Star Trek: No Subtitle

[Nate the Great]

Whether or not they showed us an origin for the TOS crew onscreen or not, there are hundreds of Trek books out there that show a relatively cohesive version of events that have served as an origin for the TOS crew. I read the books, they fit together rather well.

And you STILL haven't addressed the "we can do it BETTER" mentality. Are there not enough fans behind the scenes to point out continuity or characterization errors behind the scenes yet?

Of course all the old stuff is still there; Paramount is going to sell everything with the Trek name on it for as long as they can make money off of it. It still doesn't negate the fact that they felt that they weren't up to the task of calling in a few fans to create a story that could fit in the mainstream timeline, nor were they confident enough to create a brand new universe without pulling Spock Prime in to muddle the waters in the public's eye about which universe is "real" now.

[Wowbagger]

Originally Posted by Nate the Great

Whether or not they showed us an origin for the TOS crew onscreen or not, there are hundreds of Trek books out there that show a relatively cohesive version of events that have served as an origin for the TOS crew. I read the books, they fit together rather well.

Every Star Trek movie, series, episode, and -- nowadays -- nearly every book out-and-out ignores every Star Trek book. Why? Because respecting them would be ridiculously binding and limit a huge part of the Trek universe to the tiny proportion of it that buys the books. We're not Star Wars, with its now insanely insular fanbase that's almost completely closed to normal people (oh, how the popular mighty have fallen!). I'm very happy with that.

Canon does not contain a TOS origin story. Now it does. It was rich, it was fun, it was beautiful. And scores of millions of people saw it, rather than the few dozen who read the typical Star Trek paperback book.

This how Trek has always worked. It's how Trek is supposed to work. Once you're saying that canon needs to stay away from something because, "Oh, the books already dealt with that," you are way gone from the path that Roddenberry, Moore, Behr, Berman, Braga, Justman, Solow, Hurley, Coto, Coon, the Okudas, and all the rest blazed for us over the course of four decades.

Plus, those books are not consistent. Let's just grab three, the first three that come to mind: Best Destiny, Kobayashi Maru, and Cadet Kirk. Reconciliation of those three works is almost as impossible as reconciling the movieverse and the Primeverse. They're spaghetti. The movie is a decided canonical improvement.

And I haven't even mentioned the Shatnerverse novels. Throw in Collision Course and your head will a'splode.

So, basically, you're wrong, and, even if you were right, you'd still be wrong. This choice of setting and storyline was appropriate, canonical, respectful, consistent... and, based on dramatic opportunity alone, correct.

And you STILL haven't addressed the "we can do it BETTER" mentality. Are there not enough fans behind the scenes to point out continuity or characterization errors behind the scenes yet?

Actually, I did:

Originally Posted by Wowbagger

...if you go back and rewatch TOS, TAS, and everything Gene Roddenberry and the original creators ever did, you'll find that they didn't give us an origin story for the characters or the crew. Not once. Ever.

Bottom line: there was no "we can do it BETTER" mentality, because there was nothing for them to do better than! This is like complaining that Isaac Newton was arrogant for coming up with the theory of gravity. "What gives him the right to publish these theories?" asks Nate the Great, "Does he think he can do a theory of gravity better than all the previous theories of gravity postulated by other physicists?" Since this origin story is the first origin story we've been given for the characters, and since it is consistent with the tiny flecks of background story we got for the TOS characters during the course of TOS (and, incidentally, those "tiny flecks" were themselves highly inconsistent), this complaint is, literally, nonsensical. Parsing the sentence actual results in concrete meaninglessness.

You can feel free to argue that there were characterization problems, but not until after you've seen the movie. For myself and most other fans, no characterization problems were apparent -- though I did find Chris Pine's interpretation of the Kirk character to be interesting and at times surprising, nothing appeared to me to be at all out-of-character for young J.T. Kirk.

Of course all the old stuff is still there; Paramount is going to sell everything with the Trek name on it for as long as they can make money off of it. It still doesn't negate the fact that they felt that they weren't up to the task of calling in a few fans to create a story that could fit in the mainstream timeline, nor were they confident enough to create a brand new universe without pulling Spock Prime in to muddle the waters in the public's eye about which universe is "real" now.

Clearly you have no idea who they had writing the movie. Roberto Orci -- I am not overstating this here -- could eat your knowledge of canon for breakfast. Then he'd polish it off with a spot of Tech Manual. The man is a walking encyclopedia (and apparently relied on Memory Alpha to double-check the script work throughout the process of scripting). They brought in hardcore fans throughout cast and crew, and, of course, you can't beat having a hardcore as co-writer. This is what those fans produced.

Why did they create a new universe? Because they felt it would be wrong to simply dismiss and destroy forty years of Star Trek canon. They love that canon as much as we do. Nonetheless, they did not believe it prudent to begin a prequel series that was locked on a preset course. They believed that doing so would drain dramatic tension, because, for example, if they killed off Sulu, we'd know that they'd have to bring back Sulu in the next movie, and so there would be no dramatic tension.

In their position, I am not certain of what I would do. I definitely understand and respect their position. Anyone who writes on even a reasonably regular basis must understand that. Dramatic tension -- suspense -- is one of the key tools of the craft.

The rest of it -- bringing in Spock Prime and so forth -- is not a cynical marketing move, as you seem to insist on believing. It's the greatest paean to the importance and beauty of Star Trek canon ever composed. That love of the canon, and the insistence on respecting it and linking the Primeverse to the Neroverse to preserve Trek's ancient continuity, was a trade-off. The fixation on canon was the direct cause of most of the movie's plotting and motivation problems.

And if that doesn't argue heavily in favor of an anti-canonista position, I don't know what does.

You're not going to love everything about this movie, Nate. If there is any Trek movie you love everything about, for which you would have done little or nothing different, then I must insist that you're wearing rose-colored nostalgia glasses. I think that if you look at this movie honestly, though, you'll find a series of brutally difficult creative choices, where the filmmakers couldn't get everything they wanted (both a Primeverse setting and a great TOS origin story) and settled for a happy medium in which they produced an incredibly surprising, unbelievably respectful, helluva good movie.

