Boldly Going Somewhere

Let’s start out with two statements of fact. I like Star Trek. I like time travel. Given both of these, one could assume that combining Star Trek and time travel would yield something composed of insurmountable geeky joy. But I dunno.
Let’s step back. If you haven’t read anything about the upcoming JJ Abrams Star Trek flick, I would recommend you stop reading now. If you have read anything, then you know its events revolve around a character traveling back in time, and the more I think about it, the more I’m getting apprehensive about the whole device, and I’ve drafted a few brief points that explain why.
1 – Is it needed? If JJ Abrams just said he was rebooting Star Trek, I’d get it and give it to him. Does he really need to spend a movie explaining how he’s rebooting Star Trek, when if he just opened with a young Kirk, Spock, and Bones, I’d jump right in and let him take it away? I don’t need a framing device to get us there.
2 – Will it piss off the locals? If the new flick ultimately negates all of Trek canon, what will the die hard Trekkers have to say? If this time travel thingy equates to cancelling out all of TOS, TNG, DS9, etc., is that just a wee bit too bold for fans who’ve memorized Picard and Sisko’s family trees and had the likeness of the Enterprise E tattooed to their flesh? If suddenly none of this is real any more, are they gonna be cool? If JJ just did a reboot, classic Trek could keep on going in its reality while JJ played in his, but if the new movie kills the classic reality, will there be a teeny tiny bit of backlash?
3 – Will it confuse the newbies? JJ is rebooting Star Trek, making it young, hip, cool, and accessible to the masses. Got it. But if this is the case, is the wisest choice to wrap the reboot around a device that pulls in the original continuity. If you don’t know Star Trek and walk into a movie full of spaceship fights, phaser fights, fist-to-fist fights, and hot green chicks, that’s awesome. But if you walk into a movie with all the above and an old guy from the future of the future talking about how we’re in the past of the future and he’s altered events changing the future of the future, might you have a hard time wrapping your brain around it? Will time travel be a barrier to entry for the general movie going population who don’t know or care about canon?
4 – The past of the future is cool enough. When Enterprise came out, I didn’t like, care for, or get the point of the Time War storyline. Why couldn’t the story just have been about the first starship named Enterprise? Why did it have to tie the past of the future into the future of the future? It’s centuries before TNG, DS9, etc. but it’s still centuries ahead of the present. It’s already cool. It doesn’t need to constantly call back to Trek’s future iterations. I’m getting the same feeling here. JJ’s Star Trek looks sexy, fresh, and new all by itself, and I don’t need him to start pulling in the future of the future. More than that, in any science fiction story, the audience is asked to believe a lot, and asking me to come along for time travel on top of warp drive, transporters, phasers, and all the like might just be too much.
All that being said, All Good Things is an astonishing episode, I loved the one where they found Data’s head buried in the middle of the desert, and I’ve even got a thing for First Contact, all of which is Star Trek which revolves around time travel. Then again, it’s all Star Trek which revolves around time travel which preserves the status quo — and JJ’s flick is kinda going to tell us that status quo doesn’t exist any more.
But maybe that’s what Star Trek needs.