A few months ago, Star Trek: Discovery truly made a leap into the unknown. Where are Captain Lorca, Burnham, and the crew now? When are they? We don’t know! This Sunday the show returns with answers to these questions, but until that particular veil is lifted, I thought we should reminisce about the 8 very best times that Star Trek, in its glorious 50+ year history, has surprised us by leaping into intriguing alternate realities.
8. The Year of Hell
Early on in Star Trek: Voyager‘s fourth season, the crew meets the Krenim, a species who have managed to weaponize time travel (a quiet but long-standing open question in the Trek universe, since time travel is often utilized across species and shows). The Krenim are bopping around that part of the Delta Quadrant erasing entire planets and species that have prevented them from expanding into a formidable star empire and over the course of the year to come, Voyager watches as the Krenim go from a low-tech planet-state to a merciless expansive threat to the entire quadrant. Voyager eventually becomes their enemy and Janeway and company spend the year limping and hiding and deteriorating in a very dramatic if-we-don’t-profess-our-love-now-then-when? apocalyptic manner. The year of hell culminates in a decisive moment where Janeway kicks everyone off the ship and plunges Voyager into the Krenim’s TimeDeathStarThing, dying like a bad-ass. Everything gets reset to the beginning of the year, the Krenim are quelled, and Voyager now gets to enjoy a much better year waiting for the Hirogen plotline to please just end, finding massively destructive Omega particles, giving birth to their own clones on a Demon-class planet, watching their long-dead crewmates be remembered as genocidal maniacs…um…
Hm.
Which one was the Year of Hell, again?
Honorable mention: Admiral Janeway New Game+-ing the series finale so she can get a 101% completion rate. (Interesting in a “where is this even going next” way but “Year of Hell” isn’t as selfish and has more fun with its overwrought nature.)
Honorable honorable mention: Grizzled Kim fights Captain Geordi so they can all get their friends back (except Geordi). (“Year of Hell” isn’t as lonely.)
7. Yesterday’s Enterprise
Exploration? The Enterprise is a warship!
These are heartbreaking words to hear from Captain Picard. Not because he’s evil in this alternate timeline, but because in this one war-weary moment, the utter wrongness of his statement sharply defines the appeal of Star Trek, as well as Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s mission as a continuation of that ideal. Humanity is meant to explore for the sake of exploration; to encounter the new and greet it with joy and wonder. The Enterprise is not a warship and if you think that then something is very wrong. Either with you or with reality itself. (In this case, the episode says, the error lay in reality itself.)
Part of the brilliance of “Yesterday’s Enterprise” is in how rapidly it shifts into its alternate timeline. A turn of the head and everything’s different; a life-altering change happening so quickly that you can’t anticipate it, you can only mourn what you’ve lost.
So if this such an effective use of alternate realities, why is it so low on the list? Mostly because a reality where the Federation is at war with the Klingons isn’t all that interesting. (Which also might be why Star Trek: Discovery has literally hopped away from it for the moment.)
Honorable mention: That time Riker woke up in the future and Worf was still there and his wife was a hologram and his trombone was a hologram and everything was a hologram.
6. The Kelvin Timeline
If the new Star Trek movies have taught us anything, it’s that the original series crew of the Enterprise is damned charming regardless of how shiny or illogical their timeline gets.
Otherwise this timeline just kind of keeps…avoiding…its implications. (Vulcan is gone. How do you not follow that up in-depth?) And that’s only going to be interesting up to a certain point.
5. THE BORG IS EVERYWHERE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-D-CowBL-s
Hahahahahahahahahaha Riker.
The implication that Riker’s beard gets OUt oF COnTrOL if the Federation dies is just…the perfect touch.
Honorable mention: All those realities where the crew has to die unless they succeed in meeting Kelsey Grammer.
Honorable honorable mention: That split-second in First Contact when we got to see what a Borgified Earth looks like and it is so terrifying that Deanna f’s off to a backwoods bar in Montana.
4. The Riker-verse
Okay so this isn’t actually an alternate timeline, or even real in a fictional sense, but the Discovery had to go somewhere and Jonathan Frakes directed the first episode back that reveals where they’ve gone, so clearly they have traveled to the universe where Riker accepted Q’s offer and retroactively became God. And everyone in this universe has a beard.
I would watch that. I mean…I’m still paying for CBS All Access (gnugh) so I will watch that. And I will call it the Riker-verse.
