Also, the movie gives the impression that serving in Starfleet is very unusual for Vulcans. Probably only a handful of exchange officers and the like, given that they have their own fleet (which may or may not be very large, especially after the whole “giant future space ship imploding their homeworld” incident that involved the wholesale destruction of a Starfleet task force in the time it took Mr. Sulu to find the parking brake release.)
As it is, did we ever see very many Vulcans in Starfleet on the show proper? I remember Spock, Saavik, Valeris, the vulcan in the transporter accident in TPM, Sisko’s old Captain, Tuvok, and one or two others.
It absolutely is a reboot, but it also absolutely IS still related to the original show. Spock Prime, played by Leonard Nimoy is the very same Spock as the one he played in TOS.
Pine’s Kirk and Quinto’s Spock aren’t the same as Shatner’s and Nimoy’s but they’re still in the same “multiverse” just a different timeline created by Nero when he killed Kirk’s dad, Spock’s mom, blew up Vulcan etc.
Man, Chief O’Brien was right about temporal mechanics. :smack:
To reiterate, the events of the 2009 movie take place in an alternate timeline. In the original canon, Kirk was born on Earth, his father survived to see him reach captain, and Vulcan circled its sun just like any other planet. Nero, reacting to (old) Spock’s failure to save Romulus, went back in time and created an offshoot timeline in which he blew up the ship on which Kirk’s parents were serving – killing Kirk Sr. – and then destroyed Vulcan. But the movie explicitly says this is an alternate timeline – the universe we know from the various Trek TV shows still exists and continues as it always did (Vulcan is intact; Romulus is not). But that’s some"where" else.
Huh, I don’t recall any pre-2009 canon references to Kirk’s dad, just his brother and nephew (or nephews, nieces? - his brother had three kids) and son.
I think the Star Trek Online MMO specifically takes place in the old Star Trek universe but is set after Spock went back in time. Romulus is destroyed and unrest grows in the Federation because various worlds start believing that if the Federation couldn’t or wouldn’t save Romulus then it won’t be able to help them either. ISTR that the intro is narrated by Nimoy and he explains it that way but I only played for a while and that was a couple of years ago.
An entire ship full of Vulcans turns up at the end of Star Trek: First Contact. That is a TNG story, of course, but it is meant to be in the same universe as TOS.
The Vulcan ship turns up well before the era of TOS. The time-line has been damaged by the Borg, but TNG crew travel back in time and succeed in repairing it. They witness, but do not participate in, the first contact between humans and aliens, a ship full of Vulcans that arrives on Earth, apparently having been nearby and picked up the evidence of a warp drive being used. This suggests that Vulcans were, at least at one time, a regularly spacefaring species.
Not just that but the show Enterprise established Vulcans as having a fairly extensive off planet presence, including colonies, that was only reigned in by their rivals the Andorians.
Also, the original backstory to Spock included him getting involved in some romances back in the academy. For some reason, women always took a liking to him, possibly because he was the ultimate challenge. He went along with this sometimes, not realizing the trouble it would cause.
It’s not that hard to take that and the chemistry shown between Uhura and Spock and surmise that she was one of those people who was smitten by him. Without Spock’s mother’s death, they never really connect, and Uhura convinces herself that Spock had no feelings and was just experimenting, and of course Spock convinces himself that those human feelings were just a mistake. Neither feels any resentment towards the other, and neither realizes how close they got to a real relationship.
I guess it’s possible that Nero’s incursion caused them to meet earlier in the timeline, in the same way the rest of the Enterprise bridge crew met earlier, but I like to think that Uhura and Spock had at least some history due to how they treated one another.
My friend was on the makeup crew for the new movie. He made all the Vulcan ears, he was so proud. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I thought the movie stunk.
There is also an episode of TOS where they say that there is a starship manned entirely by Vulcans; when it is destroyed, Spock claims that he can “hear” the “screams of mental anguish” of the 400 Vulcans aboard.
And going back to the original thread, there is a scene in the movie where “Spock prime” explains that when he traveled back in time, he created an alternate timeline; in my opinion, this was aimed at the Trekkies / Trekkers / (insert your preferred word for Trek-types here) to explain why some things (e.g. Vulcan is no longer there) are now different from the TV series and earlier movies (well, except for Star Trek: Enterprise, since Spock Prime’s appearance was after the events in that series).
Also, it emphatically turns the whole thing from “predictable prequel” into “anything can happen,” right? If it’s not an alternate timeline, we’d already know that Sulu and Uhura and McCoy and the rest will spend the rest of the movie not dying, sure as we’d already know the Earth won’t get done blowed up real good by the Romulans; anyone and anything that’s still around in the series and the movies will still be just fine.
Instead, it’s a movie where, say, Chekhov might get beheaded between now and the end credits; until you actually watch it through for the first time, you don’t know.
There’s a DS9 where a crew of Vulcan’s, maybe a science vessel, is passing by DS9 and gives someone a lift to somewhere else. It’s been a couple of years though, so my details are fuzzy.