Star Trek and History

by Reagin, Nancy

  The Observation Effect, Butterflies, and Further Causality Paradoxes

  Homer Simpson [after time traveling and finding himself in the dinosaur era]: Okay, don’t panic! Remember the advice Dad gave you on your wedding day.

  Grandpa Simpson: [Flashback] If you ever travel back in time, don’t step on anything. Because even the slightest change can alter the future in ways you can’t imagine.

  —The Simpsons, “Treehouse of Horror V”

  For the sake of the show, Starfleet must not be concerned with the Observation Effect, the scientific principle identified in quantum physics that an observer affects whatever is being observed. Since Starfleet supposedly depends on quantum mechanics for power, it should be especially sensitive to potential observation repercussions.

  However, Starfleet orders observers to study untouched cultures in their own time and to observe events in the past, despite routine cultural corruptions and timeline disruptions. The original series’ “Assignment: Earth,” for example, features the crew observing the events of 1968.10 They feel obligated to go down to the planet, as they observe someone who may be about to alter the timeline. Presumably, however, their being captured by the United States temporarily either was always meant to happen or was actually inconsequential.

  If mere observation does not affect the timeline, then arguably butterflies do not, either. In Ray Bradbury’s 1952 story “A Sound of Thunder,” the destruction of one butterfly in the past changed everything in the future: “The stomp of your foot, on one mouse, could start an earthquake, the effects of which could shake our earth and our destinies down through Time, to their very foundation.”11 This was one of the first science fiction stories to grapple with chaos theory, now popularized in culture as “the Butterfly Effect.”

  Although Starfleet officers understand that violating the timeline can have adverse effects, some crews are more careful than others. Kirk’s officers are aware of the dangers, but they behave in careless ways, at least in comparison to other crews. In “City on the Edge of Forever,” for example, although Spock warns, “No past, no future,” after McCoy alters the timeline and erases Starfleet, Spock and Kirk manage to exist in the past for a week without affecting the future in any significant way (other than to “right” the timeline) (TOS, “City on the Edge of Forever”). They steal clothes, have many encounters with other people, and significantly affect Edith Keeler, but her falling in love with the Casanova of the Stars does not change anything. Her failure to die at the “right” time, however, will. In fact, although no small changes have any effect here, if one considered the death of one important person a “small” change in the grand scheme of history, one could argue that Edith is the butterfly in the story. However, the Butterfly Effect would be better illustrated if what made the difference to the future was not whether Kirk let her die but whether ever getting to see the Clark Gable movie Kirk and Edith were on their way to see would have led to the peace movement that would have allowed the Nazis to prevail.

  Other paradoxes are at play in several Star Trek episodes. For example, in Voyager’s “Future’s End,” Braxton of the DTI creates the explosion he was investigating during the investigation. Interestingly, this does not make him question the wisdom of attempting to use time travel to “fix” the timeline, perhaps because the initial theft of a time ship could still be blamed on someone from the “past.” Similarly, in “Time and Again” Janeway’s inquiry into a time fracture and planetary extinction event leads her to realize that the inspection (in the past) caused the future event she observed. Even though she was “meant” to be there in the past, as her presence there was requisite for what she observed in her present, she is still able to change both past and future.

  Janeway discovers a similar problem in “Parallax” when her ship is trapped in a singularity and she hears a distress call that the crew of the ship would send later. “Effect can precede cause” in temporal mechanics, she explains. In Next Generation’s “Cause and Effect,” a causality loop causes déjà vu, leading the crew onto a path to discover the loop and to break free. As in many other distortion episodes in Next Generation, the crew must decide whether to stay on course, although the end seems disastrous. Because they worry that altering their course might have caused the disaster in other times through the loop, they decide to remain on course in every instance (for example, in “Time Squared,” which postulates a Möbius time loop), as the cause for the effect is not clear. The episode “All Good Things . . .” features another example, as Picard experiences three time periods at once. In trying to avert catastrophe surrounding an anomaly in the future, he must decide whether staying on course or deviating from it causes the anomaly. However, the anomaly is antitime, created in the future and growing in the past in such a way that life on Earth would be destroyed. Understanding backward causation allows him to prevent the anomaly in all three times.

