Loved the latest episode. I’ve missed you guys. I’m glad you’re back!

I wanted to comment on the thing that bothered you about “Star Trek Babies” (GOD that’s a great name for the new franchise) You seemed to be really bugged about the whole time-travel to the rescue part of the plot. I wanted to point out that Time Travel and paradox were the subject of several Star Trek original series episodes.

The first one that I remember is the episode “Tomorrow is Yesterday” where the enterprise slingshots around a sun and appears in (then) present time Earth. Spock plays a fairly strong role in this one as time-nanny, first arguing that they needed to keep Captain Christopher with the Enterprise so that his knowledge of the future could not pollute the timeline; then arguing that they MUST return him because his yet-to-be-conceived son plays an important role in history.

The second episode that I remember (and is definitely my favorite) was “The City on the Edge of Forever”. Harlan Ellison wrote this sophisticated look at timeline projection where the crew could not prevent the tragic death of Edith Keller, the salvation army woman Kirk fell in love with, because her survival and pacifist activism would have delayed the entry of the US to WWII, with catastrophic effects on the timeline.

In both these episodes, Spock is central to understanding the dangers of playing with the time-stream. I think Abrams and his staff did a great job of being true to the original philosophies of time-stream conservation. In the case of Nero’s interfearance, there was no way to salvage the original timeline. What better figure than Spock to be the ironic center of the destruction of his own time-stream.

From a purely pragmatic point of view, the major changes to the galactical-political balance will allow a completely new time-stream that can contradict the previous franchises in any way necessary to do good story development, explaining the deviations as results of the Nero incident.

I am hoping they decide to start a new series similar to the original where there isn’t an overarching serial episodic structure, so that the producers would be free to collaborate with guest authors, like Roddenberry did on his watch. I’d love to see what Vernor Vinge, Greg Bear and their ilk could do with our beloved characters.

Well, I’ve rambled on. Hope to hear more from you guys soon!

Mark from MN.

However, each to their own and I myself have watch a lot of shite – (Flash Gordon on the SCI FI Channel to name one).

Boo to that one comment