Orci on Start Trek, timelines, canon and everything (SPOILERS)

[Captain Robert April]

Maybe they'll be handing out candy to draw in the non-fans.

 

[Siwilliams]

And people were saying that mirror universe type of star trek movie would be no good, and that is exactly what this will be an alternate universe/timeline...uh oh

 

[M'Sharak]

Well if those who would enjoy the film are part of the "drooling masses" then the nerds a geeks who spend endless hours critiquing "canon" and "continuity violations"... fit right into their own catagory of dribbling droolers.

I asked before that labels like "droolers" be dropped; they don't help discussion at all.

Oh I can't wait till someone with more patience to write up a response on all this wakes up...

Nor do things like this.


And then we have this pointless personal crap:

Nothing new here.

And the same can be said for any of you. If that doesn't just make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside, there's nothing that will, unless of course you eat a kitten.

I'm not the one writing paragraphs on what the film "should" be. I don't eat kittens, I eat puppies. More fiber.

No, you write short guttoral responses as to why anyone criticizing the movie isn't really a Star Trek fan.

http://i137.photobucket.com/albums/q203/captainexcabier/funny/Animal Abuse/dogfound.jpg

Whatever, enjoy your puppy, pot.

Sometimes I use a pot, other times a chargrill. But boy is that puppy deee-lish!

number6, you wrote some good posts farther up, but this kind of chain-yanking wasn't needed. Captain X, you seem to have gotten your trolling of vegetarians over in Misc. mixed up with your own chain-yanking over here. There has been some pretty awesome discussion going on in this thread and this petty garbage is only getting in the way; I'd like you both to drop it now.

 

[Jackson_Roykirk]

I was actually pretty put off by Phelps being the bad guy in MI. Cruise really did ruin that for me, but MI:3 was the closest they got to nailing the flavour of the show, which I watched regularly. I thought Transformers was ghey!

Yeah -- I was too.

This is the kind of wholesale character personality trait change that I hope does not happen in Star Trek XI (although I have no reason to believe it will happen in Star Trek).

I don't mind finding out that Kirk was a snot-nosed punk when he was 12 years old, as long as I see a believable transformation from that snot-nosed kid to the character I knew in TOS (...granted I can't really tell from the little glimpse of 12-year old Kirk in the trailer WHAT kind of kid he actaully is -- I was just using that as an example.)

 

[TrekGuide.com]

So, if my perspective is true, time travel would either be entirely impossible or would always... without exception... lead to the same timeline you know. You'd never be able to change your own past because it's all "settled" already... anything you do literally already happened in your own past.

What you are describing is a predestination paradox, where people can go back in time as often as they want, but history is never changed.

This is the theory of time travel depicted in the movies "Primer" and the new Spanish film "Timecrimes." It is also perfectly illustrated in TNG's two-part episode "Time's Arrow."

However, there have been dozens of time travel episodes in Trek, and the "predestination paradox" theory is definitely the minority.

In fact, every writer, from Harlan Ellison to Brannon Braga to Roberto Orci, who writes a Trek time travel story just makes up a completely new theory of time travel. Half of these theories do not hold up to logical scrutiny on their own, and most of the others conflict with each other (when you take them all to be happening in the same fictional universe).

From the beginning, the producers should have formed a very clear "Star Trek" rule that "This is what happens when someone time travels to the past," and then strictly enforced that rule in every time travel episode.

However, since there obviously has never been such a rule in the 40-year history of "Star Trek," I find it curious that so many people are complaining that this new film is in some way "breaking the rules."

 

[Jackson_Roykirk]

From the beginning, the producers should have formed a very clear "Star Trek" rule that "This is what happens when someone time travels to the past," and then strictly enforced that rule in every time travel episode.

However, since there obviously has never been such a rule in the 40-year history of "Star Trek," I find it curious that so many people are complaining that this new film is in some way "breaking the rules."

 

[Cary L. Brown]

So, if my perspective is true, time travel would either be entirely impossible or would always... without exception... lead to the same timeline you know. You'd never be able to change your own past because it's all "settled" already... anything you do literally already happened in your own past.

What you are describing is a predestination paradox, where people can go back in time as often as they want, but history is never changed.

No, I'm not.

A "predestination paradox" is a LITERARY INVENTION, nothing more and nothing less. My personally-preferred idea, on the other hand, denies the very idea of "time travel" as any sci-fi storytelling effort has ever played with it. But by arguing that, you seem to be missing my REAL point (immediately after that in my post)

This is the theory of time travel depicted in the movies "Primer" and the new Spanish film "Timecrimes." It is also perfectly illustrated in TNG's two-part episode "Time's Arrow."

