By Chris Snellgrove | Published
After Business Out of steam, a new film has brought back the world’s greatest sci-fi franchise: Star Trek (2009), a gifted reboot that brought back the characters and good vibes of The Original Series. To appease fans worried that the new film would completely rehash the old Star Trek media, Paramount set all of its Trek reboot films in a parallel universe that was completely separate from the regular “main” universe. What many fans don’t realize, however, is that this “Kelvinverse” parallel (named after Kirk’s doomed father) wouldn’t have happened without “Similarity,” its overlooked episode. Star Trek: The Next Generation.
In that episode, Worf returns from the bat’leth tournament to find himself drifting in and out of different realities; this allows him to experience the lives of different Worfs while seeing how different things can be on the Enterprise-D. He’s married to Deanna Troi in one reality, for example, and is a ship’s first officer in another. Eventually, Worf (with the help of Data, Geordi, and all the other high officials) finds out that this all started because his shuttle accidentally weakened the barrier between different quantum realities, and he is able to fly back to his reality while closing the dimensional fissure behind him.
How Worf’s Multiverse Adventure Created the Star Trek Reboot
This makes for a fun episode (especially if you’re a Worf fan), but what does this story have to do with it? Star Trek (2009)? Back in 2008, the writer of that film, Bob Orci, did an exclusive interview with TrekMovie, and their discussion focused on how the timeline for the new film could exist without erasing the entire franchise that came before it. Orci basically gave fans a crash course in quantum mechanics, and cited the data’s comment on “Similarity” to summarize that “every possible possibility is possible” in various other realities.
That may sound basic, especially to those familiar with the various Marvel movies and TV shows spanning the Multiverse. But the MCU was less than a year old when Orci did this interview, and the Multiverse wasn’t even a twinkle in Kevin Feige’s eye yet. So, the author walked Trek fans through how the upcoming Kelvinverse movie is firmly grounded in both real-world quantum mechanics (which the interviewer helpfully referred to as the Many Worlds Theory) and the Trek lore established in “Parallels.”
The Theory of Many Yawns?
For Star Trek fans, the Many Worlds Theory is both a blessing and a curse: it allows for storytelling in different realities, alters settings like the Mirror Universe and explains how the Kelvinverse or any future reboot realities could exist alongside the Prime Universe of shows like The Original Series again The Next Generation. But (as Red Letter Media recently pointed out), this theory arguably reduces the drama of the choices our characters make. Not only is there a dimension where they make completely different choices, but the existence of countless other dimensions means that it doesn’t matter who lives and who dies because everyone lives somewhere else.
Whether you love it or hate the narrative sandbox it’s created, “Sameness” paved the way for existence Star Trek (2009), the film that saved the franchise when Trek slipped into cultural obscurity. Those reboot movies are controversial among some fans, but their success undeniably helped make Star Trek a hit again. If you’re one of the fans who hated it, that probably won’t bother anyone involved; After all, quantum mechanics tells us that there is a universe where this is your all-time favorite movie series!
