Regrets and the Multiverse

Reflections on TNG "Parallels" and "Pegasus"

This week, the pair of Next Generation that accompanied my rowing were two episodes that I already strangely thought of as a pair: “Parallels,” in which Worf finds himself constantly shifting between quantum realities, and “Pegasus,” in which Riker confronts a former commanding officer who he now realizes took advantage of his naviety. Aside from the fact that the two episodes aired consecutively, the connection for me goes back to my time at The Daystrom Institute, where I found myself constantly arguing about alternate timelines and universes. During a particularly tense debate, I took it upon myself to rewatch “Parallels,” which is a locus classicus for multiverse theories in Star Trek.

I then noticed that the next episode was tied to another of my preoccupations in Star Trek debates—namely, Enterprise, whose finale had bizarrely been folded into a holodeck adventure that supposedly took place during the commercial breaks of “Pegasus.” The gesture was obviously intended to cement Enterprise’s place in the Prime Universe, by showing that Riker drew on Captain Archer’s adventures when thinking through a difficult moral quandary. But leaving aside the fact that both Riker and Troi are repeatedly aging and de-aging within the same few days, they didn’t do a very good job of convincing the viewers that it was woven into the events of the episode (which is not a very familiar one in any case)—for instance, they didn’t even bother to style Troi’s hair the way it had been in the original episode. Not great, guys!

Other than that coincidence, the only compelling reason to discuss these episodes together is that both involve the theme of regret. That’s easy to miss in “Parallels,” because our point-of-view character, Worf, is not directly experiencing regret. But everyone around him is—and increasingly so. As Worf shifts realities, the differences are initially small. For instance, a painting Data gave him for his birthday changes position. The outcome of the bat’leth tournament changes. But things quickly snowball as he realizes that he has entered a series of realities in which he and Counselor Troi—a close friend who has helped him with parenting duties—are romantically involved. The appearance of “our” Worf, who is very much just friends with her, represents the loss of that universe’s Troi’s husband. Later in the episode, an alternate Geordi dies because of Worf’s confusion after a shift plops him in the middle of a battle. And most famously, an alternate version of Riker (pictured above) from a universe where the Borg have overrun the Federation refuses to go along with the plan to put everything back in its right place—his universe is too intolerable to return to.

The status of “Parallels” as the episode that launched a thousand fan theories—and hence fans’ tendency to watch the episode primarily as a source of information about the structure of the Star Trek universe—also obscures this theme. (I pause here to say that many fans who believe this episode “reveals” the existence of a multiverse are wrong, because Spock casually mentions the idea in TOS “The Tholian Web.”) Many an eager fan theorist has independently discovered the idea that apparent continuity glitches could be resolved if we simply posited that the offending events took place in a parallel universe. These moves always weirdly frustrated me, as did the related trope of claiming that time travel forks accounted for apparent discrepancies. I always challenged my colleagues to account for a specific continuity problem with a specific time travel event, and virtually no one even attempted to do so. Their “theory” was basically trying to find an in-universe pretext not to worry about it—while I thought that if we were going to play this weird came of continuity diagnosis, we should at least stay committed to the bit. As with my approach in the Jesus fan community I grew up in, I was taking the claim of allegiance to “canon” more seriously than anyone around me. (In fact, after rewatching, I even wonder if the episode represents strong evidence that all those quantum possibilities are actualized in any strong sense, or if Worf’s anomaly is creating an effect that doesn’t usually occur…. Maybe it’s time to go back to Daystrom for a proper fan theory.)

But their very source text undermines their hand-waviness, because it very much does matter to everyone involved that everyone wind up in the right universe. Alternate Troi doesn’t just want any old Worf-shaped dude, she wants her Worf, the Worf she built a life with. The Borg-beset Riker is the exception that proves the rule—only when their universe has become unlivable does anyone suggest shifting realities. What seems like such an easy solution to fan theorists is not acceptable to the people ostensibly living through the experience. And I would add that the same goes for the theories that time travel always creates a “fork”—the drama of those stories, which are often the most beloved in Star Trek, stems from our heroes’ conviction that they have damaged, and must restore, their timeline, not some weird quantum copy that will be “close enough.” The same holds for “our” Worf, who clearly does not view any other quantum reality as acceptable. To the extent that his experience affects him, it is by making him aware that a different kind of relationship with Troi is possible—and (much as the viewer may regret this choice on the writers’ part) to pursue that in his universe, with his Troi.

The thoughts prompted by “Pegasus” were about the way that the Star Trek writers in the pre-serialization days used repeated themes and plot echoes to introduce some kind of structure into the series. The clearest example of this is Next Generation, which had no overarching plot that needed to “end,” but created some sense of necessity to its finale through a bookend effect—namely, by returning to the events of the premier. I suspect that the idea of bookends was floating around the writers’ room more broadly, because “Pegasus” seemed to me to echo the season 1 episode “The Battle.” There Picard learns that the ship he previously commanded, the Stargazer, has been recovered by a Ferengi. Not only is the timeframe of the background events similar—11 years prior in “The Battle” and 12 years prior in “Pegasus”—but both revolve around unintentional harm, as Picard learns that he killed the Ferengi’s son and Riker realizes that his old commander was engaged in illegal weapons research.

The notion that they were in their last season may have also inspired a connection to the best (only good?) Original Series season 3 episode “The Enterprise Incident.” Not only do we have the obvious connection with the Romulan cloaking device—which in both cases appears to be an easily portable piece of equipment, somewhat surprisingly—but there are also themes of questionable command decisions (Kirk’s apparently crazy order to enter the Neutral Zone) and divided loyalties (Spock’s flirtation with the Romulan commander). In “The Enterprise Incident,” of course, both are revealed to be elaborate ruses, while they are all too real in “Pegasus.”

At several points in “Pegasus,” the inciting incident, where the crew rebels against the captain’s orders and a young Ensign Riker takes his side, on the titular ship is called a mutiny—which everyone agrees to be unthinkable. I naturally thought of Discovery here, because its final episode requires a “good” mutiny to counteract Burnham’s earlier “bad” mutiny. It also involves using a super-advanced technology to tunnel within the Klingon homeworld, much as the Enterprise in “Pegasus” uses the phased cloaking device (just this once, we promise!) to escape from inside the asteroid where the USS Pegasus is marooned. If those echoes are intentional, it may also provide evidence of an intertext with the Enterprise finale—and come to think of it, the premier of Enterprise saw Captain Archer rebelling against his overlords to undertake a mission that “shouldn’t” be taking place yet, using a technology that is “too advanced” according to previous lore, involving Klingons that “look wrong.” And didn’t Enterprise visit the Mirror Universe at length just prior to its finale, just as Discovery does? I argue in Late Star Trek that Discovery could almost serve as a season 5 for Enterprise, but perhaps the homage is deeper, going down to the structure of the season itself….

This is where my Daystrom colleagues would probably suggest that I am “reading too much into it,” and I certainly wouldn’t make any strong claims that what I’m uncovering is intentional. But the inclusion of all of these stories in a “canon” does invite us to read them together, and the fact that most writers and producers will have been steeped in the existing material makes it likely that parallels will occur—whether as intentional homages or unconscious echoes. One may reach a point of diminishing returns on such thematic and structural parallels, but to my mind, they are more varied and interesting than the various problems that attract the most fan theories. English major Trek fans of the world, unite!