Trek XI to be alternate timeline, according to AICN
- Thread starter Ghostface1701
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It can make for some interesting stories. Further, I count only four TOS episodes that involved time travel, "Tomorrow is Yesterday" and "The City on the Edge of Forever" from season one, "Assignment Earth" from season two, and "All Our Yesterdays" from season three.
Then, of course, there's "Mirror, Mirror", which is not strictly speaking time travel.
Out of the six TOS movies, only TVH involved time travel.
So, it's been overused in TOS? It's cliche, now?
Funny I always thought "fan wankery", much like "fan service" was composed of inside jokes or overly pandering to fan desires - If this was "fan wankery" it would involve Shatner being in the film, set in the Mirror Universe where he plays both Kirk, his grandfather and Picard and Sisko would be along for the ride as well and the return of the Enterprise D would be central to the plot.
Given how some "fans" are reacting - this isn't fan wankery of any kind since it doesn't seem to be pandering to them. Just the opposite.
Sharr
Well, "The Naked Time" ends with a bit of time travel, so that's actually five episodes of Star Trek. Still not that many, all things considered.Franklin said:
It can make for some interesting stories. Further, I count only four TOS episodes that involved time travel, "Tomorrow is Yesterday" and "The City on the Edge of Forever" from season one, "Assignment Earth" from season two, and "All Our Yesterdays" from season three.
Then, of course, there's "Mirror, Mirror", which is not strictly speaking time travel.
Out of the six TOS movies, only TVH involved time travel.
So, it's been overused in TOS? It's cliche, now?
In addition to this, we have one animated adventure dealing with time travel ("Yesteryear"), eleven episodes of The Next Generation ("We'll Always Have Paris," "Time Squared," "Yesterday's Enterprise," "Captain's Holiday," "A Matter of Time," "Cause and Effect," "Time's Arrow, Parts I & II," "Tapestry," "Timescape," and "All Good Things"), ten episodes of Deep Space Nine ("Past Tense, Parts I and II," "Visionary," "The Visitor," "Little Green Men," "Accession," "Trials and Tribble-ations," "Children of Time," "Wrongs Darker Than Death or Night," and "Time's Orphan"), thirteen episodes of Voyager ("Parallax," "Time and Again," "Eye of the Needle," "Future's End, Parts I and II," "Before and After" "Year of Hell, Parts I and II," "Timeless," "Relativity," "Fury," "Shattered," and "Endgame"), eleven episodes of Enterprise ("Broken Bow," "Cold Front," "Shockwave, Parts I and II," "Future Tense," "Carpenter Street," "Azati Prime," "E²," "Zero Hour," and "Storm Front, Parts I and II"), and two more movies (Star Trek: Generations, and Star Trek: First Contact).
Now fifty-one episodes and three movies listed out like that, it looks like a lot. However, that's less than one-fourteenth the total number of episodes there are of all six series, and that's using the strictest definition of what entails a time travel episode.
Compare that, as Franklin does, to how many episodes involve the ship, say, going to a new planet, and I really don't see how anyone can say that the time-travel premise is played out.
Neither can I. Since the Only One Timeline idea is a non-starter for drama, that leaves us with Everything Always Changes.
There's also the Multiple Timelines notion where the 'different' timeline is a different one from the original, but then it follows that there would be infinite timelines, and it becomes silly to worry what happens in any one of them. Blow up the universe? Who cares, it's still okay in an infinite number of other timelines.So that's also a non-starter for drama, unless you just gloss over it lightly like Stargate does and hope nobody thinks about anything too hard.
Heroes is doing the Everything Always Changes logic - they show us a future that we might want the characters to avoid and they go back to the present and POOF that future is no longer possible - but something like it still is, because some of the situation and the personalities that created it still exist - so the visit to the future isn't irrelevant just because that specific future, in precisely that way, is now "gone." Of all the approaches to time travel I've seen, this is the one that makes the most sense and works best in a dramatic format.
Is it not? Panders to canon fans and reboot fans by making it Star Trek but an alternate timeline from the original. Check.
Compared to Spock going back in time to save a young Kirk from an assination plot by the Romulans?
Nah, it really seems they are trying to please too many people with this. They'll alienate the people in the middle who are the real audience because they are trying to settle some argument of reboot, nonreboot and give Star Trek`s split fanbase everything they want on both sides.
pookha said:
UWC Defiance said:
Well, lots of stuff will probably still be in continuity. It's not like the reboot is guaranteed to change everything, forever.
Actually, I kind of like the idea of "Enterprise" remaining "canon" because it takes place before the alternate timeline is created, but TOS ceasing to be "canon" because it takes place afterward - not because I care one way or another about canon, but because of the folks whose heads will explode.
clean up in thread nine.
all these exploding heads is getting messy.
and this isnt even a cronenberg film.
Clean up for the guys jacking off to the exploding heads in thread nine.
I tend not to think either of those "bases" were in their minds here rather it was to make something new but grow it out of the old. In many ways its more interesting and indeed ballsy to transition this way rather then simply a cold reboot like BSG. Its seems organic in a way. Provided anything of it is true...
Nope. I picked all those things I mentioned for a reason they're straight out of fan fic fan wet dreams. The nature of this film or rather the fact its got new people in established roles is more then enough to annoy "die hards" (Who are in small small numbers anyhow) anyhow they might just continue to do it and we should to ape a phrase from Nimoy: "Let them make their film".
