We’re arguing about how time travel works in a fictional universe. The writers can make time travel work however they want. The writers of the new Star Trek movies are well on record saying they didn’t replace the Prime Timeline.

My final point: The Supernova-Powered Red Matter Black Hole is possibly closer to a quantum fissure than the thousand other ways people travel in time, possibly putting people in alternate quantum realities. It’s not like we would know any better because any time travel story is affected by what character the audience is meant to follow. It’s possible that my Star Trek 4 theory happens every time someone jumps in time, we just don’t stick with the existing timeline but jump with them into the new one. People aren’t ever saving their timeline, they just find themselves in the timelines they fixed by their own actions.

To keep it out of theory and into canon, “In A Mirror Darkly” shows that the Defiant from Tholian Web ends up in the past and in an alternate reality.

And with that, I leave the thread.