So the actual CBS name for the JJverse/NuTrek is...

I knew someone would get the almost joke.

 

16 sodium atoms walk in to a bar...followed by Batman.

 

If you overlay the 60's theme with "Kiss From a Rose," you get salty Batman.

 

But does Batman have time to prepare?

 

Na.

 

I just got that.

 

*groan*

 

No doubt Abrams is happy with the name, as he uses Kelvin in every one of his projects in honor of his maternal grandfather, who had a huge influence on him as a boy.

 

You forgot to mention Grandpa Kelvin's birthday, May 14, or in other wards 5/14. Which for some reason has to have a zero in front of it when it becomes NCC-0514. Because we couldn't just go with NCC-514, there has to be a zero there.

 

My Trek fan rationalization is that the Kelvin had a major refit...and was stil being used while most ships in service were 4 digits (1***), so the new protocol was to have all ships painted at 4 digits.

 

I would have also liked the 4 year jump after the Kobayashi Maru test you mentioned, to Explain Kirk's position on the Vulcan mission - was the whole Enteprise only filled with cadets and new graduates? Where were the experienced older officers?

 

Well, the movie did kind of explain that. The Enterprise was a brand-new ship being launched early for the emergency mission, so it didn't have a pre-established crew yet, aside from Pike. It had to be staffed with whoever was available, and that was the Academy cadets. It was a contrived explanation, but it was there.

 

Pike was captured by Nero, Engineer Olson and the CMO were killed, Helmsman McKenna took a sick day.

 

Lung worm probably needs more than one day

Also, the bulk of the fleet was in the Laurentian system.

 

But that event was not very unusual. There were already at least a dozen alternate timelines depicted in "Star Trek" prior to the appearance of the Narada. And by alternate timelines, I mean when a time traveler goes back in time, changes the history he knew, and remains in that new timeline to witness its divergent history. A few examples:

1. In "Yesterday's Enterprise," Lt. Yar goes back in time on the Enterprise-C, changes the past to prevent two decades of war between the UFP and Klingons, and remains in that alternate timeline to have a half-Romulan daughter. (Every other episode of TNG takes place in this alternate timeline created by Yar.)
2. In the finale of "Star Trek: Voyager," Admiral Janeway goes back in time, changes the past to get the Voyager back to Earth decades earlier. That alternate timeline continues in "Star Trek: Nemesis," where Admiral Janeway is seen back on Earth giving Picard orders.
3. In "Star Trek" (2009), Spock and Nero go back in time, cause the destruction of the Kelvin and Vulcan, and remain in that new alternate timeline until their deaths.
4. In "Generations," Picard witnessed the Nexus destroying the planet and Enterprise-D, then went back in time with Kirk to create an alternate timeline where the planet was not destroyed.
5. In "Star Trek: First Contact," the Borg and Enterprise-E travel into the past, interfere with Cochrane's first warp flight, and are later remembered in future episodes of "Enterprise." When the Enterprise-E returns to the future, it is to an alternate future following the events in "Enterprise," not to the timeline they came from before the Borg attack. (Just like in "Back to the Future," when Marty returns to 1985, it is not the same 1985 he came from, but the new one he created by meddling with his parents' past.) Later in this alternate timeline, aboard the Voyager, Seven of Nine would recall that the Borg were present during Cochrane's first warp flight.

My point is that, like in "Back to the Future," just the act of going into the past creates an alternate timeline, and once you alter history, even if you try to "fix" it again, if you travel to the future from that point, you are just going into the future of that alternate timeline (not the original timeline you came from).

So what Spock and Nero did in "Star Trek" (2009) was not different in any way from what Yar did in "Yesterday's Enterprise," what Admiral Janeway did in "Endgame," and what the Borg Queen did in "First Contact." They all created alternate timelines in exactly the same way, and future episodes and movies depicted stories continuing in those alternate timelines. The so-called "Prime" timeline from which Spock and Nero originated was probably the same alternate timeline created by Admiral Janeway in "Endgame" and seen again in "Star Trek: Nemesis."

If you think about it, "Star Trek: First Contact" took place in the alternate timeline created in "Generations" where Kirk and Picard prevented Soran from destroying the planet and Enterprise-D. "Star Trek: Insurrection" took place in the alternate timeline created by the Borg Queen in "First Contact" and subsequent Temporal Cold War events in "Enterprise." "Star Trek: Nemesis" took place in the alternate timeline created by Admiral Janeway in "Endgame." And "Star Trek" (2009) took place in the alternate timeline created by Nero. So every movie from "First Contact" to "Star Trek" (2009) took place in a different alternate timeline from the movie before it. "Into Darkness" was the first Trek movie in two decades to take place in the same timeline as the movie before it.

If you think about it, the four movies produced by Rick Berman each took place in a different alternate timeline from each other. Abrams didn't invent the idea of alternate timelines -- he's the one who put a stop to the pattern by setting all of his movies in the SAME timeline as each other.

 

It always confuses and amuses me why Star Trek fans are so up in arms about this Abrams alternate timeline being a big thing and possibly wiping out the original prime timeline.

In Transformers lore they have something like seventeen different dimensions they call 'Universal streams', all existing in parallel, with further sub-dimensions for small instances of dimension-hopping within the same story. and I can't imagine TF fans getting upset when another Prime/Megatron conflict floats up and re-treads the same tale told by the original Saturday morning cartoon. Why does it have to be more dramatic with Star Trek fans handling the Abrams/Kelvin continuity existing parallel to the Prime one?

 

I guess it's because they've been conditioned by episodes like "City on the Edge" and "Past Tense" where the creation of a new timeline "erases" the old one unless the heroes fix it. Not to mention Back to the Future, Quantum Leap, and all the other works of fiction that treat new timelines as erasing the old. That's physically nonsensical -- the only possibilities that make any scientific sense are a self-consistent loop where history is immutable or a parallel-timelines model where any new timeline runs alongside the original -- but the "overwriting" model is more dramatic because there's more at stake, and so the public has been brainwashed into assuming that the most physically nonsensical and impossible model of time travel is the only "correct" one.

Trek fans accept the existence of parallel timelines, like the Mirror Universe, but they incorrectly assume that those are something fundamentally different from timelines created by time travel. If the Kelvin timeline had been presented from the start as just a pre-existing parallel like the MU, fans would've accepted its coexistence. But because it was created by time travel, a lot of fans reflexively assume it must have replaced the Prime timeline.

 

Ah, that does make sense. Thanks Christopher

 

Late reply, but they actually have, just not in the talk page. One persons reasoning is that "Alternate Reality" is the name used in the movie (said by Uhura in '09). But going by that logic they should rename all their Mirror Universe pages to "Alternate Universe" because the term 'Mirror Universe' is never used in the show, and 'Alternate Universe' was.

Same person had another excuse which is that CBS has no say in it because it is under Paramount.

M-A is confusing. Sometimes they use BTS info, sometimes they don't.

http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Forum:Alternate_reality_"official"_name