As to your question about which universe is "real": most members of the non-Trekkie public I've spoken to are not aware that there are two universes. They don't think about it. Those who are aware of the fact generally know the correct answer: both are equally real. We're just doing a few movies in this one while the Primeverse lays fallow for a bit. We'll see what happens after that.

Your bile against this film and its creators is so intense, Nate (and it just looks sillier and sillier now that everyone else on the face of the Earth has seen this movie and actually knows what they're talking about). What's your real deal here? What's your bone to pick with Abrams & Co.?

[Nate the Great]

I don't expect the live-action stuff to act like every novel is canon, but there are certain things that most fans can agree on as being very nice ideas. Some of these come from the animated series or whatnot. And what's more, these events carry across novels by different authors in different "novel franchises". The creators don't need to read all of these novels and comic books, just ask the fans! There are millions of Trekkies out there ready to help out the creators for free, all you need to do is ask them!

Yes, the novels contradict each other; you can't expect every author to read hundreds of novels before writing their own, but you never see anybody wiping the slate clean to be able to ignore everyone else's versions either.

And I maintain my position that the creators felt that they can create a "better" universe. Alternate timelines that only exist for an episode or two are created for fun or to tell a single plot. With this movie there was no Reset Button. The universe has been changed (and billions of Vulcans present and future NO LONGER EXIST!) and will not be changing back.

[Wowbagger]

I don't expect the live-action stuff to act like every novel is canon

If you expect the live-action stuff to act like any novel is canon, you're holding them to a higher standard than you have ever held any work of Star Trek. By this standard, you must hate on every single episode Trek produced after Spock Must Die! for disrespecting the non-canon. It's non-canon. It is not part of the universe. Period. Full stop.

but there are certain things that most fans can agree on as being very nice ideas.

...such as?

I'll give you "Yesteryear," though even that is controversial.

The recent "novel franchises" are not only the worst thing to happen in the history of Trek novel writing, on account of being not merely inexcusable dreck, but inextricably interconnected inexcusable dreck -- they're also contradictory of all the "good stuff" from previous non-canon romps. And said franchises tend to contradict each other anyway. And the fans don't agree about any of it being good, each supporting his own favored camp or none at all. (Extra credit challenge: find a New Frontier fan. Find a Shatnerverse fan. Provoke a fight between them. Enjoy. For extra extra fun, involve someone who thought that any Next Gen book released since Nemesis came out was a good idea. Then get popcorn.)

Bottom line is, you're not angry at the filmmakers for disrespecting canon. You're not even angry at them for ignoring the big pile of inconsistent sludge that is the non-canon. You're angry at them for failing to have a vision of the universe that is perfectly consistent with your own, personal, extra-canonical, one-man interpretation of the Star Trek universe. In short: you're a fanboy. And, like all fanboys, you are incapable of absorbing change, for no other reason than that it is change. Had you been born in 1963 instead of 1993, you would have hated Next Gen for its inexcusable depredations against your beloved TOS vision.

IMHO, that is. It certainly seems that way to me (strongly), but, as in all things, I could be wrong.

And I maintain my position that the creators felt that they can create a "better" universe.

That's my Nate. Never let evidence stand in the way of a good conviction.

The creators felt that they didn't have the necessary room to dramatically maneuver in the Prime timeline. They made a difficult decision to split off a new history, but were not willing to destroy the very great good that was the Prime timeline -- and insisted on linking the two together at the very root of the new timeline. They pray every day that their new timeline will measure up to the old one. With Star Trek '09, they're off to a very good start.

[Nate the Great]

Shatnerverse is 100% non-canon. I'll give you that. A lot of Peter David, as great as he is, can't fit into canon.

Spock Must Die is one of the earliest books, back when TOS was the only Trek out there. I don't count any of the pre Pocket Books stuff for the simple reason that Next Gen either didn't exist yet or was brand new. In those days people thought they had the entire universe to play around with without another TV series to muck things up. Look at the intricate designs in Mr. Scott's Guide To The Enterprise, a wonderful book that is unfortunately contradictory to a lot of stuff that came after.

What's wrong with the novels being interconnected? Are the DS9 and Voyager relaunch novel series drek merely because they're interconnected?

I said it before, I'll say it again. Had they ignored the time-travel and just done a simple REBOOT, I'd have no problem. Why? Because they'd be creating the equivalent of Ultimate Marvel. Ultimate Marvel does not pretend to be the "real" universe, just another option. And you can prattle all you like about Paramount still marketing the pre-11 timeline, as far as the casual viewer is concerned THIS is now the Star Trek universe.

From Day One Paramount made clear their desire to ingrain Trek 11 as THE Star Trek universe in the public eye in an attempt to get more viewers. I mean, heaven forbid they just pull a Voyage Home and write a story that lets up on the scifi in an attempt to tell a story that can be accessible to the filmgoing public, right? Heaven forbid they tell a story based on the original Kirk and Spock that relies on drama and can still fit into (if you insist, the film-based) canon?

[Sa'ar Chasm]

Nate, what you should be frothing angrily about is the fact that Nokia has apparently survived both the Eugenics Wars and WWIII as well as the death of capitalism and is making carphones in the 23rd century.

Also, I find it odd that the Vulcans use both Leibnitz notation *and* IUPAC conventions, complete with Latin characters.

[NAHTMMM]

Originally Posted by Nate the Great

With this movie there was no Reset Button. The universe has been changed (and billions of Vulcans present and future NO LONGER EXIST!) and will not be changing back.

Eh, it's sci-fi. If you can bring one Vulcan back to life, it's unlikely that you'll have much difficulty doing the same for the entire race.

Personally, I don't think it's over yet. The problem with Romulus has yet to be fixed -- and, as Canon clearly demonstrates, Spock is incapable of screwing up on such a high level. So I fully expect the next movie or so to deal with Old Spock finding a way to avoid the destruction of Romulus, or at least that of its people.* Possibly by sending a message to his old universe to warn himself to get on the ball sooner. What would that do, if successful, to his new timeline? I don't know, although you could easily make an argument for it staying intact, but Spock would be satisfied with creating a/another timeline in which all those Romulan deaths were avoided.