  In Deep Space Nine’s “Trials and Tribble-ations,” Bashir thinks his great-grandmother is attracted to him, and for a moment, he worries he’s meant to be his own grandfather. How can we be sure this isn’t a variant of the grandfather paradox? “This could be a pre-destination paradox. I could be destined to fall in love with that woman and become my own great-grandfather. . . . If I don’t meet with her tomorrow I may never be born! . . . I can’t wait to get back to Deep Space Nine and see your face when you find out that I never existed!”

  In “Timeless” (VOY), “future” Kim sends a message to “present” Kim after changing the timeline to avert a disaster only he and Chakotay survive. When Kim sees the message, he asks Janeway how his future self was able to send a message when the success of the intervention prevented the future Kim from existing. Janeway is unable to explain it, and viewers find it hard to understand, too. When future Kim first tries to intervene in the present, he knows he fails because he still exists. Kim is thus assuming that instead of choices creating alternate timelines in the multiverse, which would allow him to both exist and save the crew in the present, there is a only a single timeline in play. Of course, this creates another paradox—how could he have intervened to save the ship if he had been kept from existing by the ship being saved? Since the episode features the “future” crew being destroyed as they save the present, the show doesn’t have to answer the question about whether future Kim would simply evaporate (like Marty McFly in Back to the Future).

  Similarly, the Borg Queen in the Voyager episode “Endgame” attempts to rectify Admiral Janeway’s infecting the Borg with a virus by destroying Captain Janeway. She explains, “If she had no future, then you will never exist.” The queen’s plan fails, but this does not explain the time travel paradox in the episode. If Captain Janeway got home earlier than Admiral Janeway had, then Admiral Janeway would never have gone into the past to make sure Captain Janeway did in fact get home sooner. Once again, the death of the “future” interloper obfuscates the question of whether fixing the past would make the future “disappear.”

  The possibility of evaporation is brought up in the Enterprise episode “E2,” featuring the “future” multigenerational ship Enterprise from the past intervening into the timeline to make sure Archer’s ship can go through a wormhole without being thrown back in time. When Archer successfully goes through the wormhole, the other Enterprise does not follow them, leading him to conclude that the other Enterprise was either destroyed or disappeared, because it never would have existed without the Enterprise traveling in time. T’Pol is confounded by the paradox, noting that she remembers the other Enterprise, which would be irrational if it had never existed. In contrast, we do get to see a “future” character disappear in Deep Space Nine’s “Time’s Orphan,” when eighteen-year-old Molly prevents an eight-year-old Molly from getting caught in the past, which makes the older Molly vanish.

  Violating the Temporal Prime Directive versus Preserving the Timeline

  “Must you be so linear, Jean-Luc?”

  —Q, TNG, “All Good Things . . .”
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  Since the past and the future can be altered, we must consider when intentionally affecting the timeline is acceptable and why the Enterprise’s crews risk time travel so often.12 What does the audience learn about its own history?

  There are many reasons Starfleet ethicists would not permit timeline alterations. They would ban altering history for greed or revenge or when a captain’s mind was altered or diseased. They make allowances for alterations to restore a timeline someone else has altered for a “wrong” reason, to correct accidents or anomalies (which are by definition abnormal and thus changeable), or to fulfill Starfleet orders.13 The distinction between right and wrong is not actually clear in specific instances in the show. Although villains often alter time for reasons we deem irresponsible or reprehensible, so do Starfleet captains on occasion. Despite the fact that the Prime Directive forbids violations “even to save their lives and/or their ship, unless they are acting to right an earlier violation,” self-defense and even personal preferences have been used to justify clear violations.

