Star Trek as crosstime travel

[tmazanec1]

You know, Star Trek would have worked better if it was written as a parallel earth series, instead of an interstellar series. Most of the aliens looked like variant human races, most of the societies were takeoffs on human cultures, etc. Also, you would not have the problems of FTL travel if the Enterprise was just an orbital spaceship that could slide sidewise in time.
Would you have like ST better this way?

[stevebowers]

One episode of The Original Series makes no sense as space opera, but it does make perfect sense as a parallel Earth story.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Omega_Glory

From Wikipedia

Cloud produces a very old American Flag and ancient manuscripts from which he poorly recites the Pledge of Allegiance. When Kirk completes the Pledge of Allegiance, the Yangs are shocked. Spock surmises that the cultures may have developed along very similar lines to Earth. Kirk speculates that the Kohms were "Communists" and Yangs were "Yankees." Apparently, the Omegans had a war, similar to the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States. The conflict resulted in a war that destroyed both cultures many centuries earlier. Even Spock found the parallel between the two worlds to be "almost too close".

Spock was right. The parallels are much too close to be explained by convergent evolution; only a divergent timeline in a many-worlds universe makes any sense.

[tmazanec1]

That wasn't the only one. What about the one where the Roman Empire is still persecuting "Son worshipers"?

[Avengium]

Then a galaxy made of earth clones across the same time?

That could be another possibility.

[Rynn]

Trying to rationally explain star trek and retrofit it for realism doesn't work. It undercuts what the whole thing is about which is fantasy adventure with a space theme.

[ai_vin]

Where was a series that make the parallel worlds idea work for it: Sliders. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sliders

[tmazanec1]

I just watched the pilot "Parallels". That would have been a good series.

[sandcastles]

One episode of The Original Series makes no sense as space opera, but it does make perfect sense as a parallel Earth story.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Omega_Glory

From Wikipedia

Cloud produces a very old American Flag and ancient manuscripts from which he poorly recites the Pledge of Allegiance. When Kirk completes the Pledge of Allegiance, the Yangs are shocked. Spock surmises that the cultures may have developed along very similar lines to Earth. Kirk speculates that the Kohms were "Communists" and Yangs were "Yankees." Apparently, the Omegans had a war, similar to the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States. The conflict resulted in a war that destroyed both cultures many centuries earlier. Even Spock found the parallel between the two worlds to be "almost too close".

Spock was right. The parallels are much too close to be explained by convergent evolution; only a divergent timeline in a many-worlds universe makes any sense.

Star Trek had lots of advanced races doing silly things.  They had the Preservers taking Indians to another planet.  They might have taken some Americans and Chinese to Omega IV just to watch what happens.  No need to invoke other universes or timelines.  The presence of all those other alien races makes it easy to "rationalize" the silly things in the episodes.  Just say one of those aliens was behind the scenes manipulating events.

[stevebowers]

The Q Continuum, presumably. That particular aspect of the Star Trek universe opened a vast panoply of possibilities, few of which were properly explored. So did the time travel aspect, which could give the Federation the chance to mould the entire universe to its liking. But it would be very tricky to write stories in a universe like that.

[dsmike1980]

Before finding OA, my sci fi indulgence was dominated by Star Trek and not much else, mainly because it was on tv on a regular basis when I was growing up. I loved it but always hated the time travel episodes as they usually negated the premise of the show. We have this awesome starship that can take us anywhere in the galaxy where we can go to all these new planets, meet aliens and maybe get into a cool space battle with them, but instead of doing any of these things lets return to Earth so we can go back in time to 1900's San Fransisco to meet Mark Twain. Whenever time travel happened they usually weren't in space anymore which was the main reason I watched the show, those episodes were only salvageable if there was a starfield in the window.