* This is one of the weaker parts of the plot, I think. I won't knock the "red matter" technobabble per se, but why is the star blowing up so early? Rather, how is it blowing up at all, without someone seeing it coming decades or centuries in advance? I may have missed something in the dialogue, but stars don't generally spontaneously get a stomachache one day and then go kerplooie a few weeks later. It takes a while.

So I am left to assume that either A: some unknown entity induced the star to explode or B: the Romulan government is, collectively, about as short-sighted and stupid as a totalitarian government can be. Because that's the only scenario I can think of to explain why gobs of Romulans were evidently still in the system when an undisturbed star blew its top. Especially if this occurs after ST:VI.

Now, Nero the miner doesn't have to pick up on this (nice characterization of him, by the way -- rough and uncultured without being an idiot bumpkin). Spock, however, ought to have thoughts along one of these sets of lines . . . and yet his speech and actions suggest nothing of the sort whatsoever. If B is the case, he could have told Kirk "I could not get there in time. I [or the Federation] could not even convince the Romulan government to move their in-system citizens out of harm's way." That would be in line with his purpose of explaining Nero's motives and with his refusing to avoid blame. If A is the case, Spock could have expressed curiosity in passing about the means of inducing a nova, or the identity or motive of the attacker. Even the simple "The Romulan sun was, somehow, about to go nova" would have been entirely reasonable dialogue while giving some indication that the writers had thought about the situation a bit. And then you even have an obvious hook for a future story in the novels or a movie: Who caused that, and why? And who else might they try it on . . . ?

[Sa'ar Chasm]

This is one of the weaker parts of the plot, I think. I won't knock the "red matter" technobabble per se, but why is the star blowing up so early?

The first time I watched it, I assumed that the star blowing up was Romulus'. However, after watching it again I realised Spock said he was able to deploy the red matter before "any other" systems were destroyed. I seem to recall that the crazy-spinny-unpilotable-ship was outfitted and sent out *after* the star blew up. Both of these suggest that the star was in another system, since it was a race against time to get to Romulus before the wave front. However, since star systems tend to be light years apart and explosions travel at subliminal velocities, there should have been millions of years before the explosion got there, at which point it would have attentuated to the background. Therefore, since the plot so clearly violates the laws of physics, it can't have happened, therefore the move never happened, therefore we can all stop embracing the worst of geek stereotypes over it.

Ignore is a much better option than Contort Into Canon or Petulant Hissyfit.

[Wowbagger]

Originally Posted by NAHTMMM

Who caused that, and why? And who else might they try it on . . . ?

Personally, I think you're exactly right.

I think that the best way to explain Spock's reticence regarding the cuprit, whether natural or artificial (plus his obvious failure to explain radical violations of every known law of physics in the destruction of Romulus) is to suppose that Spock knew who it was, and that he left it out because explaining would have had dramatic, immediate, local effects on the "new" universe.

Specifically, I think Spock caused the supernova that destroyed Romulus. I think this stands to reason: he obviously wouldn't explain it to Young Kirk, because Young Kirk would freak the heck out on Spock Prime and that'd be the end of that. It explains Nero's really rather bizarre obsession with killing Spock, the Vulcans, and the UFP. It explains why Old Spock makes no apparent attempt to remedy the situation -- having just killed an entire populated star system, he's been humbled, and will not play God with time or space again.

This only leaves the question of why Spock would destroy a star. I sat with this question for a while, and it seemed so out-of-character for him that I put this theory aside for several months.

Then, one day, it hit me. Who was the last character in Star Trek who went around deliberately blowing up stars? Why did that character do that? What is returning to Federation space in 2410? What interest does Spock have in that phenomenon?

Answer these questions and I think you have a compelling reason for Spock to accidentally destroy Romulus in the course of an insanely hubrisitic rescue attempt.

I could, of course, be wrong. It's just an interpretation. Well-evidenced, I think, but an interpretation.

As for you, Nate...

And you can prattle all you like about Paramount still marketing the pre-11 timeline, as far as the casual viewer is concerned THIS is now the Star Trek universe.

As far at the casual viewer is concerned there is only one Star Trek universe. Only nerds realize the extent and nature of the continuity fork.

From Day One Paramount made clear their desire to ingrain Trek 11 as THE Star Trek universe in the public eye...

Give me one quote from anyone involved in production to illustrate that. In fact, if you are so insistent that this was made "clear" from "day one," give me three. Shouldn't be that hard, if your convictions are rooted in anything other than fantasy.

I mean, heaven forbid they just pull a Voyage Home and write a story that lets up on the scifi in an attempt to tell a story that can be accessible to the filmgoing public, right?

Ch'yeah, because sending a Klingon warship around the sun to travel back in time using a warp drive so that its dilithium crystals burn out and have to be reenergized using stolen protons while Kirk and Spock try to steal two whales to beam into a newly-invented transparent aluminum tank so they can save the Earth from a climate-ending whale probe that's travelled from beyond the galaxy to talk to whales was really a big letup on the science fiction.

Did I mention they time-travelled back at the end of the movie?

Heaven forbid they tell a story based on the original Kirk and Spock that relies on drama and can still fit into (if you insist, the film-based) canon?

This one does fit into film-based canon. As Roberto Orci observed, it is takes place chronologically in 2233 - 2258, but, causally speaking, it takes place after Star Trek Nemesis. You're just bugged that they found away around certain restrictions that another kind of story would have had. Don't pretend this movie threw away canon when it didn't.

Meanwhile, the whole argument of the creators in doing this was that they could not make a good movie, based on drama, that fit into the known lives of Kirk Prime and Spock Prime, precisely because the ending of those movies would be prefigured, automatically destroying any sense of dramatic tension.

It seems, incidentally, that they were right. Star Trek 2009 sold more tickets and pleased more crowds than any other Trek film in history, even after adjusting for inflation and limiting the figures to domestic audiences.

