Alternate Histories
“Now that the rift is a permanently open portal to other quantum realities, Starfleet considers it a gate to a whole new frontier,” explains Brad Boimler’s (Jack Quaid) log in the last act of the finale “The New Next Generation,” directed by Megan Lloyd and written by showrunner Mike McMahan. But like most things Boimler does, there’s a bit of overstatement in his observation. Quantum realities aren’t a whole new frontier, because Star Trek‘s been going to alternate worlds since the 1960s.
Most famously, the season two Original Series episode “Mirror, Mirror” sent Kirk to the Mirror Universe, where everyone was evil, as designated by goatees and exposed midriffs. The Mirror Universe has been an ongoing concern in Trek, ignored by The Next Generation, but a major pat of Deep Space Nine and the setting of two of the best Enterprise episodes.
The 2009 Star Trek movie directed by J. J. Abrams also take place in an alternate reality, dubbed the Kelvin Timeline, which branched from the main universe when the Romulan Nero destroyed the USS Kelvin in his own vengeful search for Spock. Thus, everything done by Chris Pine‘s Kirk happens independently of adventures done by the Kirk played by William Shatner and Paul Wesley.
Those are just explicit, in-cannon examples. Like the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which takes a lot of cues from Star Trek, the franchise sometimes conflates reality and time. The Temporal Cold War that drove many episodes of Enterprise and was echoed in Discovery warned about major changes to reality, that could be understood as the creation of alternate worlds. In fact, a recent Strange New Worlds episode confirmed that fact, when Kirk and La’an meet Khan Noonien Singh as a small child in the mid-2000s, his traditional backstory shifting because of fallout from the Temporal Cold War.
All of that’s a long way of saying, that multiverses aren’t new to Star Trek, even if the franchise hasn’t focused on them as much as “The New Next Generation” suggests. But is that a good thing?
Once More, With Feeling
It’s hard not to think that Captain William Boimler, Brad Boimler’s clone/twin/duplicate, speaks for most pop culture obsessives when he grouches about the multiverse. “I’m so sick of the f___ing multiverse,” he shouts in the penultimate episode, “Fissure Quest.” According to him, the multiverse is just filled with stuff we know, albeit with surface level differences.