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Same canon?

...Did you hit your head? C'mon, where's the Dennis who poooh-poohs these kind of straight-faced rationalizations? You sound like Timo or Christopher, or something. Give us a hearty "V'Ger won't show up the writers don't want it" and restore my faith in the universe.

Oh, I'm amusing myself by throwing the inunavoidable logical monkey wrench into their "straight-faced rationalizations." I'm personally perfectly happy with the writers doing whatever makes sense to them. :lol:
 
Nope. Two things:

1) They're now in an alternate timeline. If what has happened/is happening to them affected the TOS timeline in the way you're suggesting, then Spock Prime's memories would already have been altered.

2) Just because some things are different don't mean that all things are different or will be different. The writers now have license to alter anything they like - pre-Nero or post-Nero - in this alternate timeline and aren't required to offer a detailed explanation of it.

The simple fact that "our" past as well as the TOS future depended to some degree on the TOS characters mucking about with time travel during the TOS and post-TOS future really means that all bets are off.


I recall an interview where the writers explained time travel working like it did in Back to the Future. Using that, and a description from Back to the Future II where Doc drew it out on a blackboard, they couldn't jsut return to their future, because the future would continue from the point where it was altered. To fix it, they had to go back to before where they mucked things up in the past, and steal back the Sports Book from Biff before he changed the future.

Of course one could give themselves a temporal headache trying to sort out all the time travel crap they did then to make it fit, or to justify what did/will happen in the future or how it has any effect on the franchise now.

Simple fact is none of the writers in any of the shows bothered to sync things up with any kind of established this happened so this happens. Everyone writer who got a script on air wrote a story their way within very loose constraints. Trying to make sense of it for the sake of fanon is pointless and more than a little ridiculous when it is being used to justify arguments about why this new Trek is wrong.

I find it much easier to agree with Dennis, I like the new Trek just fine. I require no bizarre and twisted rationalizations to try to make it fit my world view.
 
Dennis, you misunderstood me. I never said anything about the TOS timeline being affected. I'm saying that theoretically everything pre-2233 should be unchanged, including visits from the prime future (STIV, "Future's End", the Enterprise episode with the hookers etc). In Enterprise we saw a couple of Daniels' from different futures (two died) and in Voyager we saw a pair if Braxton's in the same episode. Thus PineKirk could go back to 1986 and bump into ShatnerKirk ("Tials and Tribble-ations" style), the same as "I never experienced that timeline" Braxton appears in the past while crazy hobo Braxton is (presumably) still on the surface.

But as pointed out, Trek time travel (perticularly in Enterprise) often made no sense whatsoever so just about anything could happen/the writers could justify anything they want (including anything like a remake of STIV or "City on the Edge of Forever" or whatever). Although since another time travel story is unlikely, I doubt any of this really matters.
 
The writers now have license to alter anything they like - pre-Nero or post-Nero - in this alternate timeline and aren't required to offer a detailed explanation of it.

And that's what we want the most when a new group of film makers take the reign over a 40 years old franchise. Start with a clean slate and not worry about anything that could possible have made Star Trek what it was. I'm sure when the show was being created, everyone involved had their mindset on "How do we make this series available for all audiences?". But more importantly, we have a get out of jail free card in the form of an alternate reality scenario and we can do whatever we want. Got a problem? It's an alternate reality. The End.

But with all the lovers of Trek09 defending the film as it is, your milage may vary on the results. I wonder what "We _____ the _____ to serve out purpose" they'll roll out with next.
 
Dennis, you misunderstood me. I never said anything about the TOS timeline being affected. I'm saying that theoretically everything pre-2233 should be unchanged, including visits from the prime future (STIV, "Future's End", the Enterprise episode with the hookers etc).

Why? That future in which STIV happened is not the future of this new alternative reality. There will be no Kirk Prime or Spock Prime to make those trips backward. They exist in another (so-called) reality.
 
And that's what we want the most when a new group of film makers take the reign over a 40 years old franchise. Start with a clean slate and not worry about anything that could possible have made Star Trek what it was. I'm sure when the show was being created, everyone involved had their mindset on "How do we make this series available for all audiences?". But more importantly, we have a get out of jail free card in the form of an alternate reality scenario and we can do whatever we want. Got a problem? It's an alternate reality. The End.