Shatnerverse is 100% non-canon. I'll give you that. A lot of Peter David, as great as he is, can't fit into canon.

Spock Must Die is one of the earliest books, back when TOS was the only Trek out there. I don't count any of the pre Pocket Books stuff for the simple reason that Next Gen either didn't exist yet or was brand new.

Exactly. You don't count it. But thousands of fans do. There's a faction of fans outraged that there was no reference in the movie to The Return. And, yes, The Return and Spock Must Die and Before Dishonor and Q&A and Mission:Gamma and House of Cards all have equal claims to canonicity -- which is to say, exactly zero. Anything you choose to accept or not to accept is your own personal deal, but it has nothing to do with canon. You're creating your own Nate-canon, which is unique to you and distinct from every other fan's definition of canon in the whole wide world, and demanding that all subsequent Trek movies either adhere to Nate-canon or throw all canon (all real canon) in the trash and start over in some Ultimate Trek reboot. That's insane. Not to mention incredibly egotistical.

(Incidentally, I personally accept Spock's World and much of Prime Directive, as well as To Reign In Hell, Dark Mirror, The Good That Men Do, large portions of Unity, and, just for funsies, The Entropy Effect. But this has absolutely no relation to what actually exists in canon -- it's just a way for my personal imagination to have fun fleshing out the Star Trek universe that exists in my head and no one else's.)

Look at the intricate designs in Mr. Scott's Guide To The Enterprise, a wonderful book that is unfortunately contradictory to a lot of stuff that came after.

Same with poor old Star Trek: Star Charts. Every non-canon reference book eventually gets overruled in some respect. Correction: every non-canon work eventually gets overrruled. This obsessive defense of the non-canon is (fortunately) a young plague that didn't pop up until Enterprise got canceled and the authors realized they had the entire Prime Universe to themselves.

For the record, the interconnectedness of the new novels is bad because (as is traditional in Trek novels) about half of them are horrible. Awful beyond words. I can't even look at a copy of Greater Than The Sum, much less the bloated These Gray Spirit or the poorly-constructed Death in Winter. Now that these stories are all tied into each other, the absolute suckitude of one affects the suckitude of everything else in the line. Used to be you could read a bomb like the Double Helix sextet and, once finished, immediately forget all of it, forever, and never be haunted by any of its absurd storytelling contortions. Now we are stalked by the insanity of Before Dishonor and The Farther Shore not for a day but forever. Every other novel has to deal with the suck; every other novel sucks more.

Awesomeness, sadly, fails to leak over in quite the same way. Ergo, the books which were once tolerable now suck almost universally. It's those magic standalones, like Burning Dreams, which can still be good if they try.

But this is largely irrelevant to our discussion of Trek XI.

Had they ignored the time-travel and just done a simple REBOOT, I'd have no problem. Why? Because they'd be creating the equivalent of Ultimate Marvel. Ultimate Marvel does not pretend to be the "real" universe, just another option.

Given that a reboot would have (1) terminated the use of the Primeverse much more surely than Trek XI did, (2) rejected outright everything about the original verse, (3) ignored just as (in fact, much more) completely everything else you love in Star Trek's non-canon, (4) been presented far more strongly as the so-called "real" universe to the exclusion of the Primeverse, and (5) blown up Vulcan anyways, your claim here makes no sense. I think you would have been just as pissed off.

Why? Because I think you're a fanboy. You cannot tolerate change. By the standards you have laid out here (great respect for non-canon material, insistence on non-contradiction of fanon, insistence on reboot over a sequel in continuity, championing own personal view of canon over official canon, rejection of anything surprising or original or new in the franchise), it would be utterly inconsistent of you to have enjoyed TNG or any of the spinoff series. You would be, if just a few years older, one of those irritating forum lurkers who to this day deny the canonicty or validity of any Star Trek made after 1987 (if not earlier).

You're just throwing this "Ultimate Marvel" stuff in here as tinfoil -- an excuse to hate the movie because "you could have done better" with so easy a stroke.

It's silly. At this point, though, I'm pretty much ready to let this go as "Oh, Nate's just being Nate: obnoxious, irritating, petulant, irrational, fanboyish," and call it a day. I suppose the only reason I've stuck with it so far is that, while I don't mind people not liking the movie, I do mind people accusing its creators of nastiness and/or ignorance and/or a failure to love/appreciate Star Trek, because that's just not fair to them.

[Nate the Great]

Did I say that Voyage Home had no scifi in it? NO! NO! NO!

I said that Voyage Home let up on the scifi. By which I mean the object wasn't simply "two ships fighting each other in space for reasons that seem questionable and unexplainable for any reason other than 'the script said so.'" It went beyond the plot device of "a Big Bad wants to take over the universe through superior firepower" that was used in II and III. Not that it's a bad plot device, but Voyage Home went BEYOND that. It was about the human condition as much as anything else, which is what Trek is theoretically ABOUT. There was a message behind it that spoke in terms that didn't require a Ph.D. in scifi to understand. Loyalty, environmentalism, humor, a desire to help others even at grave personal risk.

"This one does fit into film-based canon. As Roberto Orci observed, it is takes place chronologically in 2233 - 2258, but, causally speaking, it takes place after Star Trek Nemesis."

How does chronological placement have ANYTHING to do with fitting into film-based canon? At all? Giving a year only means that events happened within that year, not that said events fit into prior canon.

And by the way, "2233-2258" and "after Nemesis" are CONTRADICTORY. Yes, you're referring to time periods before and after a time travel, but if I'm going to be flamed for being an obsessive fanboy I demand the right to flame for grammatical inaccuracy.

Yes, I'm a minority of one. Everybody on the planet is a minority of one. Our opinions are what makes us individuals and not drones.

How does eliminating the time travel and saying "this movie is a reboot in another timeline" terminate the use of the original timeline in marketing, etc.? In this very thread people have pointed out that the original timeline is still used in novels and computer games. It's another continuity! What does an Iron Man movie have to do with an Iron Man animated series or an Iron Man comic line? NONE! Toys are sold for all three, adaptations are made of all three, all three COEXIST!