  Although breaking the rules is more interesting than following them, we should note that sometimes captains do exactly what they should. Janeway is offered a chance to alter the timeline so that her ship would never go on the mission that would strand her in the Delta Quadrant. Respect for the Temporal Directive and the lives they’ve touched since the stranding prevents her from accepting (VOY, “Eye of the Needle”).

  In most cases, however, Starfleet personnel do violate the Prime Directive. In “Endgame,” Admiral Janeway is still part of Starfleet when she violates the timeline to bring her ship home decades earlier. Her knowledge of future crew deaths motivates her attempt to intimidate her past self, Captain Janeway, into acquiescing. Although Admiral and Captain Janeway save their crew and destroy a Borg hub, they also destroy years of history in direct violation of the Directive for personal and arguably selfish reasons. Captain Janeway complains, “Future is past, past is future—it all gives me a headache!” (“Future’s End”) Her future self, Admiral Janeway, has apparently found the solution to temporal pain: “Oh, the almighty Temporal Prime Directive. Take my advice: it’s less of a headache if you just ignore it” (VOY, “Endgame”).

  Changing the past is not the only way to violate the Directive. The later series are clear that people with knowledge of the future are not supposed to share it because it could change the timeline. This is violated as routinely as the other rules. Although Kes is careful not to disclose personal things she has seen in the “possible” future she experiences in “Before and After” (VOY), she does write up a report on an enemy they will face in order to prevent “the year of hell.” Similarly, in the last scene of the final episode of Next Generation, the crew wonders why Picard has chosen to tell them about the future he saw. They decide to rationalize his choice because it was only one possible future. As Riker states earlier, “I prefer to look on the future as something that is not written in stone” (TNG, “All Good Things . . .”). While trying to preserve the timeline in “Shattered” (VOY), Chakotay attempts to keep the past Janeway from learning too much about her future. (At the end of the episode, it’s unclear whether Janeway has “always” known these facts or whether this incident has created a slightly new timeline in which she does.)

  Some of the more interesting episodes are those in which what is “right” is not so clear. In “Assignment: Earth” (TOS), although Starfleet orders the ship into the past to observe, the crew is unclear about whether they should intervene with the alien they encounter, because they aren’t sure whether he’s from another place or another time, with the second possibility demanding a response. In “Yesterday’s Enterprise” (TNG), although the timeline has been altered and needs to be fixed, other than Guinan, the crew does not know they need to change things back.

  Picard attempts to help creatures keep “a piece of the future” from being appropriated by people in his time in “Captain’s Holiday” (TNG). However, he starts to question if they’re telling the truth. After he destroys the Tox Uthat, they confess that “history recorded” his actions. The idea that visitors from the future are untrustworthy is explored further in “A Matter of Time” (TNG). “Professor Rasmussen” claims to be an observer from the future. His presence alarms the crew as they begin to reevaluate their attempt to save an endangered planet. Later, they discover that he is from the past, has stolen a timeship, and is planning to exploit the resources of the future. Whether his arrest and subsequent disappearance from his own century was always a part of the timeline is unclear.

  In “Visionary,” when Miles O’Brien time travels unintentionally, he witnesses the destruction of Deep Space Nine. He uses his knowledge and the accidental time shifts to prevent the destruction of the station and to save his own life. Although this seems justified, the language of the Directive and the actions of the commanders in other episodes make his use of his knowledge to alter the timeline ambiguous.

  Similarly ambiguous is the decision made in “Twilight” (ENT). By destroying Archer’s memory-destroying parasites, his friends erase twelve years of history. The viewer may see this as warranted, because wiping out all but six thousand humans was never part of the timeline we observe in the series. However, Archer and his crew don’t really know for sure if that’s the case. Is the absence of the DTI evidence that they did the “right” thing?

