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thefirstfleet — Star Trek timelines explained
#chart #discovery #enterprise #reboot #star #timeline #trek
Published: 2017-10-24 20:32:48 +0000 UTC; Views: 7496; Favourites: 94; Downloads: 97
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My interpretation of the current state of the Trekverse, with all the reboots and re-interpretations...Related content
Comments: 124
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I love this!!! I do have one minor issue with it: the Abrams Hard Reboot acknowledges the events of TOS, not ENT (as far as I know; which I could be wrong here).
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It acknowledges ENT as well. Admiral Archer is mentioned and we can see miniatures of the NX class in at least one of the movies.
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While I don’t like Berman trek as much as I use too. I like the latter half of ds9 with no Berman in control. Although I still like the “real” canon I do like the modern design style of discovery. Except there background ships. They look kinda ugly. Good job on explaining this
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Thank you very much!
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I know I'm late, but there's one SLIGHT disagreement I have with this - and that has to do with Roddenberry himself. You see, Roddenberry once said that if there was a contradiction between TOS and TNG.... then TNG should take precedence. Again, this isn't what either CBS or Paramount - the people who actually set the rules - say, but were Roddenberry's personal feelings.
And Roddenberry also chose to remove all of TAS except "Yesteryear" from the canon. That is the one episode that has always been unambiguously canon.
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Wow, I didn't know that. It's really weird. In some way, with this piece of info and others, it seemed Roddenberry didn't really like his original creation...
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Well, times had changed. AND in TNG's early years, Roddenberry was often high as a kite.
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Doesn't TNG fit into the pure canon itself? I mean, Roddenberry was involved with it's initial concepts etc... so it was him building on his own ideas from TOS?
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Well, it depends.
For me, as a TOS purist, the following applies:
- Pure canon: TOS, TAS and the first six movies
- Extended canon: TOS, TAS, TNG, DS9, VOY, ENT and the first ten movies
- Abrams canon reboot: the three Kelvin movies
- Discovery visual reboot: DSC
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Where does Star Trek: Online fit into this? As I understand it, ST
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I wanted to include canon sources only.
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You dovetail with what I tried to explain in a youtube vid [all to briefly] then this one; detpackman tried to rip me a new one in a most fanboy
way. www.youtube.com/watch?v=dW2koD…
Though I think you and I are correct and no CBS propaganda can sway me.
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I might also include the FASA/numbered novels as another group: TOS, TAS, ST I-IV, FASA RPG, Franz Joseph's Technical Manual, Scott's Guide to the Enterprise, and the novels that carry numbers. It also includes a somewhat different first season of TNG.
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I wanted to go for primary sources only.
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I see it more like this.
www.starfleet-museum.org/ --->TOS/TAS/TOS movies--->TNG/DS9/VOY/TNG movies
ST:FC--->ENT--->Kelvin--->Disco---ST09/ID/B
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I didn't want to include fanon designs / interpretations here.
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Pretty much how I see it as well. The original Trek is safely within it's own universe, with all of the spin-off's being in a different universe since they cannot be reconciled stylistically with the original. And all the attempts at fitting that 60's style into "Relics", "TaT" and "Iamd", while nice nods, really just showed how incompatible those different visions were. The original Star Trek will always define Star Trek for me. I enjoyed a fair amount of the spin-off's to varying degrees, but ultimately they are forgettable to me.
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Yeah, I think you missed a group or two.
1. Roddenberry canon should include TNG, because a lot of the Utopian influence in it was his vision. He was an executive producer for the first few seasons and had a hand and influence on it.
2. Personally, I take TOS, TAS, the first 6 movies, TNG, DS9, VoY and the 4 TNG movies as canon. I do NOT accept Enterprise as Canon (as it directly contradicts TOS in several places, and even causes problems with TNG-VOY. The Borg? The Ferengi? The Delphic Expanse? The Attack on Earth? The Fed-Romulan War? These actually cannot be explained by a holodeck recreation, because they are factually inaccurate.). And that means, Discovery also cannot be canon, by default, as it acknowledges ENT and invalidates parts of TOS. Plus, kinda a spin off anyway.
Abrams verse is a different Universe and off-shot... which is fine. But as it has continuity issues not explained by the changes caused by the time-line alteration, while keeping ENT...it also falls straight into non canon for me.
