THE
FIFTEEN (!) TIMELINES OF STAR TREK
Before
we go into this, I want us to agree on one thing—you have only
yourself to blame!
In
2009, the movie Star Trek
used the gimmick of time travel to free itself from the weight of 44
years of Star Trek history. It had become a millstone around the neck
of future storytellers. But some Trekkies—and, by “some
Trekkies,” I mean you—couldn’t
accept that the stories and characters they loved might have been
erased.
So
Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci spitballed something to placate
them—to shut them up, really. The Prime Timeline still exists! they
told us. Time travelers can’t erase their own timeline, that would
erase them too and
create a paradox! When you mess with time, it creates another
universe! Now there’s another timeline running in parallel: the
Kelvin Timeline.
This
flew in the face of everything you’d ever seen on Star Trek. Up
until Kurtzman and Orci laid their theory on us, we’d assumed time
travel rewrote the history of the universe. The old history just went
poof.
But
this idea saved the original universe so you decided you liked it. It
caught on in fandom circles. And when Bryan Fuller decided to set
Star Trek: Discovery
in the Prime Timeline, it became canon.
And
so now I have to go and do what Trekkies have done for 50 years—take
canon super literally and apply this new information retroactively to
everything that came before. Don’t blame me, I’m just the
messenger!
I
think you can see that this whole exercise—the absolutely ludicrous
amount of thought I’m going to put into it—the frankly absurd,
and somewhat distrubing, conclusions that it’s going to lead me
to—all of this...
This
is all YOUR FAULT.
How
Many?
Here
we go...
