My Operatives will avenge my death. And some of them are Vulcans.
No, wait dammit, they’re mostly dead. Some of them are Ferengi.
You’re right. Humor is a difficult concept. I was joking about Journey to Babel. But as for any episodes set on Vulcan, a new planet Vulcan with 10,000 inhabitants dedicated to carrying on as if nothing had happened is just as good as the old planet Vulcan with 6 billion inhabitants complacent in the certainty that rogue Romulans aren’t about to create a black hole in the center of their home world. It’s not like we saw billions, or even thousands, of Vulcans on screen.
In any case, by Star Trek rules, everything in the original series still happened exactly the way we saw it. Nero and his buddies just created an additional timeline. At least, sometimes it works that way.
I didn’t watch much Enterprise, but wasn’t messing with the past a big part of the series? And didn’t something happen to reset history, leaving a lot of confusion about how many time lines there are and what may “officially” never have happened?
There would also be no Search For Spock. No Mount Selaya to take Spock’s katra to. No Vulcan for Kirk and his crew to take refuge on after destroying the Enterprise and rescuing Spock from the Genesis planet.
They did go to great length to point that out in Star Trek 90210. Even Mrs. Plant believes that. I’m just amusing myself. Anyway, I got a great sig out of it.
That’s exactly what I was trying to say. I was just trying to be funny about it. HIIADC, indeed! I’ve now seen the movie, and they pretty much beat you over the head with the alternate time line theory, so I think TOS Bones, Kirk, and Spock are perfectly safe.
Still, I actually see nothing wrong with discussing episodes that cannot occur in the new timeline. Or even explaining why certain non-obvious ones can still happen. That’s the fun of Star Trek fandom.
Oh, and I just had an idea for an episode (or at least part of it) that can’t happen. TNG: “Unification II”: Spock’s never having melded with his father seems extremely unlikely considering the new relationship. I guess it’s still possible, but I think it would take something like DWDuke’s “Journey to Babel” explanation.
TOS - Where No Man Has Gone Before. Not impossible, but less likely, and it’d have to be tweaked.
Kirk didn’t spend any time as an instructor at the academy, and thus never met Gary Mitchell.
I’d apply that to ALL of the examples given. Very few are impossible, but they’d ALL have to be tweaked.
Consider this: Instead of spending over ten years as a student in the Academy and as a lieutenant on the Farragut, the new Kirk went straight from enlisting to captain in just three years. We’re dealing with someone whose personality is moderately different than we’re used to, and whose command experience is vastly different than we’re used to.
Consider also: Wanna know why the actors are so young? It’s because the characters are young. In the original timeline, Kirk didn’t become captain of Enterprise until 2265. Post-Nero, he is already captain in 2258 – seven years earlier.
It’s a whole new ballgame, folks.
Of course it’s a parallel timeline. It’s how the Federation would have turned out if Zephrem Cochrane knew how much his invention would change humanity.
It’s harder to say what the “original” Trek timeline is. Some examples:
In “The Naked Time,” time travel is entirely theoretical. It’s arguable that this is the “first” incident in which humans successfully travel through time. And of course the mere act of doing so creates a new timeline. And obviously they don’t live the 3 days over again, exactly; after they escape from the collapsing planet by going back three days, Kirk, not being an idiot, says, “Okay, this time let’s not go there. But make sure to send the logs to Starfleet.”
I won’t count “City on the Edge of Forever” as a new timeline; that was a predestination paradox, and nothing Kirk did was gonna save Edith Keeler. I think the eppy with Zarabeth with similarly a self-contained loop and didn’t alter the timeline; likewise the save-the-whales time jump.
But “First Contact” clearly changed the timeline. Zephrem Cochrane knows his role in history now and is no longer so money-grubbing. This changes his interactions with the Vulcans in subtle ways, which changes their interactions with other humans, and so forth. The effect snowballs to create the Enterprise timeline, and perhaps the Voyager timeline as well.
If that’s how you want to extrapolate it, that’s cool, but there’s nothing in *Enterprise *that makes it flatly impossible to reconcile with the other four series, and as Trek canon is simply “if it happened on screen and wasn’t a cartoon, it’s official”, then it’s a part of the same timeline unless some future episode or movie says otherwise.
What I’m saying is that the canon necessarily includes multiple timelines.
Yes. Multiple episodes prove this, most notably Parallels and the Mirror Universe episodes, but what I’m saying is that *Enterprise *isn’t one of these. It’s part of 616 Prime or whatever the hell we wind up calling the timeline that was launced in 1966.
Could you say 616 a few more times? I think every time we do it, Joe Quesada dies a little inside.
Well… it’s a pretty radically altered new timeline so none of the episodes can happen. A better way to look at it is - what events are basically unaffected? I guess V’Ger and the whale probe are still going to show up around the same time. Spock will undergo Pon Farr, but I suppose he might just mate with Uhura now. I suppose any natural/stellar disasters will still happen approximately on schedule.
What I want to know is what happened to Kirk’s older brother, whose birth shouldn’t have been affected by the new timeline.
Well, for a guy who really didn’t like the film, Skald the Rhymer has an interesting take on fixing that particular continuity problem in this post.
Maybe it just makes run off into deep space and meet the Companion. 
I think you meant to link to this particular post.
Anyway, I don’t know why you’re surprised. Have you been posting on some board on which Skald the Rhymer is not an obsessive nitwit? 'Cause if you have, that’s a different StR.
I don’t get the question. We see very little of Kirk’s life pre-academy. Was it implied in the film that he didn’t have a brother? According to online sources, scenes with George were filmed but didn’t make it into the movie. (As of right now, the actor still has the role listed on his resume.)
That’s the problem with this movie. ST has been around for 40+ years and there is a very well-defined canon for it. This movie didn’t just deviate from canon, it took a flamethrower to it.
I was incredibly disappointed by this movie. Yeah, the casting was great (especially Bones) and the special effects were ok. But it sucked. It flat-out sucked. They could have done the alternate timeline thing if they had “restarted” the universe at the end, but they didn’t.
This movie is supposed to be a prequel. If it is, then a major portion of ST:TOS and a lot of TNG are broken and can’t be fixed. This was sheer idiocy and it came from having a director who wasn’t a Star Trek fan and who couldn’t be bothered to learn about it.
No, it’s not supposed to be a prequel, it’s supposed to be and is an alternate take on Star Trek. Some things changed that just can’t be explained by the Kelvin being destroyed but something with 40 years of backstory is always going to be slightly iconsistent, but I don’t recall anything off the top of my head that can’t be reconciled with the main universe before Vulcan goes kablooey.