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...I believe you meant to reply to me.
Note that I did not say "holodeck recreation" -- that would have to be faithful to history. What I /did/ say was "historical fiction" -- some of which can include /alternative/ histories, i.e. "what could have been". There are real-world examples of this -- for example, a book called '1861' (which I have not read, not being particularly interested in re-litigating the American Civil War) -- which speculates as to what would have happened if an event called the Trent Affair had wound up differently. I cast 'Enterprise' into the same genre -- a retelling of that time period which was not necessarily a /faithful/ retelling, but was entertaining even for being "wrong" or "alternative".
...and the Earth-Romulan War really was a thing, BTW. Re-watch TOS: 'Balance of Terror'. Great episode just for how it's done, but it *does* establish that war as something that happened around that time.
As for the Borg bit... that's actually rather plausible. Note what time period ST: 'First Contact' takes place in. That sets the stage...
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Actually, I was just replying in general <_<
But, as you seem to have addressed me, I will always engage in a good debate,
You're right...ENT had a potential to be a "historical fiction" through the holodeck....or even something due to the temporal cold-war. But they blew both options due to the way they handled it, in my opinion.
Oh, I'm well aware that the Earth-Romulan war was a thing... but that's the point, it's the Earth-Romulan war, not Fed-Romulan 
Oh yeah, I'm well aware that the Borg part ties into First Contact...it's the Borg blown off the ship during the battle with the deflector. That however is the problem...due to Q-Who, where the Borg are a complete unknown to the federation. If the NX-Enterprise encountered them, you'd think there'd be an oblique reference in a log or record somewhere, in some computer databank. But there's none. They're an unknown (unless you believe the VOY episode "The Raven"...which itself is poorly written and contradictory...far too much so). There's also the issue that advanced late 24th century Borg would be unstoppable in the late 22nd century
It's like the Ferengi in the final episode.... which while I accept they might not be noted in a computer databank, still just posses a logical problem of their first federation encounter being 10-20 years before TNG (by Picard and the Stargazer)...over 100 years later. It is inconceivable to encounter them 100 years before this, and then not again in a 100 years of exploration and expansion until much later. It just doesn't make sense (and while you can say historical fiction...I think Riker would have scoffed at it and called a holodeck technician...probably Barclay, and claimed the holodeck was acting up
And the attack on Earth? Directly contradicted in the Dominion War in DS9, when the Breen attack is the first attack on Earth [also, from a psychological point of view...if Aliens attacked Earth and carved a kilometre wide trench from Florida to the tip of South America, killing countless millions in the process, before the formation of the Federation....then the Federation would never have formed. Humans would have become xenophobic and quite possibly militaristic. Hell, it would have been a better set up for the Mirror Universe....and don't even get me started on the Mirror Universe episode they did do -_- . Again, this is my opinion and a psychological evaluation and interpretation but still, it makes the series even less plausible to me personally).
As you can see....I had some problems with ENT...and that just scratches the surface
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EDIT: continuity note here. The way DeviantArt structures and orders comments is kind of weird. My comment below this one is the /earlier/ of the two...
...we now return to your regularly scheduled comment section...
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Thinking about this some more... here's my final answer, Regis
Enterprise is still a holonovel series, in the historical fiction genre by the skin of its teeth -- but it's a /bad/ holonovel series and it isn't at all accurate to the time period in question.
Hang on, gimme a minute before you skewer me.
My father is fascinated by the Cape Hatteras (NC, USA) lighthouse. It's among the most recognized lighthouses in the world... if it isn't at the top of that list, it's pretty dang close. He began doing serious, proper research on the thing something like a decade or two ago, because he wants to create a museum-quality scale model of the lighthouse. He has added onto this goal, a book telling the history of the lighthouse and events around it. Meanwhile, his project has grown from hobby to passion to something probably bordering on meeting the clinical criteria for an obsession. (...and he admits it himself.)
If you go into a bookstore such as Barnes & Noble, and get a history book about the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, I can personally guarantee you that at least half of the clearly attributed and properly sourced material is flat-out wrong, all the way down to the height of the thing overall. I know this, because my father knows this and I've watched him do a lot of his research (and he hardly talks about anything else now).
