That's just the back ground that Tasha's romance plays out against. Eh, I'll give you Picard's dilemma but it's kinda weak when we get three act's of, "They have to stay to fight the Klingons" and then suddenly the Federations going to fall in six months or sooner so sending them back is no big whoop.
100%. Not only is it a fabulous high concept story that (as you rightly say) deftly "world builds", but it's as far from 'an (insert character here) episode' as you can get. Tasha is important, yes, but so are Picard, and Guinan, and the Enterprise-C crew. This story is very balanced in having good character moments for several people, all of which are absolutely crucial to the story. Also agree with every one of these points.
"Funny" because YE explicitly is about our characters' urgent (but successful) efforts to restore the original timeline, whereas Kurtzman and Orci state in "Star Trek" that it's impossible to restore the timeline and they just have to shrug and deal with the fact that history has been altered, oh well. Sigh.
Yesterday's Enterprise, First Contact and Wrath of Khan were the stated sources Orci and Kurtzman gave for ST09. TWOK - Guy wants revenge against Spock (not Kirk). Spock has to deal with death and mortality. Dialed up to the Nth degree. Yesterday's Enterprise: Time travel of a ship through a wormhole ends up rewriting history and changing the destiny of the main crew. First Contact: Time travel by the bad guys. History is damaged by the incursion. Heroes have to restore as much of it as possible and defeat evil. Also, the Borg are in there. Somewhere.
There is a point here--and one of the real issues with the Kelvin universe--in Star Trek, it is WELL established that time travel changes the timeline and that it can be restored. The Abrams team doesn't seem to get that, and wanted to do their own thing, but they really can't since the rules were established long before they came on board. If Abrams' rules apply, Yesterday's Enterprise has zero meaning, and really can't even be reconciled. There would be no point for the time cops either. Who cares if Edith Keeler lives or dies? Why would the Enterprise disappear when McCoy went through the Guardian? Star Trek does have a multiverse, but when they had the chance to establish it on screen, they chose not to do so. The annoying thing is that this can be fixed--easily--with one line if they want. I just don't expect them to do it.
I thought that was a great touch, though I read more hostility in their relationship than you do. Any theories on that aspect of their relationship? Perhaps Riker wants his own command and due to war losses there are none available. He thinks Picard should have accepted a promotion to the Admiralty and given him the Enterprise. So he resents him for holding him back.
It's one of my favorite episodes. But I felt that Guinin should have been a crew member, not a civilian.
Could be any number of things and please bear with me; I've not seen the episode since the S3 blu-ray came out. Here's a couple reasons I can think of that aren't a result of bad blood between the two: Cmdr. Riker is new (or fairly new) to the Enterprise and just hasn't built that rapport with Picard yet. Both men are so hardened by war and have lost so many friends and comrades at this point that they purposely don't get close with anyone.
The conflict between Riker and Picard in YE gives the episode some energy, and Stewart and Frakes are at their best. When I rewatch the episode I enjoy the subtleties. The only weak link is Guinan, although I liked her scenes with Tasha.
Overall, this was a good episode, except for Tasha's behavior at the end. Guinan basically told Tasha that Tasha's existence was illegitimate, that Tasha didn't have a right to be alive. What bothered me was Tasha's reaction. It didn't make sense. I didn't find Tasha's reaction, to what Guinan had told her, to be believable. Why would Tasha so easily buy into what Guinan told her? Tasha's life in that timeline was her only reality. From Tasha's perspective, she had every right to be alive and to go on living. Why would Tasha's survival instinct just wither away like that? It didn't make sense that Tasha would suddenly feel a need to give up on her life just because Guinan, through her gut feelings, said Tasha's life was not legitimate. It wasn't believable that Tasha would feel obligated to sacrifice her life on such filmsy rationale. Besides, what makes one timeline legitimate and another not? What if the Federation was winning the war, would that make that alternate timeline more "legitimate"? Also, from what I understand of the story, "correcting" the timeline didn't depend on whether (alternate timeline) Tasha lived or not. Presumably if the Enterprise C had returned to its time without (alternate timeline) Tasha, the Tashas, in either timeline, would have simply disappeared, as though the Ent D's encounter with the Ent C never happened. But by jumping into the Ent C timeline at the end, didn't Tasha ultimately change things and messed with the original timeline? Why didn't Guinan complain about that?
