SPOCK: “Nero’s very presence has altered the flow of history, beginning with the attack on the USS Kelvin, culminating in the events of today, thereby creating an entire new chain of incidents that cannot be anticipated by either party.”
UHURA: “An alternate reality?”
ME: “NO. A screwed-up timeline, dammit. One you people bloody well ought to fix.”
Star Trek (2009)
Alas, they didn’t fix a thing, and now Trek fans must face a harsh reality: all the events of Star Trek The Original Series, Star Trek The Animated Series, Star Trek The Next Generation, Star Trek Deep Space Nine, Star Trek Voyager and the first 10 Star Trek movies didn’t happen. Sorry, folks. None of it. 629 episodes and 10 movies have been unceremoniously erased from history.
The man responsible for this appalling temporal incursion is Bob Orci, the screenwriter behind the JJ Abrams-directed 11th Star Trek film, released in 2009. The film in which a huge misconception about how time travel works in Star Trek inadvertently deleted everything that came before it. (Alright, alright, not everything. The 2009 film left Star Trek Enterprise and its decon chamber intact. Thank you very much, Bob.)
If you haven’t got the faintest clue what I’m on about, let’s start with a little look at what happens when somebody travels through time in Star Trek…
Star Trek time travel (before Bob Orci stuck his oar in)
In TOS: The City on the Edge of Forever, Dr McCoy beamed down to an ancient planet, travelled back in time through a time portal called the Guardian of Forever, and altered Earth’s past. This caused the Federation of the present to cease to exist and the starship Enterprise to vanish from orbit. The landing party on the planet were somehow protected from the changes but were stuck in this alternate timeline in which they, their ship and potentially their planet no longer existed.
The Guardian of Forever: “Your vessel, your beginning, all that you knew is gone.”
Captain Kirk and Spock resolved to restore the timeline by following McCoy back and undoing whatever changes he’d made (saving Edith Keeler, a pacifist whose actions would’ve delayed America’s entry into World War II and caused Germany to conquer the world). They succeeded and the timeline was restored.
In TNG: Yesterday’s Enterprise, a temporal rift caused the Enterprise C—right in the middle of a battle defending the Klingon outpost Narendra III from the Romulans—to inadvertently travel 22 years into the future. It was supposed to have valiantly fought the Romulans to the death and been destroyed, its sacrifice bringing the Klingons and the Federation closer together. But its displacement in time triggered the creation of an alternate timeline, in which the Enterprise C’s sudden disappearance in the middle of the battle was interpreted by the Klingons as cowardly. This altered the flow of history, causing Klingon-Federation relations to break down and culminating in a devastating war.
This time, unlike The City on the Edge of Forever, nobody was protected from the changes to the timeline—everybody aboard the Enterprise D in the present changed with it. Fortunately one crewmember, whose race possessed a special sensitivity to the space-time continuum, was able to perceive the change from the original timeline to the alternate one—Guinan. She persuaded Picard to send the Enterprise C back through the temporal rift to finish what it started at Narendra III and restore the original timeline.
Guinan: “This timeline must not be allowed to continue.”
There’s one more example I’d like to talk about (though there are many more): Star Trek First Contact, in which a Borg sphere created a temporal vortex around Earth and disappeared inside it. Picard and the crew of the Enterprise E watched as Earth changed dramatically, its 9-billion-strong population suddenly all Borg. Protected from the changes themselves by the wake of the temporal vortex, they realised that the Borg had travelled back in time and assimilated Earth in the past, and resolved to go back and stop them.
Picard: “We must follow them back. Repair whatever damage they’ve done.”
Needless to say, they succeeded and the timeline was restored.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4k72iqolT4
All clear so far? Good. Then let’s turn to…
Time travel in Star Trek (2009)
In the year 2387, eight years after Star Trek: Nemesis, Ambassador Spock attempted to save the Romulan homeworld from a supernova using an artificial black hole. He failed and the planet was destroyed. A Romulan commander, Nero, blamed Spock for the loss of his homeworld and sought revenge. Spock and Nero’s ships were drawn inside the black hole and sent hurtling back in time.
