Why TT?

[Plain Simple]

First off, there's a very general spoiler down below that most of you will have heard, apart from that I'd like to keep this thread spoiler free. Thanks!

I haven't really been paying attention to all the little snippets of news about the new film recently. When the trailer was released, I started reading a bit about it and found out that apparently there is time travel involved in the story line. Now my first thought was: why? I got the feeling the idea was to make a fresh new Star Trek film, something different from the past movies and shows, but if there's one gimmick that's over used in Star Trek, it's time travel. Every series has had a couple of time travel episodes, it was a major plot line through Enterprise and three of the movies have dealt with it. So, if you want to do something different, then why time travel... again?! It feels like the writers got stuck in a time loop themselves.

Now I'm still looking forward to the film, the trailer looked promising, but I can't help wonder: why time travel. Please, no spoilers.

P.S. Since I'm not a frequent visitor of this part of the BBS I might have missed previous posts about this subject. Feel free to link me to them if a new thread is not warranted.

 

[crucifixion]

I would say its because Abrams wanted to update the franchise but if he just made a movie that started with a new Kirk/Spock, he knew the fans would be in an uproar and scream reboot. Atleast with a time travel movie, he can start in present time (e.g., after the events of Nemesis) and use time travel to be able to make a movie around Kirk/Spock with the premise that the original timeline needs to be restored/saved, so that will allow him to say this movie is still within the normal timeline of the past 40 years of Trek.

 

[trekkerguy]

Now I'm still looking forward to the film, the trailer looked promising, but I can't help wonder: why time travel.

Because it's a great tool when used properly. Not a gimmick when done right.

 

[urbandk]

I agree... if every time they pass the torch there has to be some time travel involved, this franchise could get as tedious as "cause and effect"

i just want stories, damn it! new stories!

not some endless soap opera with the same tired enemies and the same tired plots.

 

[SG-17]

Its a way to canonize a reboot of the series.

 

[Australis]

Have you seen the second version of the second trailer? That might give you an idea why.

http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=puXPozd-kuc

As for time travel, as I was saying to my ol' buddy Vance in the 'Why So Sad?' thread, time travel done well can be very good.

 

[Captain X]

Because Abrams was too pussy to reboot Star Trek the way RDM rebooted BSG.

 

[Australis]

^ Mmm, maybe Paramount wouldn't let him, I can think of a couple of good reasons for that.

 

[Captain X]

If it was the suits then they were too pussy to jump fully on the reboot bandwagon.

 

[darkshadow0001]

I think Time Travel was the only way to bring Leonard Nimoy into the film. Even if Star Trek started in the 23rd Century, some form of time travel would have to occur if Nimoy was to be a part of it. They really couldn't have a "young" version of Nimoy automatically in the 23rd Century because of his age. Besides, I think it's a good idea. If this movie doesn't make it big, then it would be easy to tell 24th century stories again.

 

[Plain Simple]

Have you seen the second version of the second trailer? That might give you an idea why.

http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=puXPozd-kuc

As for time travel, as I was saying to my ol' buddy Vance in the 'Why So Sad?' thread, time travel done well can be very good.

Hadn't seen that yet, thanks! But is that the reason or just one of the consequences of having time travel involved?

I agree that time travel well done can lead to great stories. No argument there. But it just seems that every time when Star Trek claims to do something new or to 'go back to the beginning' they need time travel to do it. It feels like it's getting old (no pun intended there) and that's the least you want if you claim to be doing something new and different. And it's also not the first time Abrams has used time travel, so even for him it's starting to get old (but also let's keep spoilers for other shows out of here).

Btw, it was cool to see the good old Spock again. You see, I don't think it's all bad.

 

[Plain Simple]

I think Time Travel was the only way to bring Leonard Nimoy into the film. Even if Star Trek started in the 23rd Century, some form of time travel would have to occur if Nimoy was to be a part of it. They really couldn't have a "young" version of Nimoy automatically in the 23rd Century because of his age. Besides, I think it's a good idea. If this movie doesn't make it big, then it would be easy to tell 24th century stories again.

