This has been driving me nuts. For most of Star Trek’s history, the Prime timeline holds together no matter what happens to it. Kirk jumps around, Picard gets stuck in time loops, Janeway rewrites entire centuries, and the universe just snaps back like it never happened. Time feels elastic but stable.
Then Nero falls through a black hole, and everything falls apart. The Kelvin event doesn’t just make a new branch going forward. The ripple hits both directions. It rewrites history that should already be set. Starfleet looks different. Vulcan feels different. Even the technology and design philosophy seem changed long before Nero was ever born. That sounds less like a branch and more like time itself got rewritten.
Once that happens, the Temporal Prime Directive starts to fall apart. It only works if time moves in one direction. You can “fix” something when there’s a clear before and after. But if the ripple goes both ways, there is no original timeline to go back to. The moment the Kelvin universe forms, the concept of Prime reality stops being a single point.
And that’s before you even touch the Mirror Universe, which is not a branch at all. It has been running beside the Prime since the beginning. So now we have at least three full continuums: Prime, Mirror, and Kelvin. But that’s not the end of it. The Star Trek Online timeline exists as an extension of Prime, playing out events after Nemesis and even connecting to the Temporal Cold War. The licensed novels follow yet another line, continuing after Destiny and Coda, where the multiverse literally starts to collapse under the weight of too many versions.
So what is the Federation even supposed to do with the Temporal Prime Directive at this point? Which universe counts as the real one? Do you merge them? Do you pick one and call it Prime? Or do you admit that every version is its own living reality with its own moral weight?
Maybe the point isn’t fixing anything anymore. Maybe the Temporal Prime Directive is just damage control. Once time starts rewriting itself both ways and spawning whole new continuums like STO or the book universe, there’s no putting it back together. The best you can do is keep the pieces from smashing into each other and hope reality doesn’t collapse under the strain.
Picard and Strange New Worlds muddle things a bit as well. The date and details of the Eugenics Wars get pushed back a few decades, but time itself seems to always make sure the events happen.
Enterprise at a certain point just stopped engaging with the mechanics of the Temporal Cold War, but small changes to timelines were apparently are hard to detect and take a while to ripple out. The Temporal Prime Directive seemed to be less about making sure things played out exactly the same, and more concerned about the arc of history. A few time loops and predestination paradoxes weren’t enough to break history.
Yesterday’s Enterprise and Star Trek (2009) show that history eventually can hit a breaking point. The Enterprise-C going missing at a crucial moment or Vulcan exploding are hard to correct for.
As for the aesthetics of the Kelvin prologue, I’d just chalk that up to the presentation of the film rather than time rippling out in both ways.