Arriving in the year 2233, Nero attacked the USS Kelvin, killing the father of James T. Kirk and altering the flow of history from that point on. Years later, Nero made a far more substantial alteration to the timeline. He destroyed Vulcan, instantly killing six billion Vulcans who weren’t supposed to die.
Now, based on everything we’ve seen in Star Trek previously, you’d expect Ambassador Spock and the crew of the alternate USS Enterprise to make every effort to restore the original timeline. Just like Picard and crew did in First Contact, after the Borg screwed everything up. In Star Trek (2009), the Enterprise and her crew were no different to the alternate Enterprise D in Yesterday’s Enterprise. Their world was different and their personal histories had changed, and now a whole planet had been destroyed that wasn’t meant to be. If Guinan were on board she’d have told the alternate Kirk and Spock the same thing she told the alternate Picard: “This timeline must not be allowed to continue.”
And yet, Ambassador Spock and the crew of the alternate Enterprise did sweet bugger all to repair the catastrophic damage that Nero did to the timeline. At the end of the movie, the alternate timeline persisted, six billion Vulcans stayed dead, and all the events of the Star Trek TV series were radically changed (bar Enterprise, which takes place before Nero’s incursion).
Ambassador Spock, for sure, should’ve known better. He saw what happened when McCoy saved Edith Keeler in The City on the Edge of Forever, and made sure Keeler died in order to repair the timeline and restore the future. Why wouldn’t he have done the same thing here?
Yes, Mr Orci, I’m looking at you.
Why Bob Orci doesn’t get it
Bob Orci has explicitly stated that he devised the time travel incursion in Star Trek (2009) to create a new universe that exists in parallel to the old one. He cites the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics and TNG’s Parallels to support his assertions. Without getting too technical, the many-worlds interpretation means: anything that can happen does happen, but in a different universe. Something Data summed up in Parallels, which saw Worf skipping between dozens of universes, many with only extremely subtle differences.
The thing is, Parallels was not a time travel episode. To my knowledge, altering the past through time travel has never created a parallel universe in this way—it created a new timeline that replaced the old one. Why else would Guinan have been so insistent on Picard sending the Enterprise C back through the temporal rift in Yesterday’s Enterprise? She said so herself: “This war’s not supposed to be happening. You’ve got to send those people back to correct this.” In every Trek series, altering the future by changing the past has necessitated great effort by the crews of Kirk, Picard, Sisko, Janeway and Archer to undo the damage. There’s never been any suggestion that old timelines persisted after incursions created new ones. Otherwise, altering the past anytime you fancy and kick-starting a whole new reality would be perfectly okay and there’d be no need for a Temporal Prime Directive or the Federation’s time police.
Trek’s prior handling of time travel is exactly the same as what happened in Back to the Future Part II. Old Biff went back to 1955 and gave his younger self a sports almanac that completely changed his future and the future of Hill Valley itself. When Doc and Marty returned to 1985, they found themselves in this new, radically altered timeline. There was no suggestion that the old 1985 persisted, otherwise Doc and Marty wouldn’t have needed to go back to 1955 and undo Old Biff’s interventions in order to, as Doc himself put it, “repair the present” and “put the universe back as we remember it”. (Yes, alright, so Doc does refer to the new 1985 as an “alternate reality” — like the characters do in Star Trek (2009) — but it’s pretty clear he’s talking about a screwed-up timeline, not a parallel universe).
Imagine, instead, that the following happened in Star Trek (2009): Ambassador Spock, or ‘Spock Prime’ as he’s come to be known, didn’t get pulled back in time with Nero. He remained in 2387 and the future suddenly changed around him. (Let’s say he was protected from the changes himself à la the time vortex wake in First Contact). Spock Prime would’ve been stuck in a future where Vulcan was destroyed and everybody he knew had changed/died/never existed. It would be no different to the new war-torn present that Picard and co found themselves in in Yesterday’s Enterprise or the alternate 1985 and corrupted, crime-ridden Hill Valley that Doc and Marty found themselves in in Back to the Future Part II.