Nimoy and Spock being there doesn't inherently make it "fan wank" - though to me *Nimoy's involvement* tells me all I need to know.
To borrow something ITL said in the Donnie Darko thread:
Like most things its how you put the pieces together that tell us how good it all is. Reading thread bare, rambling reiterations of someones dinner table discussion is no good way to judge a concept. If we were going from say a leaked script then maybe but that would contain all the emotional cues and interel logic of the story. At the moment we don't know the *story* even if we think we might.
Unless someone can tell me how N-Spock become aware of the time shift, how he physically gets involved with his younger self or the manner of Kirk's "death"? we pretty much know nothing... that is we don't really see the gears moving the story alone or the motivations.
Sharr
Actually, no. It's quite possible that in this new timeline, the 24th century Borg attack that leads to the events in First Contact did not occur, thus the Borg did not go back in time, thus, Z's designs were not influenced by his sighting of the NCC-1701-E thus Enterprise looked nothing like the Akiraprise, thus Archer never took command because it was such a butt ugly ship.
Exactly: "Enterprise" is within continuity - "canon" - and TOS won't be.
What was that shrieking I just heard issue from a hundred thousand basement apartments?
You know what I just realized? We're going to know who the next president will be before we ever see this movie. But for some reason, I find this more interesting than the campaign. I guess Star Trek is just better than America. 
I hadn't thought of that - yes, in Heroes, it makes more or less sense, especially because they make a point of how Hiro Nakamuras attempts to make things right just don't work that way. If Trek XI would do something similar (With Spock realizing that you cant simply make everything "right" again), then it might actually be an interesting premise ...
I think you are giving Abrams too much credit. Sure he has a bold idea, but it's based on the fact that Paramount wants to keep making money from the 700 episodes and 10 movies it made before while making even more money on something new.
So a fan would never come up with something that then eh? Old Spock travelling back in time to save young Kirk. I guess we need not mention one of the writers is a hardcore Trekkie.
I'd like to see these offical small numbers you are on about. The ones who are buying the books, DVDs, watching the repeats and who will be going to see this film. Where'd you get your stats from? and what is considered Die hard?
Time travel? Too far-fetched, next they'll be going faster than light.
Anyone who posts at this board would be a die hard, and if Fandom was so vast Enterprise would be on the air.
They're not making this movie to please the fans. Trust me the amount of "fans" is far to small to sustain Trek as a franchise - they're looking to make a new generation. Better to honk off the dwindling numbers and move on...
There wouldn't a Star Trek movie to argue about without Abrams. The movie doesn't exist regardless of Abrams but because of him. If he happened to not be at Paramount we'd be waiting a long long time for anything labeled "Star Trek" to come to be...
Actually the writer was only described as a "Trekkie" no hardcore attached but that's beside the point. The guy who wrote the last TNG was supposed to have been as well and I would never have noticed.
I don't see anything inherently wrong with this as a concept since who Kirk and Spock were was always about doing the impossiable for each other... going to forbidden planets, crossing time I certainly wouldn't call it "Fan wank" but I guess that's just a new way to disregard that which we haven't seen yet.
Sharr
Well, here's the problem -- most people when deciding whether to see a movie ask a friend, usually one that likes that kind of movie and is likely to have seen it. For THIS movie, obviously, its the trekkies who are gonna be asked whether the Trek movies is worth the movie ticket. If they tell their buddies that it was stupid or boring or something, the friends are probably going to skip it.
So pissing off Trekkies does have an impact, because they're the ones that people will ask about whether the movie is good. Their opinion will influence other people. If Wars fans had hated the prequels, they would have died. People wouldn't be interested in a Wars movie that even Warsies hate.
And you know this because? I know he says he's a fan, but I can't recall him saying that before he got a Star Trek Project. He was interviewed for a profile on G4, and there, he said nothing about liking Trek, and said his biggest influence was Star Wars. Not to say he doesn't like Trek, but its very difficult to separate out a person's interest in a movie when he has an economic interest in being perceived as liking it.
The same thing with Abrams supposedly approaching them about a Trek movie -- we don't really know for sure. Both parties have a vested interest in making it appear that Abrams is a Trekkie dreaming of making a Trek movie. What were you expecting them to say?
"Well, we signed Abrams to a 3 movie deal. He wanted to make monster movies, but we strong-armed him into making a Trek movie, even though he hates Trek. After all the president of Paramount needs another yacht." That will get people excited.
Until someone can dig up a quote saying he's any kind of trekkie from before he got buttloads of cash from Paramount to make a Trek movie, I don't know how much of Abrams alleged fandom to take seriously. Pay me several million dollars, and "Rocky Horror Picture Show" can be my all time favorite Scifi movie. Money talks.
Well there are problems with it. First off, it's waaay more complicated than it needs to be. Just have the Tos crew have an adventure. No need for time travel, no fixing history.
Secondly, the I can't Believe it's Not a Reboot structure isn't gonna make anybody happy. The ones who don't care about reboots have to have the continuity porn, the ones who don't want a reboot get one anyway. The ones just wanting an adventure get headaches from trying to follow the convoluted story. Less is more.
Very much like H.G. Wells' The Time Machine. I think the hardest part to reconcile with this would be how to do a sequel to the movie in a way that makes sense. At the end of XI, if we are left with a Spock who is resigned to the fact that he can't change the past, it sort of leaves us in the 24th century. It wouldn't make sense to go back to the younger Spock in XII. Not impossible to fix, sure, but it has to make sense to Joe Sixpack, as has been stated above many times.
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