04/07/2005 Archived Entry: "Time Travel in Science Fiction - Part 7: Star Trek"

Star Trek employs several models for time travel. For the most part, it has the same mutable timeline as the “Back to the Future” movies. We can see that in several episodes. In Star Trek: The Next Generation’s episode entitled “Yesterday’s Enterprise”, a temporal distortion causes a ship from the past to emerge in the present preventing it from having been at a crucial moment in history and significantly changes the present. The characters come to understand that time has changed and are able to fix things so that the time line is set right. The variability is seen time and again in Star Trek most memorably in Star Trek: Voyager’s “Year of Hell” where time is altered hundreds of times. Unlike the previously listed examples, Star Trek does not allow its time travelers to escape changes done to the timeline, with a few exceptions, most characters never realize that time was altered.

However, even with a mutable timeline, Star Trek has a large number of alternate universes. One of the most popular ones is a universe in which all the characters are evil. This was first seen in the episode of the original series entitled “Mirror, Mirror”. That universe has been visited several times later on in episodes of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. It was also established that there are an almost limitless number of alternate realities when Lieutenant Worf visited a multitude of them in the episode “Parallels”.

The difference between the alternate realities of Star Trek and those explored in “The Time Ships” is that the latter are formed when someone explicitly changes events that were supposed to have happened while in the former alternate realities exist as random branches through time as the possibility of different outcomes emerge. The Star Trek model suggests that all possible timelines exist simultaneously, each in its own universe.

Replies: 3 comments

You bring up Star Trek, yet you fail to comment on the "time war" from Enterprise?

For the most part, I think Star Trek has done a great job at presenting episodes dealing with time travel. "Parallels" was really good, but I have to say that I love "Trials and Tribble-ations". That episode not only dealt with time, but added a touch of cinematic flavour by incorporating present characters into an original episode.

Posted by dAN @ 04/07/2005 09:54 PM EST

You try watching Enterprise's temporal war and trying to make sense of it? Its really inconsistent in the way they handle time travel, etc. Best not to think about that show.

Posted by Rayne @ 04/07/2005 10:49 PM EST

Enterprise sux0rs. :/

2cents

Posted by Dave @ 04/09/2005 11:33 AM EST