Had there been no time travel in Trek 11, there'd be no reason for us to think that the original timeline was destroyed. But the original timeline WAS present, and now it's GONE. There's a big difference between "the original timeline is elsewhere in the multiverse" and "we rewrote history in front of your very eyes."

I'm sorry, but when I see history rewritten in front of my eyes without being restored before the end of the movie, I get the crazy idea that the creators don't care about the old timeline. This is another reason why I didn't like Cinderella III.

[Wowbagger]

Originally Posted by Nate the Great

Not that it's a bad plot device, but Voyage Home went BEYOND that. It was about the human condition as much as anything else, which is what Trek is theoretically ABOUT. There was a message behind it that spoke in terms that didn't require a Ph.D. in scifi to understand. Loyalty, environmentalism, humor, a desire to help others even at grave personal risk.

I keep forgetting you haven't seen this movie, which is why everything you say about comes across as so stupid.

See it, then tell me you didn't see loyalty, humor, a desire to help others even at grave personal risk, plus humility, a nice (if understated) dialogue between reason and passion, and more humor.

Star Trek IV was shallow compared to other films (particularly: TWOK, TMP, TUC, INS), but managed to be excellent by throwing its characters into an outrageous situation and watching those characters work it out with difficulty and an irrepressible humor.

That is this movie.

How does chronological placement have ANYTHING to do with fitting into film-based canon? At all? Giving a year only means that events happened within that year, not that said events fit into prior canon.

Chronological placement does not have anything to do with fitting into film-based canon. Causal placement has everything to do with fitting in. TSFS is part of canon because its events follow on and are caused by the events of TWOK. TVH builds on TSFS. TFF builds on TVH (badly). TMP, in turn, is directly caused by TOS. The causal links are greater or lesser from movie to movie, but they are always there. TUC causes GEN. TWOK is caused as much by "Space Seed" (an episode) as by any movie.

Star Trek 2009 does not cause, nor is it caused by, TOS. Star Trek 2009 is linked to the canon not by TOS but by NEM, "Unification I" and "Unification II" from STNG. It does fit into the canon -- just not in the way you want it to fit in your fanboy rage.

And by the way, "2233-2258" and "after Nemesis" are CONTRADICTORY. Yes, you're referring to time periods before and after a time travel, but if I'm going to be flamed for being an obsessive fanboy I demand the right to flame for grammatical inaccuracy.

There was no grammatical inaccuracy. The one was a chronological placement, the other a causal placement. Consider your flametaliation dampered.

Yes, I'm a minority of one. Everybody on the planet is a minority of one. Our opinions are what makes us individuals and not drones.

I wasn't criticizing your individual opinion. I was observing that Orci and Kurtzman's justification for spinning off a new timeline -- that it would restore dramatic tension, therefore making an objectively better movie, therefore bringing in more theatergoers -- seems to have been correct. Now, you may value meticulous preservation of (your particular filtered version of) the original timeline more than having a good movie, and that's fine, but my point is that the writers did not arbitrarily change timelines. They were faced with a choice between two positive values (canon worship vs. excellent writing) and selected the latter. Your insistence on assigning evil motives to that decision is misdirected and unjust. And that's why I'm still in this thread.

How does eliminating the time travel and saying "this movie is a reboot in another timeline" terminate the use of the original timeline in marketing, etc.? In this very thread people have pointed out that the original timeline is still used in novels and computer games. It's another continuity! What does an Iron Man movie have to do with an Iron Man animated series or an Iron Man comic line? NONE! Toys are sold for all three, adaptations are made of all three, all three COEXIST!

Wait. So, aside from the fact that Iron Man and Star Trek are radically different properties with radically different marketing possibilities... it's okay with you to have two divergent continuities being marketed at the same time, with one (the movies) getting the vast, vast majority of money and fans while the comics are left behind as a tiny preserve for the hardcore nerd fans?

What's wrong, then, in your opinion, with doing the same thing for two divergent timelines? Not that I think that's what's going to happen to Star Trek, as we've already seen an uptick in interest in the several TV series thanks to this new movie, but, as far as I can tell, your whole argument against the divergent timelines is that splitting the timeline will ghettoize us just as it's ghettoized the comic book world!

But the original timeline WAS present, and now it's GONE. There's a big difference between "the original timeline is elsewhere in the multiverse" and "we rewrote history in front of your very eyes."

Alright. Time for you to read this, Nate:

http://trekmovie.com/2008/12/11/bob-...-real-science/

I'm sorry, but when I see history rewritten in front of my eyes without being restored before the end of the movie, I get the crazy idea that the creators don't care about the old timeline. This is another reason why I didn't like Cinderella III.

So you ignore everything the creators have said, thought, written, shown on the subject and ascribe your own motives to them despite all evidence to the contrary.

If that's your principle, then there's very little I can say to change your mind.

[Nate the Great]

Of course the creators are going to claim that the original timeline still exists. And technically it does, through quantum theory. But when the movies ain't going back, and it seems like any new television show won't be going back, I still say that the creators deemed it irrelevant.

And for the umpteenth time, in "Parallels" and all other cases of timeline manipulation, the crew eventually get back to their own reality, or a reasonable facsimile thereof. There's a big difference between "we're only here to tell a story that would be impossible in our original timeline, but we're going back" and "our story would be impossible to tell in the original timeline, so we're going to rewrite history to make a universe where you can't complain at us for violating continuity because we can rebut 'it's magic, we don't have to explain it.'"

Seriously, this is One More Day all over again.

[NAHTMMM]

Originally Posted by Sa'ar Chasm

I seem to recall that the crazy-spinny-unpilotable-ship was outfitted and sent out *after* the star blew up.

I don't remember that at all. It arrived after the star blew up; is that what you're thinking of?

However, since star systems tend to be light years apart and explosions travel at subliminal velocities, there should have been millions of years before the explosion got there

Actually, I believe (off the top of my befuddled morning-head) that an exploding star releases enough nasty EM radiation--which does travel at the speed of light--to make its neighborhood miserable for us carbon-based life-forms. We should be glad we don't have any Betelgeuses (for example) sitting on our interstellar doorstep. This radiation would still be travelling at a rate of one light-year per year, granted, but it would arrive much sooner than you said. Plus, since this is ST, one can always say "Well, there are a lot of icky tachyons released in the explosion, so there!"

