Spoilers Spoilers for SFA e5 - fan theory I need an assist on

[Christopher]

One could view it like the interpretation Simon Pegg offers for the Kelvin movies not being obligated to match prime timeline works completely. While the 2009 Star Trek movie focused on a spacetime incursion from 2387 to 2233, the Kelvin timeline by its own nature can no longer include the latter-day portions of "Tomorrow Is Yesterday", "Assignment: Earth", Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, "Past Tense", Star Trek: First Contact, "Future's End", etc. Therefore, reality adjusts such that the Kelvin timeline is also different before 2233 in various ways.

That doesn't follow. If the timeline splits into two coexisting branches, then there's no reason time travelers from either branch can't go back to the same single pre-split part of the timeline that they both have in common and thereby influence each other's futures. I mean, we have seen stories where events in one timeline were affected by the actions of characters from alternate branches, like Sela being the daughter of the alternate Tasha Yar. And the Kelvin and Prime timelines have always been meant to coexist, rather than Kelvin's creation "erasing" Prime (which is impossible anyway). So there's absolutely no reason why those past events involving Prime characters would have been changed.

Also, I hate that I keep having to point this out, but it wasn't Simon Pegg's idea. It was Michael and Denise Okuda who came up with it for the fourth edition of the Star Trek Encyclopedia, as an attempt to rationalize the slight inconsistencies between the Prime and Kelvin Timelines in things that would've predated the split, and to pre-emptively handwave any future movies that might make more major retroactive changes. Simon Pegg was the first to publicize the idea because he got an advance copy of the Encyclopedia, but he didn't come up with it. If anything, the Kelvin movie Pegg cowrote, Beyond, was the one that had the fewest inconsistencies with Prime, and thus ironically had the least need for the Okudas' handwave.

 

[Destructor]

Close — it was Borg interference with Enterprise-E's return trip that triggered the temporal fracture.



The in-story explanation is that the Prime and First Splinter timelines began as one; when they fractured, they were still virtually identical. But over time, as more events and decisions in the First Splinter diverged from those made in the Prime Timeline, the more different the two timelines became.

So the Borg episode of Enterprise* happened in both timelines?

*which presumably had an impact on 'Dark Frontier', retroactively at least

 

[Destructor]

I think the biggest problem with the 'parallels' episode is that it contributes to the idea that nothing really matters when it comes to time travel. If both timelines 'persist', who cares if there is one in which everyone gets turned into Borg? Like if someone leaves MY timeline to go and create a NEW timeline, don't they just... disappear from my timeline? Sure a new one is created, and sucks to be them, but if they both persist, why does it bother me in my timeline? Like what's my motivation for stopping them?

Christopher, I do apologise, I am sure this is all covered in the novels- I do mean to read them!

 

[Christopher]

I think the biggest problem with the 'parallels' episode is that it contributes to the idea that nothing really matters when it comes to time travel. If both timelines 'persist', who cares if there is one in which everyone gets turned into Borg? Like if someone leaves MY timeline to go and create a NEW timeline, don't they just... disappear from my timeline? Sure a new one is created, and sucks to be them, but if they both persist, why does it bother me in my timeline? Like what's my motivation for stopping them?

Yes, this is why so much time travel fiction embraces the nonsense conceit of timelines being "erased," so that there are bigger stakes for the characters whose timelines are endangered. Although a lot of fiction has done effective work with fixed timelines, e.g. The Final Countdown and Gargoyles. (Every non-Trek time travel story I've written has used the fixed-timeline model.)

But remember what I said -- in my DTI model of time travel, timelines can be erased, just not retroactively. If you go back from, say, 2370 to 2350 and create a new timeline, then both timelines will coexist throughout that 20-year span until the moment the initiating time travel occurs in 2370, at which point the altered timeline will merge with and overwrite the original from that point forward, so as far as anyone after 2370 is aware, the altered timeline is the only one that ever existed (that is, unless someone goes back again and undoes the change). So the stakes of a timeline being destroyed still exist -- just without the logical impossibility of something that happened being made to have "never happened in the first place." That would be a self-contradiction, which can't physically occur. You need the self-consistency that anything that happened did happen, even if the timeline where it happened came to an end afterward.