this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2025
18 points (100.0% liked)
TenForward: Where Every Vulcan Knows Your Name
4779 readers
708 users here now
/c/TenFoward: Your home-away-from-home for all things Star Trek!
Re-route power to the shields, emit a tachyon pulse through the deflector, and post all the nonsense you want. Within reason of course.
~ 1. No bigotry. This is a Star Trek community. Remember that diversity and coexistence are Star Trek values. Any post/comments that are racist, anti-LGBT, or generally "othering" of a group will result in removal/ban.
~ 2. Keep it civil. Disagreements will happen both on lore and preferences. That's okay! Just don't let it make you forget that the person you are talking to is also a person.
~ 3. Use spoiler tags. This applies to any episodes that have dropped within 3 months prior of your posting. After that it's free game.
~ 4. Keep it Trek related. This one is kind of a gimme but keep as on topic as possible.
~ 5. Keep posts to a limit. We all love Star Trek stuff but 3-4 posts in an hour is plenty enough.
~ 6. Try to not repost. Mistakes happen, we get it! But try to not repost anything from within the past 1-2 months.
~ 7. No General AI Art. Posts of simple AI art do not 'inspire jamaharon'
~ 8. No Political Upheaval. Political commentary is allowed, but please keep discussions civil. Read here for our community's expectations.
Fun will now commence.
Sister Communities:
!startrek@lemmy.world
!memes@lemmy.world
!tumblr@lemmy.world
!lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world
Want your community to be added to the sidebar? Just ask one of our mods!
Creator Resources:
Looking for a Star Trek screencap?
(TrekCore)
Looking for the right Star Trek typeface/font for your meme?
(Thank you @kellyaster for putting this together!)
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
When we talk about time travel in fictional universes, almost all of the narratives follow one of three "truths:"
Time is one linear thread. What you do now will have consequence X and if you do something different it will have consequence Y. A simple illustration is the movie Sliding Doors. But the same can be said for Back to the Future or Bill and Ted's. If you make a change to the prime timeline, it will ripple into the past/future. Your cousins will disappear from the 3x5 photo!
Time has branches, a truly infinite number of universes and possibilities. Really, as far as I'm concerned, the best example of this idea is Rick and Morty. That show has the freedom to both cook our brains about the concept and also hold a mirror to its ridiculousness. You also see it more famously in the MCU, with their multitude of Lokis and such, though the TVA is still hell-bent on a prime timeline. But the multiverse is the natural order, with only 80s inspired bureaucracy to keep it in check.
Time is a combination of the two, which leads us to Trek. Time is linear, so Jake Sisko can tell his dad to dodge a beam that travels at light speed. But time is also non-linear, so... I dunno... most of Voyager. When Seven came aboard with her temporal node all bets were off as far as what could even be considered a prime timeline.
Moreso, the mirror universe is a parallel to our own, marching along at the same pace and whose characters are developing at the same rate as the prime timeline. So, there is no prime timeline, and no multiverse. Just the clean-shaven and the goatee universes.
And to answer your question: yes, I think Trek trends toward a "prime" timeline. It's honestly the way our brains work. With all the posturing of the wormhole aliens, we just don't work in a non-linear fashion. And maybe more importantly, good stories don't work that way either, Kurt Vonnegut aside. Time travel is wearing plot armor in EVERY movie and show because no one has a handle on it.
Thank you for bringing this up. It's something I think about too much.
in reality it's all a big ball of timey wimey wibbly wobbly stuff