However, there have been dozens of time travel episodes in Trek, and the "predestination paradox" theory is definitely the minority.

And since all of that is literary in nature... not scientific in nature (more like "pseudo-scientific"), that merely supports what my point was.

In fact, every writer, from Harlan Ellison to Brannon Braga to Roberto Orci, who writes a Trek time travel story just makes up a completely new theory of time travel. Half of these theories do not hold up to logical scrutiny on their own, and most of the others conflict with each other (when you take them all to be happening in the same fictional universe).

From the beginning, the producers should have formed a very clear "Star Trek" rule that "This is what happens when someone time travels to the past," and then strictly enforced that rule in every time travel episode.

And, once again, you're talking literary tools, which isn't what I was discussing at all.

However, since there obviously has never been such a rule in the 40-year history of "Star Trek," I find it curious that so many people are complaining that this new film is in some way "breaking the rules."

The point of my comment, however, wasn't that "this or that literary tool is used more often in cheesy-sci-fi-show writing.

Some of you will say "well, that's nonsense, because {fill in the blank}."

And you know what? You might be right. Because there's NO REAL SCIENCE WHATSOEVER behind "time travel." None. Everything else, without exception, falls into the realm of fantasy.

Doesn't mean that someday we might not learn something about it. But as of today, it's just fantasy, nothing more and nothing less.

​

Which, of course, led into the main point of what I wrote:

That's what bugs me about this article (and several others printed which follow similar patterns).

It says "real science says this" while what the articles really should be saying is that "In this episode of Star Trek - The Next Generation, the fictional character of Data spouted some pseudo-scientific technobabble that convinced a lot of non-scientists that this was somehow 'real.' "

​

 

[trekkerguy]

I asked before that labels like "droolers" be dropped; they don't help discussion at all.

I never saw this request, and I had stopped anyways.
The poster asked what was meant by a post several pages old so I explained.

Warning taken however.

 

[M'Sharak]

I asked before that labels like "droolers" be dropped; they don't help discussion at all.

I never saw this request, and I had stopped anyways.
The poster asked what was meant by a post several pages old so I explained.

Warning taken however.

I did see that it had been raised again in reference to a much older post. This was just a reminder that there had been a little too much of that sort of thing being thrown around on all sides and that it was time for it to go away.

 

[Psion]

Captain X, you seem to have gotten your trolling of vegetarians over in Misc. mixed up with your own chain-yanking over here. There has been some pretty awesome discussion going on in this thread and this petty garbage is only getting in the way; I'd like you both to drop it now.

Thanks for the heads-up, that was awesome! (The Vegetarians in Misc thread)

 

[trekkerguy]

I did see that it had been raised again in reference to a much older post. This was just a reminder that there had been a little too much of that sort of thing being thrown around on all sides and that it was time for it to go away.

Well, apologies still for going ahead with the comments in response.
I should have allowed it to drop.

From the beginning, the producers should have formed a very clear "Star Trek" rule that "This is what happens when someone time travels to the past," and then strictly enforced that rule in every time travel episode.

However, since there obviously has never been such a rule in the 40-year history of "Star Trek," I find it curious that so many people are complaining that this new film is in some way "breaking the rules."

And there we go.

 

[TrekGuide.com]

A "trekkian" wormhole is an instantaneous "shortcut" from one set of three-dimensional coordinates to another, after all. But there's absolutely no reason to assume that this form of shortcut would land you at the same point in the fourth dimension - time - where you departed from, is there?

That's exactly what happened in the Voyager episode "Eye of the Needle" -- they found a wormhole that led from the year 2371 in the Delta Quadrant to the year 2351 in the Alpha Quadrant.

So, if my perspective is true, time travel would either be entirely impossible or would always... without exception... lead to the same timeline you know. You'd never be able to change your own past because it's all "settled" already... anything you do literally already happened in your own past.

Again, that is the dictionary definition of a predestination paradox, or a "causality loop," if you prefer -- when you can go to the past, but are unable to change it.

 

[3D Master]

So, if my perspective is true, time travel would either be entirely impossible or would always... without exception... lead to the same timeline you know. You'd never be able to change your own past because it's all "settled" already... anything you do literally already happened in your own past.

Again, that is the dictionary definition of a predestination paradox, or a "causality loop," if you prefer -- when you can go to the past, but are unable to change it.

Actually, there's a bit more to it. A pre-destination paradox not only doesn't allow you to change the past, your time travel actually CREATES the very past you're trying to change.

 

[lawman]

All opinion, no fact.

