Star Trek and History (28 page)

Because of the film's environmentalist mission, the officers of the
Enterprise
altering their own future is less of a problem. The whole point of the film is that we
must
alter the present to alter the future trajectory of the whales' survival.

First Contact
provides Picard's crew with a perfect excuse for time travel—they are trapped in the Borg's resistance-proof wake. As the Borg violate the timeline, the
Enterprise
crew must fix it. Picard's being ordered to stay away from the battle at the beginning of the film sets up the theme of vengeance and allows us to see him violate orders. Although Picard's crew is predictably more careful with the timeline than Kirk's was, Picard's motivation must be impeccable to justify any actions. Thus, his personal history with the Borg cannot be allowed to influence how he restores history. Similarly, we see a history of Cochrane that was too clouded by admiration to see him as a flawed human being. We also discover that some primitives can be trusted, despite the Directives. This discovery is only slightly marred by Troi's inebriation: “Timeline? This is no time to talk about time. We don't have the time! . . . What was I saying?”

Star Trek
(2009) is unique in its failure to restore the timeline. Nero's actions are vile, especially since he uses time travel not just to alter the fate of Romulus but to destroy Vulcan and to attempt to destroy the Earth and all of the Federation planets. He falls prey to a typical temporal fallacy—he blames Spock, and only Spock, for Romulus's fate. Grief makes him unable to use his fantastic technological advantage in the past to productively change his personal history, as evidenced by his response to Kirk's offer of peace: “I would rather suffer the end of Romulus a thousand times. I would rather die in agony than accept assistance from you!” In fact, he makes his personal tragedy a multitime and multisystem tragedy. In contrast, older Spock remembers decades of history differently, but he does not attempt to undo what Nero has wrought. In seeking to recover from, but not revenge, the acts of a time terrorist, he sets a model for rational thought.

Spock's dual identities at the end allow us to understand “external time” and “personal time.” Nero's actions affect “external time,” but the integrity of the “personal time” of several characters is maintained. Older Spock's memories, although besieged by Nero, survive, and thus are not really destroyed.
15
Similarly, Nero has learned about Kirk in a study of Earth's history, although the Kirk he has read about no longer exists.

The film also demonstrates that although their “destinies have changed” in
this
universe, our characters will still be fundamentally themselves. Indeed, Spock seems more interested in preserving “a friendship that will define” him than with restoring Vulcan. He is also quick to give Scotty “future” technology.
16
We know that, with or without a father, Kirk was destined to cheat on the Kobayashi Maru test.

Yet the timeline is not the only historical concern in the series. Although “history” and “the timeline” may be used interchangeably, history is also independent of the individual timeline of each character. That is, the history a person has learned or experienced remains unchanged even if the timeline itself changes. Thus, the older Spock in
Star Trek
has experienced a history that has been largely eradicated by Nero's interference.

Each disruption of the timeline highlights the issue of learned history. Not only can history be changed by time travel, it has been changed by the act of recording it. History itself is a reconstruction—each log and each textbook is suspect because of a lack of full knowledge, the unreliability of witnesses, and agendas in the writing. As Michèle and Duncan Barrett note, “The rewriting of history is one of the crimes that humans are prone to commit.”
17
In
Next Generation
's “Too Short a Season” we see the easiest way to affect history—Jameson simply falsifies a report. Barrett and Barrett also remind us that
Voyager
's Doctor has his own view of this human tendency: “Revisionist history! It's such a comfort” (
VOY
, “Living Witness”).

All time travel episodes make us question our own relationship to history. Warnings from the future are never clear—we don't always know if we should change course or continue boldly on. Sometimes, our mistakes make us who we are, as in the original series' “The City on the Edge of Forever” and
Next Generation
's “Tapestry.” In other cases, as in
Deep Space Nine
's “Past Tense” and
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
, the right thing is to change our present and our near future. Science fiction always asks us what is human; time travel always asks us what is right. On several ethical questions,
Star Trek
is abundantly clear: we should not destroy Earth or her creatures. We should not treat one another badly. Classism, racism, and poverty are so pre-twenty-second century. To preserve the future of
Star Trek
, we should eradicate those problems in our present.

Time travel is always about history. We confront our own histories as individuals and as a species, and we must accept that we create our children's history.
Star Trek
forces us to think about our past through colonial or missionary allegories, our present cultural hegemony, and our future, either something immediate, as in the twenty-first-century apocalypse, or a more distant future. In all futures, we have the possibility to be better.
Star Trek
's time travel forces us to consider time itself as something that “carries with it the highest moral obligation.”

Notes

1.
Personnel are sometimes questioned about their violations. For example, Picard's Prime Directive violations are used against him in a “witch hunt,” and Captain Sisko must answer to the Department of Temporal Investigations after visiting Kirk's
Enterprise
in “Trials and Tribble-ations.”

2.
“Starfleet Command General Orders,”
http://www.starfleetsupply.com/orders.html
.

3.
This is the Predestination Paradox.

4.
This term may be misleading to those who note that the “present” of characters can change, as in “Yesterday's Enterprise” (
TNG
). However, “present” in time travel is limited to an instant. When we see the “present” change in
Star Trek
, we're looking at the future, if only a moment further. William J. Devlin, “Some Paradoxes of Time Travel in
The Terminator
and
12 Monkeys
,” in
The Philosophy of Science Fiction Film
, ed. Steven M. Sanders (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008), 106–107.

