Spoilers Should Star Trek be "our future" or an alternate timeline?
- Thread starter eschaton
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The point is, nobody has to say that because we know. Sherlock Holmes is a fictional character who inhabits his own fictional world. I'm pretty sure the word 'canon' as we use it derives from Holmes fandom. The books themselves form a 'canon' but things like the BBC show or the RDJ movies form their own little 'pocket' canons.
Sherlock Holmes is not a great example as Holmes fans were carving up and categorising a timeline for that world long before any of us were born. They just hadn't invented the literary term 'universe' yet.
Nobody has ever said "I'm in a parallel world!" in Star Trek either. They don't need to. Audiences are more than capable of enjoying something despite the knowledge that it's not real. In fact fiction relies upon a given audience making the unconscious decision to suspend disbelief.
I can watch Ghostbusters, read Spider-Man or marathon Brooklyn 99 or Friends. All take place in New York in a world that is nominally 'ours'. None of them have characters scream: "I'm in a parallel universe!".
They tell a story in a given setting and we accept that fictionally those two things fill different spaces in different worlds... and we do it unconsciously. Every time we sit down to watch a TV show or a movie, a book or a comic, that's what we do. It's automatic.
I don't see how knowing the show is not actually 100% a product of our exact world suspends suspension of belief. Every form of fiction we enjoy requires us to suspend that disbelief on a hairpin, so why is it necessary for Star Trek to do the exact opposite to every other fictional narrative that has ever existed?
Especially when imposing such a thing, and I believe it is an imposition as in effect doing so restricts what Star Trek can do, means that those who like their continuity have to tie themselves in knots in order to explain why things that are said to have happened... actually didn't happen... so that this arbitrarily applied rule can even work.
There were no Eugenics Wars. Edith Keeler was never born. Vulcans didn't invent Velcro. I like Star Trek. I like The Expanse. Both are in space and in the future and both of them are right because both of them are wrong, with the caveat being that there is no wrong in speculative fiction. And I'm alright with that.
I tell you what though. If you use Star Trek as a roadmap for what the future will actually look like then through life you'll be increasingly wrong as various dates don't match up. Aren't the Bell Riots due to not happen soon? Then if you try to plot it backwards you'll find not only small events that don't match up, but great big wars taking place that didn't happen too.
It's not only easy to accept Star Trek is set within it's own fictional universe, It's something that we do every time we sit and enjoy any kind of fiction at all. Trying to tie our world to Star Trek's world is what's stupid, because we are already past the years in which Star Trek said things would happen, which did not occur.
Star Trek is in it's own universe. It doesn't have to say it. No work of fiction does because the foreknowledge of how fiction works forms an implicit agreement between the narrative and the person enjoying it.
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Don't underestimate us. We'll simply believe that the USA government (assuming it still exists then) just has covered up what happened in Montana for a few additional decades. But these conspirators can't keep the truth hidden indefinitely! With that mindset, it should be possible to reach 2100 or so.
That's just the way fiction works.. Every single story ever told is either supposed to be 1) in our universe or 2) in an alternate universe.
Star Trek is 1) - like Sherlock, James Bond, How I met your mother, 2001-A space Odyssee, Aliens or Full Metal Jacket - all are supposed to be our universe - even though they clearly aren't, because they are fiction.
Alternate universes IMO only work if it's the whole of the story: The Mirror Universe clearly is an alternate universe. As are a lot of recent Tarantino movies. Or any story where the Nazis won, the Sovjets were first on the moon, Nixon still President etc.
The "Avengers" universe is an interesting oddity: It started out as "our universe", but by now it clearly isn't anymore. Coincidentally that's exactly the point where the stories themselves go deep into the multiverse/alternate universes to deal with that.
Star Trek simply doesn't need that. If somebody tells me specifically "Aliens", "Blade Runner" or "Space Odyssee" are an alternate universe because the timeline doesn't fit anymore with reality I simply can only roll my eyes.
Btw what kicks you out of your "suspension of disbelief" is entirely personal:
Personally, I can easily suspend my disbelief if a character talks directly to the camera, people suddenly start singing & dancing, somebody reads a generic fake newspaper, or there's a soundtrack in the background or camera effects.
But saying "this universe is a parallel reality that's perfectly similar to ours, but NOT ours, because a predecessor show from the 60s got some predictions wrong" kicks me out of the story the same way like getting some real basic facts wrong (e.g. the new Hawaii five-0 making the Yakuza a Chinese crime organisation). That's just bullshit for me.