I seem to remember reading somewhere some time ago that Nimoy would play Spock's father in the movie, so that would also have been a way to have a Nimoy cameo. Of course it wouldn't be Spock, but everyone would get the hint. I guess by dragging the 'real Spock' into this movie, you need to either address questions as to what happened to him since TNG's Unification (and thus get entangled in 'the old Trek' again) or risk pissing a lot of people of. Ah well, we'll see.

 

[Borgminister]

Because Abrams was too pussy to reboot Star Trek the way RDM rebooted BSG.

And created a ratings juggernaut.

 

[gastrof]

This thread has, oddly enough, made me a little more accepting of the movie's apparently altered timeline.

If the first changes in history caused by "you know who" are as far back as they are, the resulting new timeline could be different from "the known TOS" in uncounted ways.

You know....the saying "If you change the position of ONE grain of sand on a beach, you could trigger a chain reaction of events that'd change the whole world"?

On the Paramount television series "Seven Days" the time-traveling main character, very early on, tries using his foreknowledge to bet on a sporting event, since he knows how it turns out.

Mind you, he's in no way involved with the game or the teams, and isn't anywhere near where they are...

And yet the "wrong" team ends up winning at the end of the episode.

He ends up losing his meager "life savings".

SOMETHING he did in the new timeline triggered a series of events that reached across the country and caused a different team to win than had won in the timeline he knew.

If the destruction of the Kelvin takes place in Kirk's early childhood or as he was born, then we'd have to assume the Enterprise may not have even been DESIGNED yet.

Starfleet could have, due to the Kelvin's destruction, come up with a whole new set of designs for not just Starships but a lot of other things. The designs for the TOS uniforms might have ended up being given a green light just after the events in THE CAGE, negating the WNMHGB uniforms.

I'm a little more settled now that this new movie isn't really erasing TOS. Maybe everything is still moving in the same direction- It's just altered the path of the riverbed a little.

 

[Hartzilla2007]

This thread has, oddly enough, made me a little more accepting of the movie's apparently altered timeline.

If the first changes in history caused by "you know who" are as far back as they are, the resulting new timeline could be different from "the known TOS" in uncounted ways.

You know....the saying "If you change the position of ONE grain of sand on a beach, you could trigger a chain reaction of events that'd change the whole world"?

On the Paramount television series "Seven Days" the time-traveling main character, very early on, tries using his foreknowledge to bet on a sporting event, since he knows how it turns out.

Mind you, he's in no way involved with the game or the teams, and isn't anywhere near where they are...

And yet the "wrong" team ends up winning at the end of the episode.

He ends up losing his meager "life savings".

SOMETHING he did in the new timeline triggered a series of events that reached across the country and caused a different team to win than had won in the timeline he knew.

If the destruction of the Kelvin takes place in Kirk's early childhood or as he was born, then we'd have to assume the Enterprise may not have even been DESIGNED yet.

Starfleet could have, due to the Kelvin's destruction, come up with a whole new set of designs for not just Starships but a lot of other things. The designs for the TOS uniforms might have ended up being given a green light just after the events in THE CAGE, negating the WNMHGB uniforms.

I'm a little more settled now that this new movie isn't really erasing TOS. Maybe everything is still moving in the same direction- It's just altered the path of the riverbed a little.

And its possible that

Starfleet builds the Enterprise on the ground because they need more ships as fast as possible to deal with a possible war and they decide the adding ground based starship construction facilities would help them by allowing them to build ships in space and on the ground thus making it possible to build up fleet strength.

I thought I would post this before someome brings up the ship built on the ground thing.

 

[Australis]

I can't imagine why anyone would. Or, indeed, any particular posters that might go on and on and and on and on and on and on and on and on and on about it.

--Australis, dodgy memory. Whut?

 

[flightmech73]

I agree that its the easiest way to get Nimoy in. As far as him playing Spock's father I just don't think any of us could see him that way. I am a bit tired of the time travel thing myself but hey I just want to see a good movie. I'm pretty open minded about seeing other peoples interpatations of of a subject. I thought id never get over Starbuck being a chick and now all I can think of is "mmmmm Starbuck......." But I do have that burning question in my head every day. How the crap are they going to launch that big ass ship into orbit?!?!?! She wasn't made to fly in atmosphere as far I as remember.