What, in those circumstances, should we expect Spock Prime to do? Go back and stop Nero!
And yet Spock Prime, despite knowing that Nero’s actions had created a future with no Vulcan, did nothing. Zilch. Once free from Delta Vega where Nero marooned him, Spock Prime made no attempt to go back and apprehend Nero before he could attack the USS Kelvin and kill Kirk’s dad, and no attempt to go back and stop him from destroying Vulcan. At the end of the movie, his plan was to establish a new Vulcan colony out of the scattered remnants of his race. This is akin to Picard in First Contact saying, after the Borg have assimilated Earth, “Ah well, never mind. Old Earth’s still out there, in another universe. Let’s go build a human colony somewhere.” Or Picard in Yesterday’s Enterprise saying, “Screw you, Guinan. We’re going to carry on in this new shitty timeline in which the Klingons are whooping our arses — old timeline be damned.”
What Spock Prime did do, he confirmed later in Star Trek Into Darkness, is make a vow never to give the Enterprise crew information that could potentially alter their destinies. Gee, thanks Spock. What a difference that will make in an already decimated timeline.
Of course, these highly questionable and illogical actions on Spock Prime’s part are all because Bob Orci doesn’t get it. He clearly had no idea what he was doing when he wrote Star Trek (2009) and either hadn’t seen any prior Trek time travel episodes, or hadn’t understood them.
So, is the old timeline really gone?
Based on an in-universe understanding of how time travel works (which technically is all that matters), yes. Star Trek (2009) has erased everything that came before. But if you talk to Bob Orci, no.
Orci insists, “It [the original timeline] continues. According to the most successful, most tested scientific theory ever, quantum mechanics, it continues.”
Thing is, besides the fact that the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is only one interpretation and is not sufficiently tested at all, none of that matters one jot. We’re not talking about what the “most successful, most tested scientific theory ever” says. We’re talking about what Star Trek says. And Star Trek, Mr Orci, says you’re talking out of your rear end.
Having said all that, we now have the excellent Star Trek Discovery. According to co-creator Bryan Fuller, the newest series is set in the original timeline, seemingly uncorrupted by Nero. Since it’s not possible to accept that Star Trek (2009) and its sequels are set in a different universe to this one, based on Trek’s own rules (perhaps the subject of a whole separate discussion), we are left with two options:
- We are seeing the events of Star Trek Discovery before they’ve been tampered with by Nero.
- The entertaining but dumb Star Trek (2009), the offensively bad Star Trek Into Darkness (2013) and the not-much-better Star Trek Beyond (2016) are not canon and didn’t really happen, which means all the other series and films did.
I don’t know about you, but I like the sound of number two best.
Latest posts by C.R. Berry (see all)
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Well said. I remember watching ST2009 and waiting for them to send Nero’s ship back in time to its rendezvous with Kirk’s father; somehow they would have ensured that Nero’s ship would be destroyed in the past, perhaps saving Kirk’s father at the same time. This would have not only repaired the timeline and saved Vulcan, but also given the movie a mythological underpinning, with Kirk taking Pinnochio’s journey into the whale to save his father. Alas, Orci is a bumbling hack.
Okay so you raise good points and I could almost go along with it except for a few things.
1) Just because all the precedent in Star Trek has time travel working one way doesn’t mean the writer of a new Trek movie can’t create a new way. He can.
Warp Drive doesn’t create wormholes, yet in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, we see that happen for the first time.
2) It’s not really the case that time travel has ALWAYS worked that way. There are examples of time travel working in multiple different ways in certain episodes.
3) the very fact that Spock Prime doesn’t try to “fix the timeline”, from an in-universe perspective, suggests he believes it did create a separate timeline.
