Setting aside all the minuscule timeline changes shown in various TOS, TNG, DS9 and VOY episodes over the years, I consider everything from TOS to ST:FC to be the original prime timeline. After the events of FC, the timeline changed from 2063 onwards to the point where ENT existed when it didn’t exist before, and begat both the pre-Kelvin timeline events and the current events from DSC/PIC/SNW/LDS onward, which I call the nuPrime timeline. However, I treat Prodigy as taking place in the original prime continuity after the events of “Endgame.”
(For clarity’s sake, I need to point out that while the events of FC took place during VOY’s run, I consider the entirety of VOY’s run to take place in the original prime timeline continuity before FC changed everything. So ‘Endgame’ would be the last time we saw the original prime timeline until Prodigy.)
I disagree about
First Contact being a timeline altering event.
It's made clear that the Enterprise-E's intervention was necessary to change Cochrane's outlook about what warp drive meant to humanity and the opportunity it would offer to create a new, better society. In order for the Cochrane of
Star Trek's original TOS timeline to exist the Enterprise-E's involvement was necessary to give him a push. It's arguably a predestination paradox, where in trying to destroy the Federation's existence, the Borg inadvertently helped to create it.
To borrow from
Doctor Who, I wouldn't mind a rule that established there can be changes to the timeline, but some things are unalterable. That there are fixed points in time that are unalterable which must happen.
There are those who go by what TPTB say on the matter.
I find this argument really problematic, especially since how selectively applied some people use it. I've seen it in the arguments here, where if people like the changes, it's used as justification for why all fans
should accept it. If people think TPTB's views are bad, it's disregarded as irrelevant.
Roddenberry's views as to his intentions for what should or shouldn't be canon are largely disregarded by many here as not mattering. However, Akiva Goldsman can
give an interview where he basically tells people that he's changing things because "
storytelling beats canon," and that he's explicitly going in a different direction than what's been established. Those changes go beyond a visual retcon where we're taking about the makeup of the Klingons looking different. There are substantive story differences where the nature of the Gorn is different, Khan's backstory is different, etc. And that's fine. I have no problem with that as long as we accept it as being different. I don't think it diminishes it as
Star Trek to admit that
Discovery and
Strange New Worlds are different
.
But what I find interesting/irritating are the people that will then try to make you believe that even though Goldsman and other connected to the production will explicitly tell you that they're changing things that the people who point this out are crazy to point out it's different. The amount of arguments that border on gaslighting that amounts to saying: no, no, no, it's not different, it's all still the same and all fits even when it doesn't really fit.
I think leaving it in the hands of whomever is the showrunner of the moment to determine what is and isn't accepted canon of the Prime Timeline is a recipe for for a mess, since it's left in the subjective whims of whatever showrunner to marshal 6 decades of story into a coherent narrative until the next showrunner comes along and changes everything. Maybe you sort of go with the DC idea that we accept that each show exists within its own continuity which may or may not connect to the others, and maybe we accept each show is what it is, and it may connect and it may not.
There are those who insist that because of visual differences and possibly different interpretations of continuity, that certain shows should be excluded from the Prime Timeline.
I think a more reasonable explanation for what it is Prime Canon is whatever the consensus of fans accept it to be. George Lucas spent God knows how much time and multiple edits trying to prove that
Han didn't shoot first. That was TPTB's intention. And fans did
NOT accept it because it was a stupid change over a small moment that arguably substantively undermined the character's motivations.
Star Wars fans didn't just blindly accept it as true because George Lucas said so, and neither should
Star Trek fans accept things if they think they're bad.
