I was never much of a Star Trek fan. The only two series I ever followed faithfully were Star Trek: Voyager and Star Trek: Enterprise; and I only followed them because Hallmark was showing daily reruns for the former and for the latter, I am, unabashedly, a sucker for anything done by Scott Bakula (too much Quantum Leap when growing up does that to you).
Star Trek had always seemed to me like a contemplative universe – the movies and TV episodes lens to view the world, with its characters personification of all the myriad values and principles that exist in our world. Every story from Star trek felt like a parable, a moral exposition – too weighty for my liking.
I’ve always been more of a soap opera kind of guy – like sands through the hourglass, these are the days of our lives. Star Wars with its my-dad-is-dead-but-not-dead-however-is-my-mortal-enemy and that-hot-chick-is-actually-my-sister-so-now-I-cannot-bang-her and the-cocksure-smuggler-can-bang-the-princess storyline was more of my cup of tea.
But I digress.
There has always been a tacit agreement between fans of any universe and those who would weave the stories in which bind everything together – you may tell the stories only if you respect what is canon.
However, fans (alright, I) appreciate the commercial potential of rebooting a universe. But if you really must break from canon, create your own universe where things are different but still recognizable.
What Abrams did with the latest Star Trek movie was to totally break continuity. Whatever we knew happened will never happen. In the great scheme of things, the tape was rewound, time was reset and things that are to come will be different from that which we know has happened. It is like the last 10 movies and countless episodes of the 5 TV series were erased as the time stream was irrevocably damaged.
From a storyteller’s POV, the reboot could have been done without the introduction of the old Spock. If that had been the case, it could have been argued that this new Star Trek exists in a new parallel universe and that which had happened, happened in Earth 616 (to borrow from Marvel).
But even then, from what we know of the Star Trek universe, that argument could not be strongly made. The Star Trek universe has always existed as a fixed time universe as evidenced from Star Trek: First Contact when the crew on the Enterprise saw Earth change to a Borg colony after the Borg sphere had traveled back in time albeit one where changes in 1 point in time ripples forward along the time stream and not manifest instantly.
And so in a fixed time universe, time travel is a messy messy plot device. Even excusing the fact that those responsible for the new Star Trek cared little about the bleeding heart of the guardians of continuity, what they did with the whole time travel plot device was to initiate the possible total destruction of time in the Star Trek universe.
With the arrival of the old Spock and the Romulan vessel, a paradox was created. At some point in time in the future, the new Spock who would have aged would have to travel back in time with a Romulan ship.
Now I can only imagine what the folks on Romulus would think. The events in this Star Trek were pretty apocalyptic and attention grabbing that I am sure someone would be aware that Romulus is doomed in the future. If steps were taken to save Romulus, then there is no angry captain. If the star going supernova and its effects were contained, no wormhole to the past will be created.
Even if memory implants could be given to a bunch of Romulans so that they think their planet was destroyed, creating a wormhole to two exact points in the past is going to take a whole lot of effort.
It could almost be said to be impossible. So if this current time-line does not resolve the issue of sending Spock and a Romulan ship back, then USS Kelvin and the Vulcan home planet were never destroyed and thus the original continuity exists which means the original Spock and the ship will get sent back which means..
Do you see the loop the Star Trek universe could now be stuck in?
Further thoughts:
The old Spock is unable to teach the people in this timeline any of the technology he knows from the previous one. His knowledge is an accumulation of a whole generation of research and technological advancements. If he imparts his knowledge, then this new timeline will be able to improve on that over this generation which means when this new Spock goes back as the new old Spock, the next timeline created will have two generations of accumulated knowledge. Eventually, what might happen is that the Romulan ship going back will be so powerful that it cannot be overcome and then all kinds of shit will hit the fan with regards to continuity. Of course if the good folks from the United Federation of Planets are the ones sending back the Romulan ship then they can deliberately cripple its technology.
I don’t understand the Romulan captain. You go back in time. Instead of trying to warn your planet which has not been destroyed that they are in danger, you decide to take revenge for something which technically hasn’t happened yet. Dumb shit.
And Spock… he has a ship carrying something with the capability of generating a black hole which basically can destroy anything in space and he meekly surrenders over the ship? He should have gone all kamikaze on the Romulan ship. That would have been the logical thing to do.
And yes, I’m taking this too seriously.
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