What happened?
Basically, laziness and a closed system. There's a sort of club of authors that all write about lighthouses, and a sub-club who only write about lighthouses on North Carolina's coastal islands (the Outer Banks) and the coastal river inlets, and a sub-sub-club who only write about Cape Hatteras.
...and they all copy off each other!
That last part is the key. These authors don't audit their sources, they just assume everyone before them (or with them) has it right. Their sources did the same, as did the sources' sources, and on down the bucket, all the way to the bottom. Somewhere, because we're all human beings, errors crept in, and /nobody checked their sources for accuracy/. At least, not in a /very/ long time.
I'm not entirely looking forward to the academic fireworks that will inevitably result from Dad's book. But that's not the point here.
Half of the point is the sentence two paragraphs above. The other half is that this is far from an isolated practice -- almost all historians of a subject copy off each other. It's little clubs all the way down...
So: what if the brazen holoauthor didn't do his or her proper research on the time period, and went with "oh hey this sounds cool" -- or, rather worse, s/he was informed by flawed material...? (or both. Both is good... or, well, not really.)
/That's/ how "Enterprise" wound up that way. It's about as historically accurate, relative to its time period, as the recent movie, "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter" (which I did not see)... but if you don't mind that, it's at least a decent "ya'll ain't never gon' be-lieve what happen' next" kind of a yarn...
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Well said. I'll have to reconsider my stance.
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My personal canon is roughly as follows -- TOS, TNG, Deep Space 9, Voyager, the first two sets of movies (TMP era and TNG era). The series Enterprise is also canon, but as a "show within a show" -- it's a holonovel (or, rather, a series of them), like Captain Proton. TAS is debatable. I also tend to accept various books (novels, novellas, etc) as canon, if they fit the larger picture -- such as the Star Trek:SCE series of novellas. The 2009+ Abramsverse stuff and the new series Discovery take place in distinctly separate universes and as such are excluded -- and with glee, at that. Ugh.
The overall reasoning here is this. There is a term of art in the computer and engineering fields (in particular the second of those), although it's bled into larger society a bit. The term is "blackboxing". It's a form of reverse-engineering. You are given a device that you cannot take apart and empirically determine how it functions, but you need to know how it functions -- or, at least, you need to exactly duplicate its functioning. Blackboxing is a way to do this, but it's a brute force way -- you basically throw everything you can at the device, systematically, and you note how it responds. In electronics, if you have a chip, and you know at least power and ground, you see what happens, with the chip powered up, when you give it voltage (and ground potential) across each and every /other/ (non-supply) pin, one at a time, until it dies or you run out of pins. (This is monumentally easier --and less risky-- if you know what's input and what's output... but that's a luxury you don't always get.) Star Trek, at its heart, is a form of societal self-blackboxing -- we put humans (and other similar beings) into situations to see how they respond, and as long as it's realistic (or at least believable) it's reasonably accurate. This is how we find out who we are as a people, by role-playing our ideals and seeing what happens. If the show doesn't have at least /that/ element of exploration, I don't care what the title card says, it's not (real) Star Trek.
As for Enterprise... Enterprise is sort of in what you might call 'continuity h***', for the most part. As raw canon, it distinctly does not fit. Captain Archer never gets mentioned again -- in the primary four serieses (sorry, having "series" as the plural form of itself just doesn't work for me) or in the TMP or TNG movies. The real-world reason for this, of course, is that that character (along with the whole rest of the thing) hadn't been created yet. Not to mention that the sets (and ships) look /way/ too futuristic for pre-TOS-era anything. /But you still have to account for it./ "These Are The Voyages" (TATV), as unpopular an episode as it is, actually gives us our way out here. TATV is the keystone -- TATV is how it all can fit together. The entire episode basically takes place in the holodeck, right? So, gee, why not have the /whole series/ be in there? There's /nothing/ in the entire thing that prevents this from being the case, AFAIK -- i.e., there's no internal contradiction. There /is/ a mention somewhere in one of the /other/ serieses, IIRC, that somewhere around the time science fiction became science fact, science fiction as an entertainment genre died out -- but, then, we have Captain Proton, and the kids' entertainment one that I can't remember from Voyager -- Flotter and something...? Whatever. We have precedent here for holonovels to exist. Hence, Enterprise is a holonovel series, reimagining the relevant time period. Historical fiction, we'd call it. Boom! It suddenly fits. All the junk that otherwise doesn't work, is artistic license (or a /profound/ lack of research!) on the part of the author.