5.
Certain episodes seem to play with the notion of eternalism. For example, in
Next Generation
's “Time's Arrow,” when the crew discovers evidence that Data was destroyed on Earth in the past, the investigation ends with a neatly wrapped-up story, leading the audience to believe that the crew was always already part of the story. Nothing they do in the past changes it; rather, all of their actions create the present we know, one in which a meeting with Samuel Clemens encouraged Jack London to pursue writing.

6.
David Lewis, “The Paradoxes of Time-Travel,” in
Science Fiction and Philosophy: From Time Travel to Superintelligence
, ed. Susan Schneider (West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 317.

7.
Lewis, “Paradoxes of Time-Travel,” 321.

8.
If I had Hermione's time turner from the Harry Potter books, I would have taken the Elementary Temporal Mechanics course at Starfleet Academy in addition to my early twenty-first-century (Muggle) literature degrees so that I could understand this better. Unfortunately, like Janeway, I find myself with a headache when trying to explain these issues.

9.
David Deutsch and Michael Lockwood, “The Quantum Physics of Time Travel,” in
Science Fiction and Philosophy: From Time Travel to Superintelligence
, ed. Susan Schneider (West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 330.

10.
The actual assignment was to create a spin-off series. This mission failed, despite Teri Garr's heroic adorableness.

11.
Ray Bradbury, “A Sound of Thunder,” in
Science Fiction and Philosophy: From Time Travel to Superintelligence
, ed. Susan Schneider (West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 290.

12.
“So prevalent is the time-travel theme . . . that the 1996
Star Trek
chronology . . . discusses twenty-eight such time lines involving thirty-four episodes.” Jon Wagner and Jan Lundeen,
Deep Space and Sacred Time:
Star Trek
in the American Mythos
(Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998), 198.

13.
If they are not following Starfleet orders, then some kind of gods, as in
Deep Space Nine
's “Accession”; the Prophets send a man through time, although their sense of time is nonlinear. This causes problems and leads Sisko to claim that they “work in mysterious ways.” Similiarly, Kira convinces Sisko to allow her to use the Orb of Time for a time jump with the excuse that it's not a Starfleet matter and that the Prophets will protect her (and implicitly the timeline) (
DS9
, “Wrongs Darker Than Death or Night”). However, most of the crews' actions are permitted in the following episodes and movies: “All Our Yesterdays” (
TOS
); “Azati Prime” (
ENT
); “Carpenter Street” (
ENT
); “City on the Edge of Forever” (
TOS
); “Cause and Effect” (
TNG
); “E
2
” (
ENT
); “Little Green Men” (
DS9
); “Past Tense” (
DS9
); “Relativity” (
VOY
); “Shattered” (
VOY
); “Shockwave” (
ENT
);
Star Trek: First Contact
, in which Picard's violation of an order to stay away from a fight at all will also surely be forgiven; “Storm Front” (
ENT
); “Time and Again” (
VOY
), although Janeway's actions cause the problem, she
believes
she is fixing the timeline; “Timescape” (
TNG
); “Trials and Tribble-ations” (
DS9
), although the time police do have to investigate it; “We'll Always Have Paris” (
TNG
).

14.
Margaret Atwood,
Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 159.

15.
Strangely, in “All Our Yesterdays,” personal time is influenced by objective time, as Spock becomes like his Vulcan ancestors when in their time.

16.
We must refrain from assuming this is where Scotty learned to trade in information—the timeline has been altered so that the events in
The Voyage Home
are unlikely to occur.

17.
Michèle Barrett and Duncan Barrett, Star Trek:
The Human Frontier
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), 176.

“Eaten any good books lately?”

—Q (to Worf), TNG, “
Deja-Q”

Picard:
Well, it seems Mrs. Troi is our
acting
ambassador of goodwill for today”

Troi:
“You just think of me as your entertainment director”

—TNG,
“Half a Life”

Elizabeth Baird Hardy

For those who love books, one of the most encouraging aspects of the
Star Trek
future is the fact that its people work in outer space and visit distant planets but still read, enjoy, and quote the books that are already classics in our own time period. Even in the twenty-first century, book aficionados often lament the advent of e-readers and other technological replacements for the experience of reading an actual book, but the use of classic literature by the characters of
Star Trek
reinforces the historical and literary value of these venerated texts.

A number of scholars and fans have meticulously tracked down the plethora of literary allusions in the films and television series, and even viewers with only a passing acquaintance with what literary scholars refer to as the “Great Books” can identify the references in episode titles such as “By Any Other Name” or recognize the deerstalker hat and pipe of Sherlock Holmes when they are worn by Lt. Commander Data.
1
Some critics have theorized that these literary elements are intended only to provide a facade of elegance, but there is far more at work than mere window dressing.
2
In the distant future, works considered “Great Books” today remain popular for entertainment in both traditional and technologically enhanced performances, without eliminating the pleasure of reading an actual book with pages and a cover. The texts of the Western literary canon are clearly still materially and culturally valuable in a distant future whose stories sometimes echo those told in the antique books they continue to treasure, and they reflect the histories of the texts themselves as well.

“I know of your fondness for antiques.”

—Captain Spock,
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan

C. S. Lewis claimed in his landmark literary analysis handbook,
An Experiment in Criticism
, that one of the best tests of a book's value is in its endurance under the pressure of rereading.
3
By this standard, the texts on the shelves of the
Star Trek
characters certainly qualify, having held up under additional centuries of reading and enjoyment. The books that get the most usage, both as artifacts and as themes and references in the
Star Trek
universe, are the old books, leading to the presumption that the emphasis on the Great Books, often a source of contention in the academy, has not been snuffed out by real or fictional events in
Star Trek
's past. Age is frequently a qualification for literature implemented into
Star Trek
, as if books, like Romulan ale, take a while to ferment.