You’re right to point out that there’s a confusing apparent contradiction there, which could have been fixed if they’d just included a line explaining that time travel worked differently this time due to some condition or other. But it’s not the case that time travel always has to work the same way in every instance.
Here’s an article I wrote for Ars Technica, where I explore the different modes of time travel in Trek and why it happens different ways: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/09/how-time-travel-works-in-star-trek/
Very interesting article! The big problem is, as you say, it is never made clear in the 2009 movie that the time travel works differently due to some condition. We therefore expect, based on everything we’ve seen before, that the old timeline has been overwritten by Nero’s actions and ought to be fixed, but isn’t. Saying that Spock Prime not going back to fix it suggests that a separate timeline was created doesn’t cut it. That’s just an excuse for bad writing. Admittedly all Trek fans do that from time to time. When a character does something that’s totally inconsistent with what we expect from them, we try and explain and justify it in any way we can. (I did it just the other night with Janeway, after she flouted Starfleet principles a matter of months after saying that she would never deviate from them.) In reality, bad writing – or perhaps just having too many writers (the curse of a network show with 20-something episodes a season) – is the real reason these things happen.
You point to DS9’s “Visionary” and TNG’s “All Good Things” as being exceptions to the timeline overwriting principle. I haven’t seen “Visionary” so it’s difficult to comment, however, having read your synopsis and others of “Visionary” and having seen “All Good Things”, I don’t agree that these are exceptions. In “All Good Things”, Picard was jumping between the past, the present and the future. He wasn’t jumping into different universes. This episode actually proves the overwriting theory in that Picard prevents most of the events of the episode from occurring by stopping the Devron system anomaly from being created. The 2009 movie’s logic would say that nothing was averted – it all just happened in a different timeline. Re “Visionary”, from the sounds of it, you’re suggesting that the O’Brien who remained alive at the end of the episode must’ve been from a separate timeline because his past self had died. That’s a whole other thing. Trek has shown us that time travellers who go back and alter the futures they came from don’t actually disappear Marty McFly-style. They somehow exist outside of it – the alternate Tasha Yar is a good example of that. Her timeline is erased at the end, but she continues to exist and has Sela. (I admit, Time Squared seems like an odd exception to this rule, but I’m not saying that Trek has always been consistent in its depiction of time travel. It hasn’t.)
My objection to Star Trek (2009) is that it is simply too big a departure from what we’ve seen before.
I enjoyed your post, C.R., because I often wonder about how to make the time-travel model in a group of stories consistent.
At the end of your article, I might add a third alternative for Discovery: (3) At some point that we have yet to see, Spock Prime does manage to stop the destruction of Vulcan, restoring the original timeline.
The other thing that I’d ask you to discuss is the use of the word “before” in this kind of sentence: Star Trek (2009) has erased everything that came before.
That “before” is in our timeline–the timeline of CBS and Paramount and you and I. Can you rewrite the sentence and the rest of your post to make sense of what happened in that universe without making any reference to any outside observer? For example, does young Spock in the new timeline still grow old and try to save Romulus? If so, does he get caught in the black hole and come back to be his own Spock Prime? If so, what’s he relationship to Spock Prime from the ST:ToS timeline? If not, then Nero will never be thrown back in time from the new timeline. Both Nero and Spock Prime from ToS certainly came from the ToS timeline, and they exist in the new timeline, which somehow must mean that the ToS timeline exists in the history of all timelines. Some event in that timeline caused the new timeline to be generated.
I guess that I don’t fully understand how to describe what happened in “The City on the Edge of Forever” without reference to some outside observer, but I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts. On the other hand, I do get what happened in the very first (“first” from our point of view) Star Trek time travel. In “Tomorrow Is Yesterday,” Kirk and the gang are simply doing what they always did: The events they partook in were always part of their own past. They were just closing the deterministic loop, so to speak.
