Star Trek Finally Explains Its Time Travel Rules

“So, you have questions about time travel?” asks Starfleet science officer Dr. Erin MacDonald in the fourth episode of Star Trek: Prodigy‘s second season. “You’ve come to the right place.” Without question, time travel has long been a major part of the Star Trek. franchise. Kirk, Picard, and everyone else have bounced back and forward […]

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“So, you have questions about time travel?” asks Starfleet science officer Dr. Erin MacDonald in the fourth episode of Star Trek: Prodigy‘s second season. “You’ve come to the right place.”

Without question, time travel has long been a major part of the Star Trek. franchise. Kirk, Picard, and everyone else have bounced back and forward in time, whether to save the whales, hang out with Sarah Silverman, escape an evil AI, or save a young Khan.

But while these stories generally turn out to be a lot of fun, they’re not always clear. Like most big science fiction franchise, Trek often fudges the specifics of its time travel adventures, putting cool story ahead of scientific precision.

Fortunately, when Prodigy used real-life astrophysicist and aerospace engineer Erin Macdonald in an instructional video, it laid down Trek‘s time travel rules in detail, for the first time.

The Great, Collapsing Chain

“The simplest way to think of time travel is to think of events as a series of dominoes,” explains Macdonald. His statement is followed by images of dominoes falling, suggesting that one event leads to another. If one event changes, it’s like removing a domino, so that the rest of the line does not fall.

Well, more specifically, MacDonald says “big event,” which, again, makes sense. Strict adherence to the butterfly paradox, in which something as small as a butterfly flapping its wings can have major consequences, would prevent any time travel story.

Within the context of Prodigy, the big event is Chakotay launching the Protostar, which has massive consequences for the main cast and the civil war on Solum. Other major events in Trek time travel stories include Zephram Cochrane’s flight in First Contact, the Bell Riots in Deep Space Nine, and the various events of the Temporal Cold War on Enterprise.

But on the surface, that’s not really consistent with stories we’ve seen in the past. Take one of the first, and still the best, Trek time travel story of all time, “City on the Edge of Forever” from The Original Series. When Spock declares that “Edith Keeler must die,” its not because he’s jealous that Kirk has fallen for Joan Collins. It’s because her surviving a car accident that should have killed her would result in the Nazis getting the atomic bomb before America.

Somehow, according to “City on the Edge of Forever,” a social worker living is a major event. How does that make sense? To get that answer, we need to consult a higher power. We need a Traveler.

Travels With Wesley Crusher

Perhaps the most delightful part of Prodigy‘s second season is the arrival of Wesley Crusher, now a full-fledged Traveler. Although Wesley still has his sweater-heavy fashion sense and boundless enthusiasm, he also has a greater understanding of time and space. In other words, he’s essentially the Doctor (from Doctor Who, not Robert Picardo). As such, he’s the perfect person to finally give some structure to the franchise’s time travel mechanics.

Give or take an unnecessary cameo in Picard season two or a silent shot at the wedding of Troi and Riker in Star Trek: Nemesis, Wesley last appeared in the season seven The Next Generation episode “Journey’s End.” There, Wes drops out of Starfleet to study under a mysterious being called the Traveler, who appreciates Crusher’s genius and wants to teach him the secrets of time and space.

By the time Wes reappears in Prodigy, he has an omniscience that fits his go-getter personality. In between aggravating the Prodigy kids and going off on tangents, Crusher stops long enough to explain the way time travel works. More specifically, Wesley teaches the kids about alternate reality, explaining that there are “tons” of different universes in existence.

“Quantum timelines, alternate timelines, planes of existence—take your pick, I’ve been to all of them,” he enthuses. To illustrate his point, Wes pulls up a graphic that looks a lot like the image that the Ancient One showed Hulk in Avengers: Endgame. There’s a straight line in the middle, with branching lines coming off of it. According to this image, removing the domino by erasing a major event doesn’t really block the flow of time. Inste