Yes, yes, more whinin’ about Star Trek.
A long and detailed video giving the history of Star Trek… not a history of the Federation and the Klingons, but of the various corporate entities and licensing issues that have turned Trek into the mess it is today. One of the more important (for Trek fans, anyway) conclusions is that something we’ve been told for a decade now is false: the “Prime Timeline” ain’t.
Okay. From the 1960’s up until the end of the fourth season of “Star Trek: Enterprise,” everything was assumed to take place in the same narrative universe, same timeline. Even “Enterprise,” which had some definite continuity issues with the Trek canon, did eventually make itself more or less work. This connected, shared universe was not referred to as the “Prime” universe at the time because… why would it be? There was nothing else. But then in 2009 the “Kelvin timeline” or the “JJverse” movies started coming out. This was an obvious, and acknowledged, different timeline.But the source of the break in the timeline came from, we were told, the “Prime” timeline. Some years after the last of the original Star Trek” movies, the Romulan Empire was destroyed by a nonsensical FTL supernova; as a result of that event, Prime Timeline Old Spock and some Romulans got sucked into a black hole and sent back in time. The Romulan emergence and tangling with the USS Kelvin set off this new timeline. OK, fair enough. But as the movies went on, the divergence not only in history but in *everything* from Original Star Trek became more apparent. Then a few years ago CBS decided to start cranking out new Trek for their All Access service. Their first series, STD, was said to be set in the “Prime” timeline, about ten years before the original Star Trek.
But the problem is, there is simply no squaring what we see in STD with original Trek. There is no way in hell that STD could *possibly* evolve into TOS, then TNG, DS9, Voyager. So if this is the “Prime” timeline, then TOS & TNG are NOT the “Prime” timeline. Instead, they are in the “Canon” timeline.
This means that Leonard Nimoy did not play the same Spock we all knew in 2009’s “Star Trek.” Instead, he played the Spock who shows up on STD. The “Prime” timeline and the “Kelvin” timeline that split off from it have *nothing* to do with TOS & TNG. Thus the Picard series currently in development will not feature the Picard known from TNG, but a Picard who lived in the universe derived from STD.
So… current Star Trek isn’t “Star Trek.” “Star Trek” as we’ve come to know and love it ended in 2005. All Star Trek since 2009 is “Trek” in name only. It’s an unrelated sci-fantasy franchise that has appropriated some names and a few bits and pieces of design.
A simplified, shorter and less serious summary: