Time is relative. For example, it took me 5 hours to see a 2 hour movie a several weeks ago. I left home to a friend’s house, we picked up someone else, went to the theater, saw the movie, and drove the converse route back which took a total of five hours. So although I thought Star Trek was a decent film, I’m not sure it was good enough for me to justify the time I spent trekking (pun intended) to go see it.

Time is an important aspect in the recent works of JJ Abrams. I’m not just citing Star Trek, but also his television shows, Lost and Fringe. The new Star Trek rises from events that have occurred in the future, creating a new timeline for the writers to create new adventures for a new generation. The film theorizes that though the past has been drastically changed, some things are still fated to occur, specifically the gathering of the Enterprise crew members. Lost, I feel, is going to follow a similar path in the last season. The show has set up a cyclical time loop that can go one of two ways. Either the final season will show how the events of the previous season caused the cycle to be broken or it will show how even though events may have been changed, the cycle is destined to continue into the next iteration. For more in depth and possibly mind numbing discussion on Lost, see Jeff Jensen’s analysis on EW. On the season finale of Fringe, it was revealed that a parallel world in a divergent timeline exists where again on the surface everything seems very similar but underneath things are quite different. For example, in this reality, the Twin Towers were never hit, a premise I first saw in Brian K. Vaughan’s Ex Machina. Haven’t been a huge fan of Fringe and its loose use of pseudo-science but there are bits and pieces that are intriguing.

With more and more science fiction entering the mainstream entertainment channels, I really hope that subject matter isn’t dumbed down too much and that new ideas will be explored, especially when dealing with adaptions of existing works (ie No Khan for a while please). I just hope that they don’t merely retread old ground and seek to challenge the viewer.