10 ways Kelvin Star Trek is better than Prime, and 5 ways it’s Worse

Star Trek (2009) Set Photo Enterprise Bridge

09: Better: A New Sandbox

As we’ve previously touched on, when J.J Abrams and his team designed the world for the Kelvin Timeline they did so with a purpose, to bring Star Trek back to the big screen with new options, new stories and a new cast while preserving everything fans know and love about the series.

While the changes still caused some fan dissension the plan to build a new sandbox to play in with some of our favourite characters was a sound one and was well executed. Rather than being limited as most prequels or series set during established timelines are Star Trek (2009) and it’s sequels aren’t beholden to anyone’s preconceived ideas, stories or notions of what will happen next.

As a result the writers have near limitless freedom to move forward without risking either future events or painting themselves into a corner they then need to escape from before another established event happens. Since this is a common problem with prequels it’s all the more impressive that they were able to manipulate the story to allow such freedom.

The new sandbox is made all the better by the fact that it’s already an established system within the Star Trek universe where characters have crossed over with their counterparts in an alternate but parallel reality since 1967’s Mirror, Mirror when a transporter accident introduced us to the concept.

We have also returned to the Mirror universe in Star Trek Deep Space Nine, Star Trek Enterprise, Star Trek Discovery and countless books. The Kelvin timeline is exactly the same type of universe, just a much more recent version.

Because this system gives the writers the freedom to create new things and the characters a chance to explore alternate destinies without causing any harm to the established canon of the franchise we rank the new sandbox as Better for the Kelvin timeline.