  Voyager’s “Future’s End” complicates the matter of time travel by showing how even the DTI can be wrong. When Braxton appears with weapons aimed at Voyager, Janeway is wise to refuse to submit. Braxton’s intentions are good, but his incomplete understanding of causality almost renders the timeline permanently damaged. It also ends with an ambiguous lesson on violations. Braxton will not send Voyager to the Alpha Quadrant, citing the Temporal Directive. However, the adventure allows them to gain twenty-ninth-century technology that frees the doctor from the sickbay, which is an example of what the Directive was meant to prevent. Then again, if stolen technology was always part of Earth’s history, creating our tech boom, then arguably this ill-gotten twenty-ninth-century piece is actually a twentieth-century artifact.

  Braxton later illustrates one of the reasons violating the timeline is forbidden when he becomes a saboteur to get revenge on Janeway (VOY, “Relativity”). Intriguingly, he cites being stuck on Earth in “Future’s End” as part of what drove him to it, although at the end of “Future’s End,” the timeline restoration has erased this from his personal time. The episode also raises the fascinating question of whether you can arrest people for what they’re going to do, and it reveals the DTI practice of erasing people’s memories.

  The presence of the DTI across so many later episodes raises three questions. First, why doesn’t the DTI seem to have agents of its own? Has the Starfleet of the future cut staff so much that it must keep deputizing time civilians like Archer? Second, isn’t telling Archer that time travel is possible before he knows it a form of giving a primitive civilization a glimpse at advanced technology or interfering with its time?

  Third, what does it mean when the DTI doesn’t show up? One cynical answer involves our timeline—since the DTI wasn’t invented until after the original series, it doesn’t appear to Kirk, despite its complaints of his numerous violations. Another cynical answer is simply that sometimes the plot requires nonintervention. One can imagine many canon purists decrying the DTI for not preventing Nero’s destruction of Vulcan in the 2009 movie, Star Trek. Similarly, one wonders why it doesn’t stop Admiral Janeway in “Endgame” (VOY). Did she get a pass because Braxton tried to kill her and her crew? In many episodes, we could argue that a crew’s actions were “meant to be,” but these examples clearly show this not to be the case.

  Conclusions and Continuums

  [If there’s] a novel, there’s bound to be a clock in it. . . . And once you’ve got clocks [or star dates], you’ve got death and dead people, because time, as we know, runs on, and then it runs out, and dead people are situated outside of time,
whereas living people are still immersed in it.

  —Margaret Atwood14

  Star Trek pays much attention to the human concern of time’s passing. Every Kirk movie is a treatise on aging, as he sulks unless he captains. Although each film finds a way to give him command, the crew is always fighting a villain and time itself. Kirk’s death, we learn in Star Trek: Generations (1994), must be in battle in defense of an Enterprise. (Perhaps he was always a Klingon at heart.)

  In Star Trek films about time travel, the Prime Directive is always a consideration. Whether the heroes or the villains initiate time travel, the protagonists are concerned about preserving history, which is why Kirk tells his crew to investigate the whereabouts of some humpback whales (extinct in Kirk’s century) without drawing attention to themselves in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, why Picard’s crew must keep out of sight during Star Trek: First Contact, and why old Spock in the 2009 film is able to manipulate a young Kirk into keeping the existence of a new timeline secret.

  In The Voyage Home, Kirk’s habit of ignoring the possibility of timeline alteration is evident. Is this because Earth, and not just a ship, is in peril, or because they’re already facing a court martial? Although Kirk hesitates to tell Gillian of the future, he and his officers are quick to interact with locals, abduct whales from their original time period, and steal nuclear power. Kirk gloats when Spock questions his selling his antique eyeglasses: “Weren’t they a birthday present from Dr. McCoy?” “And they will be again; that’s the beauty of it.” Scotty trades future information with a glib “How do we know he didn’t invent the thing?” Even so, it’s hard to believe that McCoy’s growing a new kidney in a woman won’t alter her life and scientific textbooks (she would be featured in all of them) in a significant way.