I guess we'll just have to ignore whatever from the old series contradicts the movie.
Potential Canonical Sticking Point
- Thread starter Kryton
- Start date
No, because Abrams, Orci and Kurtzman have all said it isn't.
This is hardly the first time that characters have been recast in any form of Trek.
As for why Spock never mentioned this incident in TOS: Could be a mind-meld to erase his memories of it. Or, conversely, it could simply be that he agreed never to tell anyone about it, in order to preserve the timeline. As a Vulcan, he would be one of the few creatures in the universe who could be absolutely trusted to keep that promise.
TNG already contradicts TOS on the question of whether time travel is a known phenomenon or not. In "Time Squared", Picard muses on the possibility of time travel, and mentions the crew's experiences in "Where No One Has Gone Before" and "We'll Always Have Paris". But not once does he mention that the Kirk era Enterprise discovered the ability to travel through time whenever they felt like it with the "slingshot effect" in "The Naked Time".
Maybe Picard just wasn't up on his history? He remembered WNOHGB and WAHP because those happened to *his crew*.
Or perhaps this is the Department of Temporal Investigations at work.
Or maybe young Spock knew all along that he was destined to meet this old Spock. Maybe the time travel formula he helped create in "Naked Time" was something he learned from old Spock in ST XI. Maybe young Spock was trusted not to reveal the future. "It is not a lie to keep the truth to one's self." Maybe he felt it was a calculated risk to improvise the formula in "Naked Time" to ensure the timeline so he could later meet old Spock. Like Guinan in "Best of Both Worlds," she knew and told Picard that this wasn't the end because she secretly knew that she hadn't experienced the events of "Time's Arrow" yet.
Spock is Obi-Wan now. By the end of this movie, Young Spock will know everything he needs to know at crucial moments for the rest of his life to keep Kirk safe from interfering time-travelers and such.
No, that's too reasonable. Instead, we should come up with tortuously elaborate intratextual rationales to explain the contradictions and use message boards to propagate them.
Mordock --
That's funny...I was going to say this same thing, but with a positive spin on the concept of "rationalizing contradictions".
I truly feel that we fans have always creatively (but in a sensible manner) explained the many canon contradictions that have occurred over the past 42 years -- and that is a good thing. Although I do agree that some contradictions are best ignored. That doesn't mean that the ones that can be sensibly rationalized should not be.
Last edited:
Spock-as-Selek (in "Yesteryear", TAS) traveled back to meet young Spock, and Sarek and Amanda, provided the help needed to get the timeline back on track, and returned to the future, but only the audience and adult Spock remained aware of the changes.
In the 70s and 80s, that's what the "Star Trek Mysteries - Solved!" chapters were for in "The Best of Trek" paperbacks.
Well, if I were a betting man... I'd put a lot of money on the idea that the end of the movie will leave us with a lead-in to the Trek we remember, without any glaring inconsistencies (except that it won't be the same actors), and the whole movie will be a transitional thing bringing us towards that point. Whether or not time travel is involved...
That's bull as well. The whole of ENT was still canon, it really happened. Only the *final episode* was a holodeck re-creation.
It may be easier not to care, but what's the fun in that?
I find rationalizing the canonical inconsistencies to be good clean nerdy fun.
It may be easier not to care, but what's the fun in that?
I find rationalizing the canonical inconsistencies to be good clean nerdy fun.
Yes, it's easier not to care, but then there is the simple joy of engaging in the occasional good rationalization isn't there?
To that end, in "The Naked Time" Spock could've been referring to the method of time travel being discussed being purely theoretical, not time travel in general.
Last edited:
Similar threads
