Star Trek: First Contact.

[Quantum-Charles]

After listening Rico's "First Contact" podcast episode on my way to work it had me wanting to go back and re watch the movie. I watched about 3/4s of the movie. I tend to watch it in Fast Forward.

The movie got me thinking about Zefram Cochrane and his place in ST history.   If the TNG crew helped him achieve First contact I am sure he would remember these few select crew members. Atleast Lily could help jog his memory.
Why does he not mention any of this to Kirk in the TOS series..... I know I am nitpicking but it is something that is continuing to  bug me asI spend more time on this.   

Only thing I can figure is that Cochrane had no help from the TNG crew the first time and when we reach the 24th century and the TNG crew goes back in time   this creates an "Alternate reality" kind of concept.

WOW... My head hurts.   Has anyone else ever thought of this before and reached any other conclusions...?

[Feathers]

But did he do it the first time without help? Or did the TNG crew always come back and help him in which case what we saw was just mainstream history being replayed.

It all depends on your view of time travel...although from the latest film, we all know that Trek now goes for alternate and changed histories even more so than it ever did before.

[alanp]

TOS fans tend to have a problem with this.  I saw TNG first and went back and watched so I guess the continuity problems really didn't bother me.

For me, I get nit-picky about Lore not being mentioned in Nemesis.  I mean, looks like someone would have said, "I don't know about this; remember the last time we found an android?"

[Rico]

I've always felt the TNG crew basically asked Dr. Cochrane to try and not say much about what happened and he and Lily kept most of it to themselves.

[Geekyfanboy]

I think it's funny when folks bring up these kind of continuity errors..  It happened alot with Enterprise.. but they never really bothered me.. I chuck it up to TOS was made after TNG, DS9 and Voy and Enterprise was made after them all. Whenever you do prequel or time travel there is going to be continuity errors to tell a better story.. if the story is there I don't really care if things are tweaked a bit. There is so much story in Star Trek it's impossible to keep everything straight..

That's one reason why I loved the new re-boot Star Trek.. they can start from scratch but still have familiar characters.

[cosmonaut]

A good part of my education was to read a text and look for errors. Logical errors, methodological errors, weak explanations, contradictions to other theories and studies already out there.

I'm a critical thinker and probably always was.

I'm aware of the limitation of show business, and I'm willing to let go errors to a certain degree.
But I do expect the writers to be consistent with their story, once I have to concentrate more on suspension of disbelieve than on the story itself I stop being entertained.
But if something completely and utterly ridicules is necessary to tell a unique and interesting story I'm fine with it. If it only happens to be able to put more special effects in the movie you've just ruined a movie.

Time travel and prequels can be done without continuity errors. I mean if there's, for example, only a trilogy of movies I really can expect the writers to watch those three movies and come up with something consistent, doesn't need a doctoral degree for that.
And the theory JJs movie is based upon elegantly avoids the grandfather paradox, so there's time travel without inconsistency.

I think I'd give a continuity error from First Contact to TOS (or is it the other way round?) a pass, but that doesn't mean I dismiss it as not worth discussing.

Actually I do enjoy a good discussion, like others would for example fencing or a card game. That's it, it's more like a game, and I have fun. 

[X]

For me it was always a case of simplicity.

In the first timeline, he didn't get help. TOS was in that timeline. TNG, DS9, and VGR were in several timelines. The one created after the whale probe would have been the most obvious change between TNG and TOS.

Then they went back and changed things again and again in various shows.

Enterprise was in this NEW timeline and would be different from the previous timeline and from what was said on screen, they were a direct descendant of the First Contact timeline. Cochrane even mentioned the crew and the borg in one of his speeches before retracting.


It also happened in DS9. Gabriel Bell was Gabriel Bell, but when they went back, they changed things and suddenly Bell was Sisko.

If you follow the branching multiverse theory, it explains everything and even some continutity goofs. Everytime someone mucks with time a new branch is created. From the perspective of the show, they are most times on the latest branch. Things on that branch will be different from what came before.

Even with Enterprise, we see that the ships have already been affected and changed from the encounter. The NX-01 isn't like the ships that we saw before in Trek and trek media of ships that were around in that time.

Lasers that were used in the Cage have already been replaced by phase pistols.

[Rico]

I really don't see what happened in "First Contact" as altering the timeline in any way.  Most of the time in Trek when things like this happened, they would cleverly say, "it was always meant to happen this way."  The TNG crew was meant to help Cochrane discover Warp Drive.  A good example of this is the time travel episode from TOS, "Assignment: Earth."  In my view, every time time travel happened it didn't mean it started a new branch or parallel universe.  I really don't think you can pull that trick all the time.  They absolutely did it for the recent movie, but that's the exception rather than the rule - at least in my view from what has been shown.