But with all the lovers of Trek09 defending the film as it is, your milage may vary on the results. I wonder what "We _____ the _____ to serve out purpose" they'll roll out with next.

Right, the writers can do whatever they want. What was your point?
 
Star Trek, even at it's most episodic, has references, technologies and assumptions inherited from Canon.

We don't see them because we already know them. They are obvious to us. Transporters, Gorn, The Enterprise, Starfleet, The Maquis, Cardassians, Romulans.

Subtract Gorn, Maquis, and Cardassians, and add Klingons, Vulcans, and numerous other things, and you have this movie.

So this point is moot. There was nothing that made making another movie in the established universe "virtually impossible."

I'll bet that if JJ Abrams had made a true origin story instead of an alternate universe, just as many people would have seen it.

You missed my point. It was about approachability and perception, not the literal fact.

I got your point, I just don't buy your rationale. No matter if they rebooted, did an alternate timeline, or did a true origin story, this movie would have made roughly the same amount of money as long as JJ Abrams and co were behind it.
 
I got your point, I just don't buy your rationale. No matter if they rebooted, did an alternate timeline, or did a true origin story, this movie would have made roughly the same amount of money as long as JJ Abrams and co were behind it.

Of course you're speculating (or wishfully thinking.) And merely moot since the film made the same amount of money it did being an alternate timeline (and I assure you that isn't some "tirade" of mine.)
 
Of course you're speculating (or wishfully thinking.)

It's definitely not wishful thinking. I didn't really care what they did, and I'm sure millions of other people felt the same way.

And it's not really speculation. After Lost, several other Bad Robot titles, and previews for the movie, it wouldn't have mattered what the movie was about or how it decides to get there. Abrams' name, the cast, and Paramount's promotion put the butts in the seats. Everything else (especially details about what kind of universe it is) is inconsequential.
 
It's definitely not wishful thinking. I didn't really care what they did, and I'm sure millions of other people felt the same way.

More speculation.

And it's not really speculation. After Lost, several other Bad Robot titles, and previews for the movie, it wouldn't have mattered what the movie was about or how it decides to get there. Abrams' name, the cast, and Paramount's promotion put the butts in the seats. Everything else (especially details about what kind of universe it is) is inconsequential.

It obviously didn't happen that way, so you're still offering speculation.
 
If Dennis's "stuff in the past didn't happen because it was caused by a future that isn't there anymore" theory was accurate, Spock Prime and Nero would have disappeared the minute they started fucking with history.

Nope. Two things:

1) They're now in an alternate timeline. If what has happened/is happening to them affected the TOS timeline in the way you're suggesting, then Spock Prime's memories would already have been altered.

2) Just because some things are different don't mean that all things are different or will be different. The writers now have license to alter anything they like - pre-Nero or post-Nero - in this alternate timeline and aren't required to offer a detailed explanation of it.

The simple fact that "our" past as well as the TOS future depended to some degree on the TOS characters mucking about with time travel during the TOS and post-TOS future really means that all bets are off.

That may be so, but until proven otherwise I still say the universes have a shared past. I'd say the TOS/TNG/DS9/VOY characters just zip back up a different branch of the timeline tree (or make a new one) each time they go back.

The makers of Star Trek Online also think the timelines have a shared past:



[Oversize and hotlinked image placed behind thumbnail. Click on it to see the big one. - M']

I doubt it'll ever be "proven" one way or another. I doubt time-travel will come up in the next two movies, and the only time the past will come up will probably be the Eugenics Wars, and I'd consider that more of a retcon (and a very understandable one) than a result of timeline tampering.
 
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Would be easily solved by putting a model of the original TOS Enterprise in Kirk's or Pike's or Scotty's quarters/desk/whatever.

It already could have been easily solved in the last movie by Nero's ship computer trying to identify the ship class and showing the TOS Constitution class as closest match.

Unfortunately, there was not one visual hint in that movie that it was indeed the same universe before Nero's intervention, or that Spock was indeed coming from the TOS/TNG/DS9/VOY timeline.
 