 

[Franklin]

The premise of this thread is flawed. It's been brought up before, and folks have gone around and around on it, but time travel has not been overused in Star Trek.
As a percentage of episodes, very few actually involved time travel. But many of those time travel episodes are among the most popular within the series. So, the perception is there are a lot of them.
According to Memory Alpha, time travel episodes per series are (and I've counted two-parters as one episode, or story):
-- TOS = 5 episodes in 79 shows.
-- TAS = 1 episode in two seasons.
-- Movies = 3 of the 10 movies.
-- TNG = 11 in seven seasons.
-- DS9 = 9 in seven seasons.
-- VOY = 11 in seven seasons.
-- ENT = 8 in four seasons.

That's 48 times in over 700 Star Trek stories of various types (or less than 7 percent). I'm sorry, that's just not enough to say it was overused. Especially because, like I said above, and inordinate percentage of these stories are among the favorites.

 

[Timelord79 (he/him)]

Most of the time (no pun intended) the heroes were the time travelers themselves. This time they will just be visited from the future. Imagine TVH told from the perspective of Gillian Taylor. What a different movie it would have been. ;-)

 

[Plain Simple]

The premise of this thread is flawed. It's been brought up before, and folks have gone around and around on it, but time travel has not been overused in Star Trek.
As a percentage of episodes, very few actually involved time travel. But many of those time travel episodes are among the most popular within the series. So, the perception is there are a lot of them.
According to Memory Alpha, time travel episodes per series are (and I've counted two-parters as one episode, or story):
-- TOS = 5 episodes in 79 shows.
-- TAS = 1 episode in two seasons.
-- Movies = 3 of the 10 movies.
-- TNG = 11 in seven seasons.
-- DS9 = 9 in seven seasons.
-- VOY = 11 in seven seasons.
-- ENT = 8 in four seasons.

That's 48 times in over 700 Star Trek stories of various types (or less than 7 percent). I'm sorry, that's just not enough to say it was overused. Especially because, like I said above, and inordinate percentage of these stories are among the favorites.

Well, whether or not you think that 48 episodes is too many or not is a matter of personal taste I guess. Based on the same figures I can also say that this movie will be the 4th out of 11 movies that features time travel, so that's more than one third. And the last installment on tv, Enterprise, had time travel as one of the basic premises of the series and so, although perhaps not all episodes focussed on it, it was a big part of the series. For example, the whole Xindi storyline in S3 had something to do with this temporal cold war iirc.

Perhaps it just feels too much like Enterprise all over again to me. Think about it. It's a show/movie that is supposed to reinvent Star Trek, to bring something fresh to the franchise. In order to do that they move the setting to a 'closer future', not 24th century, but a time when we 'can still identify with the characters and earth's not perfect yet' and who knows what else. And what is the first thing they did in Enterprise: throw most of that out of the window and make the overarching story about a time travel cold war. It just felt so unnecessary and it seemed to take attention away from the stories the show could've been telling in the show's present. And now with the movie again there's time travel in the plot.

Now I'm not saying that any story with time travel is automatically a bad or boring story, of course not. Just as you can make absolutely awful stories based on about anything, you can also make absolutely brilliant stories based on about anything. I'm just wondering, why? It seems not necessary. But then, as some have argued above, perhaps it is necessary to give people some in story reason for discrepancies with canon.

Just a final note on the numbers you mention. People who go "not again time travel, we've seen that so often in Star Trek", they have this reaction to the plot based on their feelings of what they've seen before. They will not look op the precise numbers on internet and then change their mind and say "o, apparently my feeling had no solid foundation in reality, now that I now that only 7% of Trek is about time travel I feel this plot element is less over used", they will just feel that it's over used and probably incorporate that feeling into their decision on whether or not to see the movie.

Btw, I thank you for showing us these figures. It's not that I do not appreciate the reality of these numbers, it's just that I don't think that people gut reaction to 'yet another time travel story' is based on the number, but more on the feeling these stories left them with.

Edit: judging by your signature, you'll appreciate my last remark above.