Except there are no “rules” with time travel in Star Trek, because time travel is a fictitious thing that changes based on the whims of the scriptwriters. So saying that Abrams didn’t “follow the rules” is a meaningless statement.
Picard's decision to let Tasha go to the Enterprise-C was a bit questionable from that point of view. Tasha had died and suddenly she was few decades in the past. Perhaps Picard was certain Enterprise-C couldn't survive and let her go in a more "glorious way". But who is to say what timeline is the correct timeline? Maybe the correct one is the one we create. Enterprise-C was sent back to save millions of lives.
TOS S2 "Mirror, Mirror" would disagree with you (as would the DS9 Mirror Universe episodes, the ENT Mirror Universe 2 parter, and the part a M U Terran Empress currently plays in the prime Star Trek timeline of ST: D.)
It's not "meaningless". Yes, it's fiction, but it also has rules that have been well established by MANY prior Star Trek episodes and films. "Yesterday's Enterprise", "City on the Edge of Forever", "First Contact", "Trials and Tribble-ations", etc. etc. All deal with the time lines being broken (or potentially broken) and subsequently fixed. Trek 2009 suddenly says, "forget all that, timelines can never be fixed, too bad." Um, really? Since when? All fiction is made up, of course, and if you're venturing into the realm of sci-fi/fantasy and are creating fanciful concepts that don't exist, you darn well better at least have them be internally consistent otherwise nothing will feel like it matters and suspension of disbelief becomes impossible.
The whole point of the Abrams movies was to wipe the slate clean, and have no set rules to follow, with lip service paid to continuity by coming up with this device of changing the history so it can then unfold all over again, in whatever way the writers want. It's a cheap trick to sidestep continuity, so it's a given that the result will be bad continuity. I think it's best to ignore the device. In effect, they threw out the rule book and made their own Trek their way. If you like it, it's Trek 2, a separate story. If you don't like it, like me, it's the easiest thing in the world to avoid the problems, we can just ignore it.
I don't remember the Abrams movies ever saying the timeline couldn't be fixed. All it would take is some way to prevent nero's ship coming through...
I actually agree with you. I think it was a (reasonably) clever way to try to have it both ways - rebooting the franchise with the original characters while still winking and saying, "no, don't worry, the original universe still 'exists' somewhere out there, just not here." Considering they were tasked with re-launching the franchise and wanted a foot in the familiar with the freedom to go in new directions, it was a (reasonably) smart way to go about it. But it definitely flies in the face of the "rules" as established by basically every prior Star Trek incarnation. Was there another path that might have done the same thing, within the "rules"? Eh, maybe. And I honestly wouldn't care of I actually liked the reboot movies. But I don't. So I ignore them, as you suggested.
Except we don't actually know what happened to those alternate universes, because we as the audience are only seeing the perspective of the 'prime' universe. Let's take "Yesterday's Enterprise" as an example. Due to the actions of the Enterprise-C being thrown into the future, it created an alternate future timeline where the Federation was at war with the Klingons. By returning to the past, the timeline "righted" itself. But how do we know that the other war timeline didn't keep existing, and we just don't see it? The Abrams films made it clear that the Kelvin universe is an alternate one, branched off from the 'prime' timeline when Nero was thrown into the past. But the 'prime' universe still exists; only in this case we the audience are now seeing the Kelvin universe instead of the 'prime' universe. One of the Star Trek novel writers even used this premise in one of their books, a sequel of sorts to "City on the Edge of Forever." In that book, the alternate timeline created when McCoy went back to the past and kept Edith Keller from dying (before Kirk & Spock "righted" the timeline) still existed, where McCoy was never rescued by Kirk & Spock and that timeline ended up with Germany winning WWII like what Spock saw in the future news reports.