Still, this is all academic, since that radiation would have been largely released in the actual explosion and therefore it would be too late for Spock to do anything about it. So he can only have been trying to deal with the matter part of the explosion, which, as you say, would travel at less than the speed of light.

Therefore, since the plot so clearly violates the laws of physics, it can't have happened, therefore the move never happened, therefore we can all stop embracing the worst of geek stereotypes over it.

Ignore is a much better option than Contort Into Canon or Petulant Hissyfit.

I like this way of thinking.

Originally Posted by Wowbagger

I think that the best way to explain Spock's reticence regarding the cuprit, whether natural or artificial (plus his obvious failure to explain radical violations of every known law of physics in the destruction of Romulus) is to suppose that Spock knew who it was, and that he left it out because explaining would have had dramatic, immediate, local effects on the "new" universe.

Oooh, that's possible.

I can't see Spock being responsible for the star's destruction, however. Even if he tried a stunt like that, he'd go for a star in a totally uninhabited system in a totally uninhabited neighborhood. (Or, it being the TNG-DS9-VOY era, he'd call up Geordi or someone else to technobabble him up a phenomenon that would imitate a supernova well enough to fool the Nexus. )

As Roberto Orci observed, it is takes place chronologically in 2233 - 2258, but, causally speaking, it takes place after Star Trek Nemesis.

Is that deduced from events in the movie, or did someone connected with the movie have to come out and say that, or what? I've been wondering about when in the original timeline this was supposed to be occurring.

Anything you choose to accept or not to accept is your own personal deal, but it has nothing to do with canon. You're creating your own Nate-canon, which is unique to you and distinct from every other fan's definition of canon in the whole wide world

*nods emphatically*

For the record, the interconnectedness of the new novels is bad because (as is traditional in Trek novels) about half of them are horrible. Awful beyond words.

Wow. I've read rather a large number of novels (nowhere near all of them, and none that have come out in the past five years or so), but there haven't been more than a dozen or so that I'd call horrible. There are a lot that I consider mediocre, being as they are uninspired, paint-by-number plots.

I guess you just have higher standards than I do.

[NAHTMMM]

I'm not up on the latest advances in theoretical physics by any stretch, but this:

Anthony: So what happens with the destruction of the Kelvin is the creation of an alternative timeline, but what happens to the prime timeline after Nero leaves it? Does it continue or does it wink out of existence once he goes back and creates this new timeline.

Bob: It continues. According to the most successful, most tested scientific theory ever, quantum mechanics, it continues.

strikes me as a little . . . over-dogmatic? He's taking the many-worlds view and running with it, which is fine, but that's just one view. I'm pretty confident you don't need the many-worlds concept in order to have time travel. Although maybe he or the physics community has bundled something with the basic concept, and I'm thinking of a "naive", "prototypical" formulation.

. . . Hmm, you know, I don't think it matters. If MW had been proven I (or someone here) should certainly have heard about it.

(He is correct about the implications, however, if MW is correct in any meaningful way.)

We are not relying on the time travel element to tell a good story.

Good or bad, I would agree that they didn't rely on the time travel element for purposes of telling a story. It just allowed the first part of the story to connect with the rest.

Bob: I would argue that, yes, any time there is time travel that they created a parallel universe, if they want to conform to our most current and advanced thinking on the matter, which is quantum mechanics.

According to the MW concept, every time they did anything--or failed to do anything--they created parallel universes, each of which, depending on your interpretation of the concept, may or may not have blended into a neighboring universe if the difference wasn't substantial enough.

[Nate the Great]

http://thatguywiththeglasses.com/blog/15620

Here we go again...

1. Was it strictly necessary for Kirk to be born during this emergency? If Winona was in fact an officer (a concept that spits in the face of my personal Nate-canon), why is she still on duty as a heavily-pregnant woman again? Especially during a crisis. Couldn't the plot equally be served with him as a five-year-old visiting the ship? His father could still save him, and every other part of the film's "plot" would work just as well, and this prelude scene could've used up less screentime as well.
2. What was the purpose of driving a car off the cliff again? An action sequence? The director does realize we're going to have much more impressive space battles later, right?
3. So the Enterprise is being built in Riverside for some reason, so presumably in this new timeline Riverside is a much more important location to Starfleet. That still doesn't explain what Academy cadets are doing there. Maybe the engineering students, but Uhura? Can you say "shoehorned"? I knew you could!
4. Actually, I don't have that much of a problem with the Enterprise being built ten years late. If that's what it takes to explain the newer tech (the Kelvin disaster forced Starfleet engineers to reevaluate every part of their designs), so be it. But why Riverside? You still need to build a shipyard to build the ship! And shipyards take MUCH longer to build than the ships that will be built there. You're telling me a shipyard capable of building the Enterprise was built in like five years? Can you say "implausible"?
5. Seriously, were the bad guys just hanging around for 25 years doing absolutely nothing? You can't even toss in a temporal anomaly to freeze them in time for that long?
6. Spock is a professor? Um, what?
7. "All the cadets are pressed into emergency service because the bulk of Starfleet is in the Laurentian System." Unless the Borg are attacking, the bulk of Starfleet should never be in one system, or even one sector! And what about the professors at the Academy? Or those on leave elsewhere on Earth? Or the umpteen outposts elsewhere in the solar system?
8. "A cadet...that was under academic suspension for cheating...was made acting First Officer...and is now assuming command." Again, what? And a few dozen more times for good measure, WHAT? Starfleet has a strict rank system, right? Whoever has the highest rank is in command. And "cadet" is hardly a rank, much less eligible for placement in the line of succession. Was it IMPOSSIBLE to do another time skip and have Kirk as a lieutenant helmsman or something so he still has to jump through hoops, but at least is in the line of succession?