When the initial question was, "so what if it ignores previously established Trek history?", what sort of "fact" exactly would you imagine entering into the discussion?

Of course it's a matter of opinion—that's all this thread is about.

So (allowing up-front that you disagree with the conclusion), what did you think of the opinion as expressed?

 

[lawman]

In "Yesterday's Enterprise," the battle with the Romulans caused photon torpedoes to be fired. The explosion of the torpedoes caused a spatial rift to form. The rift caused the Enterprise-C to disappear. This is the only possible chain of causality in the "original" timeline.

No, it is NOT the only possible chain of causality, in fact the fact that there was a timeline where there was peace between the Klingons and the Federation that got erased because the E-C traveled to the future tells us for a certain fact that that is NOT the chain of causality.

...

Anyway; as I said, unless you KNOW the exact causal relationships, every exact detail, you cannot talk about what came first or didn't, and IT DOESN'T MATTER. The only thing that matters, is that there was a peaceful timeline where the E-C got destroyed, this got changed because the E-C ended up in the future - there was time travel, and the time line got changed. We don't need to know any more.

I'm inclined to agree.

I find diagrams can be helpful when time travel is involved, and I look at it like this: imagine the timeline (relevant to this episode) as a "Y". Things are flowing unbroken up until the branching point, which is the ENT-C's battle with the Romulans.

At that moment, things go two ways: (1) the ENT-C disappears into the future, the Klingons get angry, and a war results; (2) the ENT-C sacrifices itself in battle, the Klingons are impressed, and no war results.

Branch (1) is the one experienced for the bulk of the episode. Branch (2) is the one we know from TNG episodes before and after this one.

It is IMHO meaningless to say that one timeline "came first" or "caused" the other here. (We're talking about temporal mechanics, after all, and such terminology implies a sort of uber-timeflow overlaying everything.) What they are, is mutually exclusive alternatives: separate paths forward.

It is, however, relevant to note that branch (1), the war, for all intents and purposes ceases to exist beyond the moment at which the ENT-C travels back through the rift to the branching point. Branch (2), OTOH, continues forward, and thus represents the "throughline" of Trek continuity to which I have referred.

 

[lawman]

^
^^ and that's fine.

It just seemed to me that some people had problems with the "alternate timeline" plot device from a scientific standpoint rather than from a dramatic standpoint.

(or even using the science to try to invalidate the dramatic plot point)

I haven't really seen much of that.

Speaking just for myself, at least, although I can and do quibble with TrekGuide about his interpretation of temporal mechanics (it bugs me when people insist that there's only one logical interpretation of something that's completely hypothetical!)...

...my objections to this film being a reboot (via alternate timeline or anything else) are coming entirely from a dramatic standpoint.

IOW, if it's not the same characters, merely similar ones, then it might as well be a movie about the Mirror Universe. Either one could be diverting in its own right, I suppose, but it's not something I'd want to see supplant the original version.

 

[lawman]

So, if my perspective is true, time travel would either be entirely impossible or would always... without exception... lead to the same timeline you know. You'd never be able to change your own past because it's all "settled" already... anything you do literally already happened in your own past.

Again, that is the dictionary definition of a predestination paradox, or a "causality loop," if you prefer -- when you can go to the past, but are unable to change it.

Interestingly enough, there actually is some real science (albeit obviously speculative) underlying this interpretation -- it's called the "Novikov self-consistency principle." Kip Thorne and others at Caltech have done some mathematical modeling of "closed timelike curves" that seems to back it up.

 

[trekkerguy]

All opinion, no fact.

When the initial question was, "so what if it ignores previously established Trek history?", what sort of "fact" exactly would you imagine entering into the discussion?

Of course it's a matter of opinion—that's all this thread is about.

So (allowing up-front that you disagree with the conclusion), what did you think of the opinion as expressed?

I thought the whole opinion discussion was over pages ago?
Or maybe that one was between me and another poster...
I don't even recall what the specifics of the conversation was and
had since moved beyond that line of thought after considering the
fact it's all opinion here.


lawman, just for future reference there is an "Edit" button on your posts
so you don't have to post multiple times in a row.

 

[SalvorHardin]

lawman, just for future reference there is an "Edit" button on your posts
so you don't have to post multiple times in a row.

And there is also that Multi Quote button, I find extremely useful

 

[lawman]

lawman, just for future reference there is an "Edit" button on your posts
so you don't have to post multiple times in a row.

Matter of taste. When I'm playing catch-up in a thread, I suppose I could build up one big long post responding to different posters on varying topics, but it's usually easier (for me, and I'd imagine for readers) just to keep them all separate and shorter. Obviously, YMMV.