Personally, I can easily suspend my disbelief if a character talks directly to the camera, people suddenly start singing & dancing, somebody reads a generic fake newspaper, or there's a soundtrack in the background or camera effects.
But saying "this universe is a parallel reality that's perfectly similar to ours, but NOT ours, because a predecessor show from the 60s got some predictions wrong" kicks me out of the story the same way like getting some real basic facts wrong (e.g. the new Hawaii five-0 making the Yakuza a Chinese crime organisation
). That's just bullshit for me.
But saying "this universe is a parallel reality that's perfectly similar to ours, but NOT ours, because a predecessor show from the 60s got some predictions wrong" kicks me out of the story the same way like getting some real basic facts wrong (e.g. the new Hawaii five-0 making the Yakuza a Chinese crime organisation
My point is that it doesn't have to be said. We know its not real and it doesn't matter.
I think we are getting tied up in the idea of a fictional "universe" being a new thing. It's been going on for centuries in fiction. It's only recently we started to apply that term. There is a 'canon' of things that have happened in Star Trek. That's the universe and it differs massively to ours.
I think the problem is that the difference between "our universe, but different because it's fictional" and "an alternate universe that's fictional" is really, really difficult to define.
In fact, this is a case where I really wish they would dance around the issue, instead of addressing it head on.
VOY's "Future's End" was really good at that, in that 1996 looked and felt exactly like a perfect representation of a "normal" fictional 1996, but there were some in-jokes hidden in the background (like the Botany Bay model).
That's why I NEVER like it if any SF story is set too close to our time - First Contact in 2064, Blade Runner being set in 2019, Space Odyssee in 2001.... All these stories would lose NOTHING of they were set just 100-200 years more into the future, and this whole suspension of disbelief issue would be completely avoided in a show about spaceships, robots and ray guns. But that's just my personal opinion.
I still feel sadness that we never got the future that 2001: A Space Odyssey promised. All we really got were destroyed skyscrapers and a new police state.
When I look up at the sky and see the moon overhead, I think, "Phew. 1999. Dodged a bullet there. Glad it didn't break away from a nuclear waste dump explosion."
I do love all the posts in this thread. We all deeply want that better world alluded to in Trek, don't we? That's a good thing.
When I look up at the sky and see the moon overhead, I think, "Phew. 1999. Dodged a bullet there. Glad it didn't break away from a nuclear waste dump explosion."
I do love all the posts in this thread. We all deeply want that better world alluded to in Trek, don't we? That's a good thing.
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I've never felt any crime show, drama romance or war movie is in "our" universe, therefore making it easier for me to accept Star Trek is not "our" universe. It's all called fiction for a reason. Because it isn't real.
I mean, hell, even in Big Cities, when a murder happens it's a Big Deal, and the combined effort of the investigation, arrest and trial of the guilty party will take years. Yet in TV Land it all gets done in a week, and then they tackle another murder and trial the next week. And continuously for the next twenty weeks. Then take the summer off.
I'm still upset we haven't got proper hover boards and self drying jackets
I think at least interesting diversions on how we perceive fiction have happened. That's a good thing. I do love this community.
Do you realize that Sherlock Holmes stories ae full of people and places who would be recorded if they were real? Since there is no record of them, they cannot have existed in our world. Thus when you suspend disbelif while reading Sherlock Holmes stories who have to assume that Sherlock stories are set in an alternate universe where they did exist.
I also note that there is a serious nconsistency between "The Final Problem" and "The Empty House" on one hand and The Valley of Fear on the other hand. Which is easy to explain if "The Empty House" is a sequel to "The Final Problem" but The Valley of Fear happens in an alternate universe to those stories. So if some Sherlock Holmes stories happen in alternate universes to some other Sherlock Holmes stories, then it is a small step to accept that all the alternate universes of the various Sherlock Holmes stories are different from our universe.
Btw what kicks you out of your "suspension of disbelief" is entirely personal:
Personally, I can easily suspend my disbelief if a character talks directly to the camera, people suddenly start singing & dancing, somebody reads a generic fake newspaper, or there's a soundtrack in the background or camera effects.
But saying "this universe is a parallel reality that's perfectly similar to ours, but NOT ours, because a predecessor show from the 60s got some predictions wrong" kicks me out of the story the same way like getting some real basic facts wrong (e.g. the new Hawaii five-0 making the Yakuza a Chinese crime organisation
TOS didn't merely get predicitons wrong, it also got "postdictions" wrong, and just as wrong as Hawaii Five-0 having a Chinese Yazkuza.