If Dennis's "stuff in the past didn't happen because it was caused by a future that isn't there anymore" theory was accurate, Spock Prime and Nero would have disappeared the minute they started fucking with history.

Nope. Two things:

1) They're now in an alternate timeline. If what has happened/is happening to them affected the TOS timeline in the way you're suggesting, then Spock Prime's memories would already have been altered.

2) Just because some things are different don't mean that all things are different or will be different. The writers now have license to alter anything they like - pre-Nero or post-Nero - in this alternate timeline and aren't required to offer a detailed explanation of it.

The simple fact that "our" past as well as the TOS future depended to some degree on the TOS characters mucking about with time travel during the TOS and post-TOS future really means that all bets are off.

That may be so, but until proven otherwise I still say the universes have a shared past.


Until proven otherwise, I say that they don't - that's not how Orci described the situation in his discussions of quantum mechanics, after all.

If you look at quantum mechanics and you learn about the fact that our most successful theory of science is quantum mechanics, and the fact that it deals with probabilities of events happening. And that the most probable events tend to happen more often and that one of the subsets of that theory is the many universe theory. Data said this [in "Parallels"], he summed up quantum mechanics as the theory that "all possibilities that can happen do happen" in a parallel universe. According to theory, there are going to be a much larger number of universes in which events are very closely related, because those are the most probable configurations of things. Inherent in quantum mechanics there is sort of reverse entropy, which is what you were trying to say, in which the universe does tend to want to order itself in a certain way. This is not something we are making up; this is something we researched, in terms of the physical theory.

So anything and everything can be different both before and after Nero's incursion, and doubtless much will be - there are folks arguing now, after all, that the Kelvin would not have existed as it did in the TOS universe. Maybe it exists as it did because Cochrane was influenced by neither a Borg attack nor Picard's people.
 
I recall Bob Orci saying in the trekmovie.com Q+A after the film was released that the timelines were identical until Nero's arrival. I'd find it and add a link but I'm on my phone ATM and it doesn't do copy+pasting. Also mentioned was that the Admiral Archer mentioned in the film was the guy from Enterprise (and not some multiverse copy).

I don't think it helps my argument, but remember that the "many worlds" theory requires that every prior "go back to save the future" story actually created an alternate future where the world was saved, without erasing the prior one. Thus everything from Old Janeway's universe to Borgified Earth to the world about to die at the hands of the whale probe and the earth destroyed by the Xindi are still "out there" in the multiverse somwhere. It undermines every old time travel story, but is kind of interesting. What if everyone from Kirk and Spock and Picard and Old Janeway were wrong? What if Spock now knows something he and the others didn't earlier?
 
I recall Bob Orci saying in the trekmovie.com Q+A after the film was released that the timelines were identical until Nero's arrival.

The operative bit there is the plural - "both timelines." Whether they were identical or not is something they can amend without contradicting the movie, since that's not explicit in the film.
 
It's definitely not wishful thinking. I didn't really care what they did, and I'm sure millions of other people felt the same way.

More speculation.

Who cares if it is speculation? What is your point? I think it's a pretty safe bet to say that a good majority of the people who saw the movie didn't do so because it was an alternate timeline. Most people aren't terrible nerds like that.

It obviously didn't happen that way, so you're still offering speculation.

What didn't happen what way? Do you have nothing better to do than try and win arguments about semantics?

I'd bet that the majority of people saw the movie for the following reasons:

JJ Abrams' fresh take, young and attractive cast, top notch effects, the name brand Star Trek, and word of mouth.

It doesn't matter if it's speculation because it's more than likely true until you offer any kind of insightful counterpoint (I won't hold my breath). People would have seen this movie regardless of some stupid little issue as to what kind of universe it takes place in.
 
I recall Bob Orci saying in the trekmovie.com Q+A after the film was released that the timelines were identical until Nero's arrival.

The operative bit there is the plural - "both timelines." Whether they were identical or not is something they can amend without contradicting the movie, since that's not explicit in the film.

Hmmm. So does this mean that you may be agreeing with the theory that NuOldSpock and Nero may have indeed crossed into the past of an alternate universe instead of going back in time along their own timeline? That theory has been out there for quite some time now. And to me, it is the most logical way of explaining the stuff that just doesn't fit.
 
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