Star Trek

[innerSpaceman]

Originally Posted by mousepod

the concept of time travel has occurred almost 50 times, and never ... did it conveniently create an alternate universe the way it did in this movie.

No, they just didn't feature that as a story point ... because those particular stories didn't require it - - meaning the change of everything going forward from the way it "was."

This story, of course, required that. And the completely Star Trekian trope of time travel provided a great way to handle it.

And yes, add a new and obviously time travelish quirk to the 51st Star Trek time travel story. Finally. Better late than never. Am I to now to complain that Star Trek never addressed the paradoxes of time travel satisfactorily in its other outings, so is now precluded from doing so because of tradition?



And did they ever say anything to explicity assert the universe was unaffected by all that constant time travel?

For instance, there were only two more episodes of Next Generation after they time traveled in the First Contact movie. Who's to say the future of the universe came out Exactly As It Was before Zefrem Cochrane knew the future?

I'm sure we could find little butterfly-effect potentials in all the time travel episodes. So why didn't we think the altered time line might somehow be different?


Because it was never shown to affect what the characters did from that point on. Star Trek episodes always moved linearly into the future. This is the first one to go back and start over, so to speak. Now's the time to tell you .... they've been changing the future all along!