[Bryancd]

I really don't see what happened in "First Contact" as altering the timeline in any way.  Most of the time in Trek when things like this happened, they would cleverly say, "it was always meant to happen this way."  The TNG crew was meant to help Cochrane discover Warp Drive.  A good example of this is the time travel episode from TOS, "Assignment: Earth."  In my view, every time time travel happened it didn't mean it started a new branch or parallel universe.  I really don't think you can pull that trick all the time.  They absolutely did it for the recent movie, but that's the exception rather than the rule - at least in my view from what has been shown.

x2, this is how I have always looked at it. The idea that every production of Trek exists in differing timelines kind of ruins it for me. I look at all Trek, from TOS, the films with the exception of the most recent, and all the series as a continuous story arch and don't let continuity issue's ruin that part of the viewing pleasure. "Enterprise" is the only Trek that perhaps I look at as being a somewhat different animal from the rest as it's hard to reconcile some of it with TOS for me. Otherwise, it's all one big adventure. :)

[cosmonaut]

:D

[X]

I really don't see what happened in "First Contact" as altering the timeline in any way.  Most of the time in Trek when things like this happened, they would cleverly say, "it was always meant to happen this way."  The TNG crew was meant to help Cochrane discover Warp Drive.  A good example of this is the time travel episode from TOS, "Assignment: Earth."  In my view, every time time travel happened it didn't mean it started a new branch or parallel universe.  I really don't think you can pull that trick all the time.  They absolutely did it for the recent movie, but that's the exception rather than the rule - at least in my view from what has been shown.

I wasn't saying that it wasn't supposed to happen a certain way. If you change time and then continue on that path, for all intents and purposes, it was always supposed to happen that way.

However, in several episodes, we see that time has been changed from what it "always" was. Sisko was not Gabriel Bell during the first time it happen, but by the end of the episode, his image was the one that was thought to be Gabriel Bell. If it was always supposed to happen, it would have always been his image there.

To people on the outside, it always happened, but from the perspective of a few folks, history was changed.

Another example is things that were supposed to happen, but didn't. The Defiant crew not going back in time to create the Gaia colony and E2 are prime examples.

Cochrane is another great example of how things were one way and end up another. The cochrane seen in First Contact is different from the man that was seen in TOS. The man talked about in ENT was the man we saw in the movie and he mentioned the Borg in one of his speeches, something that was not mentioned before. We also gained knowledge on the born nanites, long before we would have in TNG.

Those are important things that you don't forget, but yet it isn't mentioned. The only way to really explain it is to propose that what we saw first happened before someone changed the timeline. Later shows come after the timeline change, so their perspective would be more in line with what we previously saw happen on screen.

I can only think of really one case of a seamless transition in a time change. That was in the opening of Voyage Home. If I remember correctly, they actually arrive a few seconds before they leave and you can hear mention of their arrival in the beginning of the movie.

I'm not 100% sure of that and it might be an issue with my memory but I think it's there. I've always saw time travel episodes as mroe where the camera chooses to stay as opposed to where the timeline is.

The suggestion of divergent timelines in someways solves the delima of the grandfather paradox and allows one to change time. Without  that little bit of help, time travel would always create a paradox.

Just because you changed one thing does not mean everything else is also in vane. there is also theory that similar realities, if they exist, would and could at some points over lap and merge. Some little things in the distance past that might have been different become lost in time and this allows two points to merge with no one else being the wiser.

Since there are also several other episodes that establish multiple realities in the Trek Universe, my mind has always been drawn to the path that has made the most logical sense to me. If we can follow the crew on a Mirror universe voyage, what is to say that the camera doesn't follow them to a world that they changed? This would also explain how some times, the time traveler remembers things happening a different way than it did.

Alexander's trip from the future is another good example of that. things happened a certain way and he went back and changed them. For him to have those memories, it implies that it had to happen for him. When he changes things, the timeline changes.

[X]

I was taking about this to my wife a second ago and she said that they had shown branching timelines in trek before. With Yar and her kid. In one timeline it did not happen then time was changed and it became something else. It was changed back, but we were now in a new branch where Tasha was both dead when she was supposed to have died and had a baby in the past.

[cosmonaut]

I prefer the divergent time line theory for it not only resolves the grandfather paradox but also allows character to be able to change their future. What fun is knowing that you're doomed if you aren't going to be able to do anything about it?

Trek in all its incarnations isn't very consistent with their tech, science and theory, but I hope they stick to the divergent time lime theory.
And even better, keep their promise that they won't use time travel again, ever.
"Temporal Cold War" *ugh*

[alanp]

My take on it is:

Original history, Zefram Cochrane climbed his drunken rear on the first human warp speed vessel and made history.

Borg altered the history, they blasted the fire out of the launch site, then the TNG crew worked franticly to make the bird fly and put history back together.

And the Zefram Cochrane isn't anything in the movie like he was in TOS because TOS was designed to be a short lived campy TV show that no one dreamed it would spawn movies and spin offs for decades.  And the trade off to getting new Treks is that they make continuity mistakes.

[Rico]

And the Zefram Cochrane isn't anything in the movie like he was in TOS because TOS was designed to be a short lived campy TV show that no one dreamed it would spawn movies and spin offs for decades.  And the trade off to getting new Treks is that they make continuity mistakes.

TOS was designed to be a campy show?  Ahh, no, I don't think so.  Cochrane that you see in TOS has been made younger by the Companion.  So of course he looks and acts differently.