The Culture Beat

Thanks to a very helpful commenter, Emil P., who responded to my post last week berating the new Star Trek film for eliminating Star Trek’s established history in favor of a new one, I can now modify my response. When the aged Spock tells the young James Kirk that an time-traveling Romulan’s intervention at the moment of Kirk’s birth meant Kirk childhood would be fatherless, and that Vulcan would be destroyed eliminating who knows how much of Trek lore, I felt like the franchise and those who loved the original stories had been kicked in the teeth.

But Emil’s comments that followed included excerpts from an interview with one of the screenwriters where he says that in fact, the story was intended to establish an alternate universe that gave Kirk (and company) somewhat different histories. The Seattle Times interview has Orci referring to quantum mechanics theory of “many worlds” of possibilities that they borrowed branch off from the Star TRek “canon” and create a new generation of stories with the same characters without having to write themselves around established events. A key comment in the interview:

Q: You’re referring to the increasingly popular “many worlds” theory about the possible structure of the space-time continuum.

A: Exactly, and we chose that approach not only because it’s the most up-to-date speculation about time travel, but in terms of telling a time-travel story it inherently preserves the established events of “Star Trek” in an alternate reality, and that allows breathing room between those stories and what we’re doing now. It’s also really fun for us, as writers, because “Star Trek” got us into science and now science is helping us to preserve “Star Trek,” which is pretty amazing when you think about it.

Whatever you think about quantum physics, the writers needed a story device that would allow them to “retell” these characters’stories from scratch that would be viable for those not steeped in all things Trek. I would have like them to have found a way to actually have said that in the film, but it probably would have made a complicated script even more convoluted–just like this. And the purpose of the film was to re-launch the franchise and so for the writers, that theory was handy, but just don’t think about the plot mechanics too much.

This makes me feel better about the film and I may even see it again.