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that's the best way to think about it. Discovery fits into the prime timeline of events but it is a soft-re imagining of Star Trek. One of the Disco books explained that the TOS uniforms were for Constitution class officers only, as a sign of distinction for their vessels. Its a visual continuation of Enterprise, with tech modern for our time, but still behind TNG in capabilities. TOS is hard to fit into the canon because they never stuck to their own canon. Like having 6 seperate substances being the hardest thing known to man (10x stronger than diamond!), Spock being the first/only Vulcan in Starfleet and the Intrepid being 100% Vulcan Starfleet crew. I just would like them to keep elements of the Klingons in line with the rest of canon. Or at least show us they are out there and just not in the forefront of the current war.
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Also, let's not forget about the things like Vulcanians VS Vulcans, UESPA VS Starfleet, Earth ship VS Starfleet ship, First Federation VS UFP...
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Interesting. My personal interpretation is a mixture of real and pure. I view Discovery as a almost completely new timeline despite what they say. The ships ,tech and uniforms just don't fit into the TOS prime universe. The Klingons.. So I guess in the 24th century Worf now looks like that? What about Bellanna Torres' mother? Spock has a adopted human sister all of a sudden? Is it canon that the Klingons got it's cloaking device from the Romulans? Or is that fanon? If it's canon they ignored that.
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It's an offshoot cannon.
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Prime Timeline in terms of events and history, but it is visually a soft-re-imagining.
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If you asked me, I wonder where's the Enterprise in Discovery. It is like the Enterprise is completely missing.
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The NX-01 or the NCC-1701? The NX-01 was mentioned indirectly by referencing Jonathan Archer. The 1701 was explicitly mentioned in Ep. 6.
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Most of differences between TOS and B/B canon can be explained by having TOS movies and TNG airing at the same time.
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Some stuff was retconned. WWIII, the Eugenics Wars, Zefram Cohrane being an Earth Human, etc.
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I should rewatch then.
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Also TrekkieGal
How is this affected if the JJLensFlareVerse does not exist?
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Ah Lensflare, the only new weapon that was created that actually KILLS any attention from a scene.
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What you call the Brannon/Braga "Real" canon is the prime timeline, if you remove ENT and add TAS. Don't forget, Roddenberry helped create TNG. The Enterprise Universe was created by the Temporal Cold War. The Prime Universe still exists, though the so called "Spock Prime" and Nero didn't actually come from it. They came from either the Original Prime Universe, or The Online Universe, where the Borg are still in existence (Borg were removed in the Destiny book trilogy).
The list is follows:
DISCOVERY UNIVERSE: DISC, TOS, TAS, TMP, TWOK, TSFS, TVH, TFF, TUC, TNG, DS9, FC, INS, VOY, NEM.
ORIGINAL PRIME UNIVERSE: TOS, TAS, TMP, TWOK, TSFS, TVH, TFF, TUC, TNG, DS9, FC, INS, VOY, NEM. Still exists.
ENTERPRISE UNIVERSE: ENT, TOS, TAS, TMP, TWOK, TSFS, TVH, TFF, TUC, TNG, DS9, FC, INS, VOY, NEM (and the novels set after NEM). This universe replaced the Prime Universe thanks to the Temporal Cold War. Any novel mentioning ENT is set in this universe. Borg removed in the Destiny Trilogy.
KELVIN UNIVERSE: ENT, STAR TREK, INTO DARKNESS, BEYOND. This is is an already existing universe that was slightly altered by the arrival of Nero. Includes the comic series (which saw Q arrive from the Original Prime Universe), and the new Boldly Going comic series set after Beyond.
ONLINE UNIVERSE: This universe includes all the series except DISC (at the moment), and ignores the end of the Borg in the Destiny Trilogy.
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Uh your actually wrong there. The events of Enterprise happen regardless in all timelines as they are the foundation for the rest of Trek. Sorry to burst your bubble there.
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