I can't believe how many people have "overthought" the Franklin timeline with some theories being truly bizarre. Here is an article which contains basically the same backstory I postulated here on the BBS last week.
http://trekcore.com/blog/2016/07/heres-where-the-franklin-fits-in-the-star-trek-timeline/
Well, I for one am perfectly content to accept the basic timeline as confirmed there, but let's be fair...there are some details that don't exactly square and require "theories" of their own. The sticking point for some is surely the registry number: NX-326. It puts those who would try to make sense of such things in a bit of a double bind. If this was her number from the time she was built in the early days of Starfleet, why isn't she an NX-class ship—which is what that prefix specifically denoted in ENT—and why is it so high? If it's a new number the ship received many years later after the founding of the UFP (when she also seems to have gotten a new dedication plaque) why would she
then be given the prefix of an experimental prototype—which is what NX denoted in the Federation-era Starfleet—when she presumably no longer was one? I'm not really one to get tied up in knots about such ultimately trivial details, but in all fairness it
is a little head-scratchy, and makes it seem like someone somewhere along the line didn't think something through all the way.
I'm trying to make sense of the speculative answer proposed by the authors of that article—
not by the people involved with the production that were interviewed, to be clear—and it isn't making much sense to me. They seem to suggest that Starfleet originally used NX prefixes for the
Franklin's line of Warp 4 ships (of which she would be the
first, not the 326th) and then used them *again* for
Enterprise's line of Warp 5 ships, but starting the numbering over. Eh? So, you'd have two different sets of identically numbered ships? And when being incorporated into the rejiggered Starfleet after the fouding of the UFP, the
Franklin kept its original NX prefix but was given a new number reflecting the total number of ships at that point? How is
this theory
not "overthought" or "bizarre"? Have I misunderstood something? (Honest question, not meaning to sound haughty, if I do.)
I might rather go with the idea that before being folded in the
Franklin wasn't a Starfleet ship at all originally, but a Military Assault Command vessel with some
completely different designation, which seems a bit more in line with what Highsmith actually said. Except there's a problem there, too. The space expertise of the MACOs in ENT was explicitly said to come exclusively from simulations conducted on Earth, and their presence out there before being invited along with Archer to track down the Xindi was nil, so they shouldn't have their own ships
before that point. A bit frustrating. This idea too would have made much more sense if it were a post-ENT ship. Again though, not that I'll hold any of these quibbles about minor background details against the new movie—which I regrettably still haven't had the chance to see, but will within the next day or two, and fully expect to enjoy regardless. This stuff doesn't really matter to the drama, it's just niggling.
I can't even begin to attempt to explain Angel and Psylocke, but DOFP provided the opening to revise (essentially reboot) Deadpool from the ground up. The major events in Wolverine, which were in the 80s, happened after the point of time divergence (when Mystique spared Trask in the 70s).
But anyway, I'd say virtually every incarnation of Trek has stricter rules about writing time travel than even the best X-Men stories, though.
Origins: Wolverine ends in 1979 with the Three Mile Island disaster, which is still after the divergence of 1973, but its version of Wade Wilson was clearly born well before that divergence. So in order to end up with a different version of him born much later as per
Deadpool as a result of the timeline change, its effects would have to ripple
backward from 1973.
But yes, explaining the mechanics of all that is futile, you just have to shrug and go with it. It's comic books. As others have pointed out, while Pegg's statement seems broader than this, at least with the
Trek situation we explicitly know that Kirk Prime
personally had the biggest file on record with the Department of Temporal Investigations for messing with the timeline, so right out of the gate, altering his future from the point of his birth could plausibly have consequences reaching far into the past just by itself!
For good measure, I'll quote myself from another thread to illustrate (crudely) the relationship between the Prime and Kelvin timelines as I see it based on Pegg's comments:
I'll have to track down quotes, but I think it was made pretty clear from the beginning by Abrams and/or Orci and/or Kurtzman that the Prime Timeline always continued to coexist in a separate reality parallel to the Kelvin Timeline. All Pegg is adding in is that the Kelvin Timeline's differences ripple
backward as well as forward along it, creating not only a parallel future but a parallel past as well.
So instead of this:
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _P
We have this:
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _P
_ _ _ _ _ / \_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ K
That's what I'm getting from it all, anyway.
As for how this jibes with other depictions of time travel in previous
Star Trek, that's a whole other can of worms that could probably fill many pages of discussion and debate in its own thread (and probably has many times over on this board) but for the sake of brevity and simplicity—which have already suffered enough here, no doubt—
could also be neatly side-stepped by saying that Red Matter has peculiar properties that make the effect of this particular event distinct from other scenarios. It's a handwave, but it's certainly in line with the spirit of that plot device as presented in the film!
