines wouldn't have happened in
First Contact if the Borg had not chosen to use time travel as a weapon in that battle?
As far as there being no "before" and "after," what about the "Trouble With Tribbles" and "Trials and Tribble-lations" episodes, where we see how things were "before" and "after" Arne Darvin's use of the Orb of Time? For example, we have a "before" where the DS9 crew weren't around to make sure that things went according to the history books, and one where they did. Would't that be evidence of a "before" and "after"? Or how "Past Prologue, Parts I and II" (DS9) has Sisko taking over Bell's place in the Bell Riots, using his knowledge of the original Bell's actions to guide his decisions? Or "Accession" (DS9), where a Bajoran poet from the 22nd century, who was lost in the wormhole, briefly emerges in the present, before being sent to his home time to live out his life? Kira specifically ends the show with memories of the "original" timeline where the poet was lost, despite the fact that they're now living in a timeline where he was not lost.
I believe it was in Harlan Ellison's original script for "City." I remember reading the comics adaptation of that recently, and there were some lines that reminded me of that bit from "Yesteryear."
Was that the comic were they retold the original draft (with the drug dealer, and all that?)
What's consistency got to do with it? Just because something is an exception, that doesn't mean it can't happen at all, just that it's unusual. Heck, warp drive and time travel are themselves extreme exceptions to the laws of physics. They would only be achievable in the most unusual of circumstances, by using exotic substances that don't occur naturally in order to bend the laws of nature to their greatest extremes. So if you wanted to limit yourself to what was consistent with the normal operation of physics, then that would pretty much exclude every Star Trek story ever.
I don't want to limit
Star Trek to real physics. The point I was trying to make is that I think the fictional science of the show should override real-life science when there's a contradiction between the two.
More broadly, fiction in general is about the exceptions to the rules. It's about the cases where things go wrong, where missions aren't routine, where experiments fail, where disasters happen. Most stories are about extreme and atypical situations, because typical ones are boring.
I understand keeping things fresh, but changing the process by which things work just gets confusing. The point of time travel stories isn't how they work, it's about what the characters do in the different time periods.
Yeah, I saw that yesterday when I looked up its USS Franklin article. It treats it as a ship that existed in both timelines, and then talks about how it was found in the "alternate reality" (why oh why won't they use the official label?) and remains lost in the Prime reality.
I happen to know that changing titles of wiki pages is a pain in the butt, so I wouldn't blame
Memory Alpha for keeping their old terminology when it gets the point across (and the Kelvin timeline already has numerous nicknames that are well known, anyways). On top of that, their decision to not covert to Pegg's model makes sense; it's not canonical info, and
Memory Alpha only logs canon information. (Also, they do mention Pegg's idea in the behind the scenes sections.)