Two similar closed time-loop episodes come to mind, both from DS9: The first was “Past Tense”: I claim that Sisko (posing as Gabriel Bell) always was the impetus for keeping the riots in check; there was no timeline in which Bell did those actions). I like that kind of consistent “paradox” where a character’s actions are informed by his or her knowledge of what happened. The other example is “Trials and Tribble-ations”: Yep, Sisko, Warf, and the gang were always there to begin with, always part of that classic story.
Let me see if I can answer this. You say “does young Spock in the new timeline still grow old and try to save Romulus”? No. Young Spock in the new timeline is now a completely different Spock. His destiny has been altered by Nero’s changes to the timeline (I believe this comment is actually made in the film, I think). So no, he won’t get caught in the black hole and go back in time and become Spock Prime. None of that will happen now – this is a whole new timeline set to follow its own course. We are already seeing this. The events of Star Trek Into Darkness and Star Trek Beyond don’t happen in the original TOS timeline.
You go on to mention what is effectively the Grandfather Paradox. How can Spock Prime and Nero exist if their future has been erased? Reversing this, the original TOS timeline MUST still exist because THEY exist. Even Star Trek itself hasn’t been consistent on this point, but in general, what we see is that when a time traveller goes back in time and alters their own future, they don’t just stop existing Marty McFly-style. They continue to exist. Yes, it’s a paradox, but I like to think that, basically, they exist OUTSIDE of the timeline they came from. For example, the alternate Tasha Yar from Yesterday’s Enterprise has her original timeline and future erased when she goes back with the Enterprise C. Does she stop existing? No. She ends up birthing Sela.
It doesn’t help when Star Trek trips itself up. For instance, Admiral Janeway in Endgame goes back and changes her future by getting Voyager home early. As soon as she turns up, she’s messing with Voyager’s timeline and altering her own future. Does she disappear at any point? No. Does she start to disappear even as Voyager launches an attack on the Borg to get home that never happened in her timeline? No. And YET the Borg Queen says that if she kills Captain Janeway in the past, Admiral Janeway will stop existing. This doesn’t work or make sense. If this rule applied, Admiral Janeway would’ve already disappeared.
Now I need to go and lie down! 😀
Yes, lying down may help 🙂
I do think you’ve done a good service in opening up a good can of worms about how to reconcile the original time travel episodes (39 through Voyager by my count) with the Kelvin universe. I shall spend some time working on that and post my thoughts here anon.
P.S. Not Star Trek’s first reset!
By coincidence, I just this afternoon hit Season 3, Episode 4, of DS9 in my daily rewatch of Star Trek. Definitely a reset. I think Jake’s explanation of the elastic cord that yanks Sisko back might fit in with some kind of consistent time travel model.
Sorry, but done is done.
You can’t just say “didn’t happen” if you don’t like something… that’s juvie.
You’re forgetting one thing: The Kelvin went about 35 years farther back in time, than Spock Prime did.
So maybe Spock didn’t want to erase the 35 years of history that happened between Nero’s destroying the Kelvin, and destroying Vulcan.
And Nero didn’t time-travel to destroy Vulcan; so it would violate the Temporal Prime Directive for Spock to go back in time and save it.
It’s a question of Vulcan Ethics: if everyone just time-traveled in order to undo everything they didn’t like, then it would stagnate the universe.
So time-travel must be reserved for correcting alterations to the timeline– never for MAKING them in the first place.
In “Yesterday’s Enterprise,” I would have to assume that the Enterprise-D did something to create the spacial rift that the Enterprise C ran into; since otherwise, it simply didn’t happen in the past, so there’s no reason it would alter the timeline.
Interesting argument (not sure how I missed this comment – sorry!). I don’t agree that it would violate the Temporal Prime Directive to go back and stop someone from totally screwing with the timeline. Just because Nero didn’t intend to go back and screw with everything is irrelevant, he still did it. And still needed stopping. Same as sending the Enterprise C back through the rift (which wasn’t created by anything the Enterprise D did – that was never established or mentioned).