[NAHTMMM]

Originally Posted by Nate the Great

1. Was it strictly necessary for Kirk to be born during this emergency?

No. Was it strictly necessary for Kirk's parents to be on the ship that Nero's ship encounters when it exits the spacetime warp? No. If you want to look for absurd coincidences, that is where I'd look.

If Winona was in fact an officer (a concept that spits in the face of my personal Nate-canon), why is she still on duty as a heavily-pregnant woman again?

Was she actively on-duty? I don't remember noticing.
And, yeah, it never occurred to me either to wonder whether Kirk's mother might be in Starfleet. *shrug*

Especially during a crisis.

I would consider that a mitigating factor, personally.

Couldn't the plot equally be served with him as a five-year-old visiting the ship?

The plot almost certainly could, but the story could not.

This is something that I felt was largely missing from Nemesis: a lot of the stuff felt (to me) devoid of emotional impact. When Picard and Data are trying to escape from Shinzon's ship, I didn't get a sense of "Will these two good guys escape from the nasty guys' clutches? Will they? Get up on the edge of your seat and don't you dare blink!" I got a sense of "Timeout while we watch two of the good guys zoom around an enclosed space on futuristic motorcycles." Maybe it was there and I was just not in the right frame of mind, but without some sort of emotional impact, a movie isn't likely to resonate with many viewers. Which is a bad thing.

I'm ambivalent about XI overall, but I felt that this first act was executed well (as opposed to, say, cheesily).

2. What was the purpose of driving a car off the cliff again? An action sequence?

And also to get a laugh at the expense of Kirk and his relative (brother? uncle? I forget). Kirk's relative got on the phone or something to Kirk while Kirk was driving the car and (poorly, IMHO) delivered a monologue in which, among other things, he warned Kirk not to injure his car, not even a little. So when Kirk overreacts to the cop and winds up trashing the car, there's a sense of "Ha ha, is he ever in trouble NOW!"

Not especially my kind of humor, but again there's that emotional impact and sense of consequences that a scene needs if it's to be remembered as more than just a really cool action sequence that will likely be forgotten about a few movies later. Whether done well or poorly, a movie has to have that if it's going to be more than a mindless popcorn flick, which is what I, for one, was afraid this movie would be.

The director does realize we're going to have much more impressive space battles later, right?

Er, well, I think I missed those. Maybe it's just me and my crazy, unrealistic preference for phaser beams that look like beams instead of like cactus needles or machinegun ricochets . . .

(Actually, off-hand, I'd say the aftermath of the battle at Vulcan was the most impressive scene of the movie for me.)

That still doesn't explain what Academy cadets are doing there. Maybe the engineering students, but Uhura? Can you say "shoehorned"? I knew you could!

Yeah. *sigh* At least the main bunch weren't all there.

While we're on this, I dislike the way McCoy got his nickname here. "Bones" is apparently an old nickname for a doctor, which is fair enough and presumably the original inspiration. But now it's soaked with bitterness, and McCoy, for all the grumbling and criticizing he likes to do, is not a bitter character. Not primarily, anyway.

(the Kelvin disaster forced Starfleet engineers to reevaluate every part of their designs)

That's an interesting thought. Hadn't considered that possibility.

And shipyards take MUCH longer to build than the ships that will be built there. You're telling me a shipyard capable of building the Enterprise was built in like five years? Can you say "implausible"?

Why would it have to have been built after the Kelvin disaster? Modified to keep up with the use of improved tech, possibly, but it could have been there already.

5. Seriously, were the bad guys just hanging around for 25 years doing absolutely nothing? You can't even toss in a temporal anomaly to freeze them in time for that long?

What would you have them do? As a mining ship, they probably don't have any probes capable of sitting in space, waiting to detect a particular ship's emergence from a weird twist in the spacetime continuum. Nor would I expect them to be capable of running down Spock's little ship. They have to sit there pretty much constantly.

That must have been pretty bad for the underlings, though. Bewildered and grief-stricken, all alone deep in the past, and they're sitting around, doing nothing in particular aside from trying to keep on their tiptoes while constantly monitoring a point in space to see if it ever blinks. Day in, day out, year in, year out, and they have no certainty that it will ever do anything but stare back at them blankly. Nero must have been a pretty effective leader to keep everyone in line for that long.

6. Spock is a professor? Um, what?

Well, there wasn't any Enterprise for him to be an officer on . . . *shrug*

7. "All the cadets are pressed into emergency service because the bulk of Starfleet is in the Laurentian System." Unless the Borg are attacking, the bulk of Starfleet should never be in one system, or even one sector!

Usually it's the opposite, eh?

Does make me wonder what's going on there, though.

And what about the professors at the Academy? Or those on leave elsewhere on Earth? Or the umpteen outposts elsewhere in the solar system?

No kidding. I guess that wouldn't be nearly enough to staff all the ships, though, so they're probably scattered in among the youngsters.

Come to think of it, though, the cadets might be best-situated to be getting training regarding the new starships. Since some of them would presumably eventually serve on them, it would make sense for them to occasionally engage in training scenarios, etc. that reflected the new capabilities. So they might have a bit of an edge as far as that goes.

8. "A cadet...that was under academic suspension for cheating...was made acting First Officer...and is now assuming command." Again, what? And a few dozen more times for good measure, WHAT?

I agree. Although, the thing is, presumably Kirk's performance in the scenario wouldn't count for much of anything after his first attempt, so I've always assumed that he kept trying out of sheer determination and orneriness, and there was no question of his improving his "grade".

To me, he ought to be suspended not for cheating but for deliberately violating whatever security precautions he violated to get at and alter the programming.

That wouldn't resonate with the audience the same way, though. I think a lot of the corner-cutting in the movie -- Kirk's promotion, Uhura and McCoy both being in Iowa, etc. -- was done for similar reasons. I don't agree with all of it, but I respect it more than I respect corner-cutting due to sheer laziness or stupidity.

Was it IMPOSSIBLE to do another time skip and have Kirk as a lieutenant helmsman or something so he still has to jump through hoops, but at least is in the line of succession?

