Star Trek part 4:  Spock, know thyself

In the new 2009 move Star Trek, Spock is thrown back from a point beyond the end of all Star Trek stories to date to the beginning of his own career one hundred twenty-nine years earlier.  Eventually he meets himself, that is, the older Spock from the future of the original history meets the younger Spock fresh from Star Fleet Academy in the new history.

Older Spock tells the young cadet Kirk that he must not under any circumstances reveal to the younger Spock that the older Spock sent him to take command of the ship.  He implies in that conversation that there might be severe temporal problems from such a meeting.  Yet at the end of the film when the younger Spock mistakes the back of the grey-haired Vulcan for his own father, the older Spock introduces himself and says that there are too few Vulcans in the universe for them to avoid each other, and that his presence makes it possible for Spock to be in two places at once.  Which is the truth?  Are there serious repercussions arising from the time traveler meeting his younger self, or is it a completely unimportant event?

The answer lies between those extremes.  As noted in our discussion of temporal doppelgangers a few weeks ago, such a meeting will change the traveler, altering the history and the identity of his younger self in unpredictable ways and possibly endangering time by making it more difficult for that history to stabilize from a sawtooth snap to an N-jump.  The younger Spock might take a course of action that does not bring him to that moment of traveling back to become the older Spock, and in that case the older Spock would never have arrived to meet the younger Spock and so change his life.

In this case, though, their meeting is a dwarf so small in the face of the giant changes which the older Spock has already, directly and indirectly, caused in his younger self.  Because of what the older Spock did in the future, the younger Spock saw his planet vaporized, watched his mother fall to her death from the grip of safety at the last instant, was given command of his own ship and forced to relinquish that command to someone he neither liked nor trusted, piloted a ship a century ahead of the best he might ever have seen, and fought in a dread battle against a foe with superior weaponry.  This Spock has been changed by that Spock.  Further, he had already deduced that that Spock was here somewhere, and he was in some way responsible for much of what had happened.  Certainly eventually Kirk will tell him the rest, as their relationship develops.  It is not as if not meeting will shield the younger Spock from change.

It will still be a factor in the total picture, of course.  For history to be preserved, this younger Spock must eventually fail to save Romulus and be caught in the black hole he creates, in just the right way to be sent back to the same point in history (and to bring Nero back with him).  He must in his turn meet his younger self--who will be more like the self he remembers having been, because he will have lived in the same or very similar version of events.  That, too, will be a telling moment, telling whether that new younger Spock will be impacted in the same way by his older self, and ultimately take the same steps.  But then, it is the logical choice, and so we have every hope that Spock, of any iteration, will make it.

All of which requires a summary, which we will provide next time.