-I liked how Scotty was in Starfleet purgatory for losing "Admiral Archer's prize Beagle". Was this Porthos from Enterprise, in which case the poor critter must have been incredibly old, or perhaps one of his descendants?
Well the real funny thing is that Archer would be like 130 or so when the Enterprise launched. So just go with it and give them a bit of wiggle room
-I didn't catch his name in the credits, but I could have sworn one of the Vulcan scientists preparing Old Spock for his doomed-to-failure mission was Tuvok (Tim Russ) from Voyager.
That would be super fucking cool. I noticed a black Vulcan. Whether it was Tuvok or not, I am going to believe it was. A better question: Did Tuvok's ancestors survive in the new universe? I believe the same about that as I do Worf...
-The have indeed freed themsleves from the "established" chronology, arguably by stomping the shit out of it, wiping their butts with it, and skull-fucking its head. In particular, the jerking with Klingon history better not cost us Worf, one of my favorites from TNG. If so, I will be, like him, NOT a merry man:
No, the opposite. "Canon" as we know it is untouched, to a degree. Here's all that's happened new to the universe we all know:
Without getting into the story of the Countdown comic so as to not spoil it for those who haven't read it, the universe that we have known from the 60's on is untouched. Well, the only difference is that Romulus is now gone, and Spock vanished through a wormhole stopping it from killing any other planets. Everything that happened before that hasn't changed. Worf is still around, Klingons are Klingons, etc.
But this movie followed Spock through the wormhole and into an alternate universe. As far as we've seen, the "future" (TNG, DS9, etc) hasn't happened yet in that universe (it hasn't been shown). And new alternate adventures are facing the NCC-1701.
So, do you REALLY think, if they ever get around to taking this alternate universe far enough forward to get to the TNG characters, that they would make a story WITHOUT freaking Worf, one of the most popular characters in Trek ever? Think about it.
-Nero is still a stupid name for that character; it's like they pulled the name of a famous Roman villain at random out of their asses. Someone more famously associated with Roman grudgeholding, like Cato or Scipio Aemilianus, would have been a more appropriate namesake.
Meh, Nero is a Romulan name... Otherwise why would there be a Romulan named Nero?
Seriously though, you have a race of beings named after Romulus and Remus, from an ancient Earth legend. That makes sense, but one of them named Nero is a crazy thing??
-I hope Vulcan isn't irrevocably wiped out. They raised Spock from the dead; surely they can bring back his planet, too. In any case, I am eager for the surely-inevitable series of sequels, so this flick has surely done its job. Indeed, my students, whom I'm accustomed to see giving me me blank looks when I reference Trek, are all over this, so they seem to have successfully rebooted the franchise. But I'm still pissed at what they did to the chronology. And just for the record, Picard over Kirk to the bitter fucking end, goddammit.
Well again, they didn't do anything to the chronology in reality. The only thing they added to the chronology that we know is the destruction of Romulus in post-Nemesis TNG time, and Spock vanishing through the singularity. Everything else is in an alternate timeline. Like the TNG Episode Parallels where Worf flickers around through a bunch of alternate realities (a super fucking cool episode and one that gave the writers the idea for this movie timeline)... We are seeing the voyages of the NCC-1701 in one of those alternate realities. All the 60s episodes still happened in the one we know so well.
But the real reality is that Paramount decided to reboot the franchise a la Batman, and came to Abrams and said "Would you like to be the one in charge of it?" And thank God for that, because if he said no, we could have had Michael Bay or something rewriting everything we know, making Scotty a Rastafarian, etc. without even bothering to make it in an alternate timeline. But Paramount was going to reboot it regardless, and I'm glad I get to see an alternate reality of Kirk & Co. that are so good at playing Kirk & Co. without worrying about canon - because the canon we know is not this reality. But, as we've seen, there are still lots of similarities because they want it to remain familiar to us as well. They've having their cellular peptide cake and eating it
Oh, and if there's any civilization that can recover with a remnant and rebuild, I'm willing to believe it is Vulcans.