Despite fact checkers Star Trek got so many things wrong about our real universe that it has to be in an alternate universe. The only way I can suspend my disbelief in Star Trek is to sassume that it happens in an alternate unvierse which diverged from ours long before TOS was ever made.
I quote from "The Best of Both Worlds" Part 1:
In our timeline emperor Honorius didn't watch the Visigoths capture Rome in AD 410. Honroius was hundreds of miles away in Ravenna, where the court had been moved from Milan some years previously.
Furthermore the Roman Empire wasn't about to fall in 410. The western section of the Roman Empire had already started to fall a few years earlier, but that would not be complete for another lifetime, until 476 or 480 perhaps. And the eastern administrative division of the Roman Empire didn't fall for another thousand years, until 1453, 1460, 1461, or 1475, and the Holy Roman Empire didn't fall until 1806.
If the first duty of a Starfleet officer was to the truth, shouldn't Picard have thought of a historical simile that was actually correct in our timeline - if Star Trek happens in our timeline?
Shouldn't Picard have said something like: "I wonder if Khusrow II, King of Kings, realized when he declared war on the Roman Empire in 602 that he was starting the chain of events which would result in the fall of Persia withn a lifetime?"
Or:
"I wonder if Francisco Solano Lopez realized in 1864 that he was leading his country to the most terrible and horrifying defeat that any major country that had diplomatic recognition would ever suffer, at least until the atomic wars?"
In "Bread and Circuses":
And of course Spock, a scientists notorius for always speaking precisely, often annoyingly so, gives figures for the fatalities in our first two world wars which are very low, indicating that TOS happens in an alternate universe where the two world wars were much less bloody and many, many millions fewer people were killed.
In "Patterns of Force":
And again the scientific and precise Spock says things about World War II which were not correct in our timeline, thus putting TOS in an alternate universe to ours.
And in "The City On the Edge of Tomorrow":
But in fact the V-2 rockets had a maximum range of only 200 miles, far to short to conquer the world. And in fact the early atomic bombs in the 1940s and the early 1950s were too large to fit inside a V-2 nosecone and were several times as heavy as its payload.
I deduce that in the alternate universe of TOS, and thus of all Star Trek neo-nazi Human time travelers from the future and/or space aliens went to Germany soon after the Nazis took over and used mind control on the Nazi party, government, and military, leaders, and started to a program to build small, lightweight atomic bombs, andan other program to build heavyweight, long range rockets capable of carrying those atomic bombs over intercontinental distances.
But the USA and/or other allied powers managed to invent atomic bombs, and maybe ICBMS also, before the Nazis did, and so saved the world, probably aided by rival groups of time travelers or space aliens, in the alternate universe of Star Trek.
And so the only way I can suspend my disbelief in Star Trek is to imagine that it happens in an alternate universe than ours, since its creators were unable to keep it in our alternate universe.
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For this being your key message, I can only repeat myself from earlier: Suspension of disbelief varies wildly from person to person. Your not wrong. We just have different opinions.
I watch/read fiction under the assumption that it's always meant to be set in "our" universe, unless specifically called out not to (like the MU, Marvel's multiverse or Tarantinos revisioned history).
I accept canon inconsistencies within fiction. I accept canon inconsistencies between fiction and "reality".
For me that's not a reason to put it in an alternate reality. That's just a mistake by the author.
A mistake means that it is unintentional, I'm pretty sure every plot point has intention by the author behind it. I don't expect a group of 25th century time travelers that includes a cybernetic person to be running around Southern California in a little less than two years. I seriously doubt the author expects it either.
Each person should just watch these things and decide for themselves. It has worked for Trek fandom for a good portion of the last 55 years.
Let's call 'Star Trek' a "Alternative Future Timeline" that some of us wishes to happen, but IRL; the future is probably going to be vastly different from the Science Fiction laid out in 'Star Trek'.
Of course - this is what this whole thread has been about the whole time:
Before Trek was reasonably set in (a fictional version of) our universe. Where a lot of these "mistakes" piled up over the decades.
Now it looks like PIC is very intentionally set in an alternate universe.
For some, who never cared or thought so anyway, that is a minor point. For others - like me - this is a major retcon, in a worse direction.