Well, Pike did make Kirk first officer, and then Spock allowed Kirk to become captain. But those are field promotions and surely aren't guaranteed to be made permanent after the dust has settled.

This is undoubtedly another case of corner-cutting for purposes of effect. It would have been more realistic, as you say, to show a brief montage of Kirk rising through the ranks. It might have been more satisfying, too, to see glimpses of Kirk learning to control his attitude and maybe have Pike smiling approval in the background once or twice.

But TPTB decided to go for the big dramatic splash (and fulfill Kirk's earlier boast to Pike). Can't count on there being enough interest for another preliminary movie, you know, so we've gotta get everything in place during this one. *shrug* I agree, it was a ridiculous promotion, but I guess the alternative was to have the movie go a little too long for somebody's liking.

[NAHTMMM]

Re: the (rather foul-mouthed) link.

But we also, with Winona Kirk, get to catch a first glimpse of the "wonderful" and "strong" female characters we'll see throughout the movie. All she does is give birth and cry.

She also manages to remain coherent and to try to include her husband in the experience as best she can, instead of (for example) dissolving into repetitions of "No! Get out of there! YOU CAN'T LEAVE ME! YOU CAN'T LEAVE US!" etc. Part of her dialogue does move the plot along, yes, but it's neither stilted nor forced-into-the-scene. So yes, I'd say she's strong.


The part with the car kinda jarred with the rest of the movie for me, yes. Not having seen the deleted scene, it likely was deleted for purposes of audience appeal, sure. But unless there was some really good stuff in it, I personally could do without such scenes. You can guess how they're going to play out for the most part, for one thing, and . . . I dunno, I guess I just have an aversion to them.


Never occurred to me to question a chasm in Iowa.


Oh, right, the Klingon thing. That just sounds ridiculous, and I'm not going to defend it.

But then the movie suddenly remembers, "Oh, yeah, talking is lame and boring. We gotta get to the action!"

It rather felt like that, but for dramatic and plot purposes they needed Kirk's standing to be in that gray area. He had to be able to move around freely to get to the ships, but if the hearing had concluded -- cheating or security-violating -- the punishment would probably have been too harsh to allow for that, even if he weren't thrown out of the Academy.


This next bit about Uhura and Spock's relationship is, just to be clear, entirely made-up. I would be equally justified to wonder what the man's opinion of black women must be, for him to think that Uhura would have to be having sex with Spock to get a compliment out of him. It's that unsupported and . . . stereotypical, for lack of a better word.


Not fond of the movie's warp "effect", myself. I like my warp effects to be kinda flashy, and the SFX people went with . . . barely anything at all. Probably the "realistic" route, sure, but this is supposed to be a blockbuster action movie and you're going to put an arrogant cadet in the captain's chair of Starfleet's best ship at the end, so give it some flair dagnabbit.


Not very happy about Amanda dying, especially what with her standing needlessly far out from the rest of the group for no apparent reason, but it wasn't just for cheap emotional value. It wound up driving the plot later on. Just to be fair.


The finale was not over-explosive. Kirk was not very bright, though.

But why did Nemesis fail where Trek XI had succeeded?

Because Nemesis's "plot" was disjointed, made precious little sense repeatedly, and screeched to a halt whenever it was time for a "kewl" scene?

The man has a point -- Nemesis contained more of a 'deeper message' than XI does, even if it did feel like an afterthought at times. But people don't generally watch a movie--even a Trek movie--primarily for its deeper messages. They might watch it for the engaging story, for the plot twists, for the characters, for the dialogue, for the SFX, for the scenery (human, landscape, or otherwise), for the humor, for the emotional effect, for the curiosity of seeing what on Earth the producers did with a thirty trillion dollar budget. Most of these, I felt, were missing from Nemesis. I think the biggest difference in terms of quality between the two movies, for me, would be the emotional impact and the story. (Have you guessed? ) XI's story, like it or not (and I don't entirely), mostly held together and flowed from one minute to the next. That much is good writing.

[Nate the Great]

I'm prefacing this with the statement that I have STILL not actually seen this movie, but here are some ideas for timecutting measures so you can fit some actual plot coherence into this movie.

(I'm ignoring the Spock plotline here 'cause I don't know that much about it, but remember that they have to be in there somewhere. I'm also using the Wikipedia article for reference.)

1. Kirk is a young boy visiting the ship during the disaster. George has to trick Winona and James into the shuttle. Touching goodbye across glass a la Wrath of Khan.
2. Cut to Kirk as a young teenager in San Francisco. His bad behavior has caused Winona to send him to relatives at Starfleet Command. They attempt to indoctrinate him in the ways of Starfleet, but he'll have nothing of it. Starfleet killed his father, after all. (Oh, and the Enterprise is actually being built in San Francisco in the PREEXISTING shipyards).
3. Pike finds him in a bar, the same conversation ensues.
4. Forget academic probation; that's dumb. He reprograms and beats the Kobayashi Maru offscreen and people just comment on it to save time. He gets a commendation.
5. Cut to five years later. He's the helmsman on the Enterprise. Spock is visiting his old friend Pike. Kirk gets command because he technically outranks Spock.
6. Sulu and Scotty jump down to the drill. Hey, writers, don't put the Big Seven on a ship unless you intend on using all Seven. This ain't the Eighties anymore! We've been following Kirk and Spock for the last hour, let someone else have the screen, alright?
7. Oh, and Vulcan isn't destroyed. This is a big BIG BIG Berserk Button for me. Spock's mom can visit a Vulcan moon or outpost and you can destroy THAT, but not zarking VULCAN!

[NAHTMMM]

I think all the Seven got plenty to do, actually. That was one of the aspects of the film I was unambiguously pleased with.

I was not pleased with Vulcan being destroyed, either. Still not exactly thrilled about it .

[Wowbagger]

Nate, this one's for you. I was going to just repost it here, but it is way, way too long for me to post it for a second time, especially because 5MV's word limits are much tighter than the Beeb's.

Eleven is Prime: A (Ludicrously Long) Reconciliation

Enjoy. Or don't. Whatever.