I don't care about author intentions as much as I care about what author's actually achieve. Various creators of Star Trek may or may not have intended for Star Trek to happen in our universe. But overall they did no achieve putting Star Trek in our universe, therefore it can not be in our universe.
Furthermore, I have to doubt whether many authors would choose to say that their stories happen in our universe once the concept of alternate universes was explained to them. There are a lot of stories which don't give enough information about the persons, places, events, etc. in them for their existence to be proved or disproved. But many or most stories set int he past or the present do give enough information for the existence of most of the persons, places, events, etc. in them to be disproved.
For example, in "Spectre of the Gun" several people in Tombstone, Arizona in 1881 are seen. Some, like the Earps and the Clantons and JOhnny Behan, are historical. Several seem to have been created for the story, like "Sylvia","Ed", and "Barber". And I think that the creators of the show didn't expect that Tombstone city directories or the 1880 census would show that they existed in Tombstone in 1881, and if pressed would admit that would put "Spectre of the Gun" in an alternate universe if it wasn't based on Kirk's ideas about the old west.
Another unnamed citizen of Tombstone is thrown out of a saloon and shot by what later turns out to be Morgan Earp on October 26, 881,the same day as the gunfight at the OK Corral. Morgan Earp is later called:
And I have to wonder whether Morgan Earp ever shot anyone, or ever was involved in violence, except at the gunfight at the OK Corral or had such a reputation as a deadly killer. I expect that I would have read about it in acounts of the gunfight if Morgan had shot someone earlier that day.
So I expect that if they were pressed the creaters of "Spectre of the Gun" would have said either "Yes, the episode and Star Trek happen in an alternate universe" or "The events in the episode are non historical because the Melkotians based them on Kirk's ideas about the Wild West".
And considering how much more sinister the Earps appear in "Spectre of the Gun" than in real history, let alone in the more flattering popular accounts in the 1960s, I have to wonder whether Kirk's ideas about the Gunfight at the OK Corral are based on family stories handed down over centuries from pioneer ancestors with the surname of Clanton or McLowery!
So what about episodes set in much more recent eras like "The City on the Edge of Forever" or "Tomorrow is Yesterday"?
If there actually was a 30th Street Mission run by a sister Edith Keeler in 1930 New York City they would probably be listed in old fashioned city directories or newer phone books. There was also a Floyd's Barber Shop in the NYC set, and Mr. Floyd also would have in the directories if he existed. And is there evidence that any of the boxers mentioned in the poster existed in 1930:
https://www.therpf.com/forums/threa...ng-poster-city-on-the-edge-of-forever.344880/
Since there was some uncertainty about the age of Billy Clanton at the gunfight at the OK Corral I once looked him up in the 1880 census which said he was 18, thus mking him 19 or 20 during the gunfight. I also once looked up the Apache leader Geronimo in the 1900 census.
So it should be possible to prove which of the characters in "City on the Edge of Forever" were alive in 1930.
There is a lot of information about USAF Captain John Christopher in "Tomorrow is Yesterday". Serial number 4857932. Married with 2 daughters in the late 1960s and a son Shaun Geoffrey Christopher born later. Serving in the 498th Airbase Group in the late 1960s. Lt. Colonel Fellini served in at the Omaha installation (which would be Offutt Air Force base).
So it would be easy to find evidence that they lived, if Star Trek is in our universe.
And as it happens, the first man Moon landing, Apollo 11, did launch on a Wednesday. However, it din't launch at 6 AM EST. So unless someone can find evidence that Apollo 11 was originally scheduled to take off at 6 AM EST but the launch was set back a few hours, "Tomorrow is Yesterday" must happen in an alternate universe.
And If the creators of those episodes asked me if I wanted them to only look up and usereal persons in stories set in the present or the past, and thus risk being sued by those real persons, I would have said "no, I only want you to acknowledge that Star Trek cannot possibly happen in our universe and must be in an alternate universe."
Using person, places, things, or events in a work of fiction which can be proved to be unreal automatically puts that work of fiction in an alternate universe.
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I still think the whole point is getting lost in semantics. I personally see little functional difference between a fictionalised version of our world and an alternate universe. Both operate in the same way and fulfil the same purpose as far as a work of fiction goes, ie: a recognisable version of our world with differences (major or minor).
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Circling back to my original point, this season of Picard has a manned mission to the Jovian satellites in 2024. This is clearly impossible in the real world, but it is completely logical within the "advanced spaceflight timeline" showcased by TOS and early TNG for the late 20th/early 21st century.
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