3. All Good Things (The Future)
It’s just nice to see how everyone ends up, you know? Not in an overly dramatic way (HERE LIES CHAKOTAY), but with a realism that is respectful to the growth that these characters have gone through in the seven years we’ve watched them. The somewhat mundane future in “All Good Things” also heightens the series as a whole, letting viewers know that the adventures they’ve been watching really have been an exceptional era in the legacy of the Enterprise and the future history of the Federation. (The episode also gets bonus points for somehow demonstrating that Q really truly loves Picard–in his way–and is becoming a better being for it.)
This future timeline gets subverted, but you’re not entirely relieved that it does, and this aspect of the episode works splendidly towards the series’ summation; in pondering the possible changes to the future you’ve seen, you ultimately come to realize, as the characters themselves do, that “the future” is simply a reminder to live in the present.
And so, Picard sits down at the staff poker game for the very first time…
Honorable mention: The Inner Light “timeline” that turned out not to be an alternate timeline but a reliving of events that had occurred long ago.
2. The Mirror Universe
The first alternate timeline in Trek. Perhaps the best. (Perhaps also where Discovery is headed.) Over the decades, in Star Trek, Deep Space Nine, and Enterprise, the Mirror Universe has become a grueling, if entertaining, demonstration of how fearful aggression can smother humanity’s potential for centuries, both through imperialism and enslavement.
Honorable mention: Still the Mirror Universe, but that one part where Vic Fontaine is real.
1. Beverly’s Warp Bubble
You forgot about this, didn’t you?
Of course you did. You’re only real until you pass beyond the boundaries of the universe.
::sigh:: I know how you feel, Beverly.
I know how you feel.
Chris Lough is so glad Star Trek is back.
What about the timeline where Edith lives and the Nazis win?
“If there’s nothing wrong with me, maybe there’s something wrong with the universe.”
– Beverly Crusher
Those, my friends, are words to live by…
Yesterday’s Enterprise, hands down.
Great list. I’m glad we’re getting a good amount of Star Trek content on Tor. We all need it.
Side note, the way the Krenim use time as a weapon always struck me as the way the Time War should have been handled in Dr Who instead of the literal war we were given in Day of the Doctor. Oh well, c’est la vie.
My assumption has been that Discovery has found itself in a timeline where Klingons have smooth heads (for now) and are in more of a Cold War with the Federation than an all-out war. Also, this timeline is a bit less advanced, technologically, and nobody has holographic communication.
I’m really glad Star Trek is back too. I don’t know why they had to change the name to “The Orville” but its a lot funnier now too.
@3
Another vote for Yesterday’s Enterprise. Captain Rachel Garrett was the real deal. And they killed her off. Should have been a series all on its own with the Enterprise C.
Hot take. STD was always in the Mirror Universe. It would explain blatant canon errors.
Arguably the most poignant alternate reality would be in Deep Space Nine’s “The Visitor” when we see how life would have unfolded for Jake Sisko if his father had in died in that accident on the Defiant when he was 18 years old.
Well, a war with Klingons might not be interesting in and of itself, but I think “Yesterday’s Enterprise” handled it better than Discovery has so far. For one, we don’t actually see the Klingons, only their ships. That’s a plus. And I’m fascinated by Picard and Riker’s strained relationship—they REALLY don’t like each other. That’s something I wish had happened more often in the Prime Universe.
6, zing!
But anyway, can we count the “fake” reality where Riker got stuck on a Holodeck? I’m not sure. I guess as an honorable mention it works.
However, what about….the negative universe? Or maybe the Trek universe with Kzin?
@9: “The Visitor” is one of those episodes I was “meh” about when it first aired, but I just rewatched it and bawled like a baby. The love between the two of them is so powerful and pure that it’s utterly amazing to witness.
“Time’s up.”
Such a lame line, but Kate delivered it so bad-assedly that it’s still my favorite line of hers after “I don’t compromise with Borg.”
That’s a great list. When I think of Crusher reasoning herself out of the warp bubble universe, I wish for an alternate reality where she’s the Enterprise science officer, and Pulaski runs sickbay. And, of course, she has a teenage daughter called Leslie, the way it was meant to be.
@8/ragnarredbeard: Good idea, that would give us a whole new set of canon errors to talk about.
@11/LordVorless: My favourite TAS universe is the one you didn’t mention, where magic is real and the crew ends up drinking beer with a faun. But the only one that’s a proper alternate history is the one where Spock died as a child, and the Enterprise’s first officer is an Andorian.
@12 Chalk that up also to the incredible on-screen chemistry between Avery Brooks and Cirroc Lofton. Starting right with “The Emissary, ” I totally “bought” their characters as father and son.
@15: I know that they actually were that close in real life, that Cirroc was basically Avery’s adopted son during the series, and hung out with the Brooks family all the time.
@15 Russell H – and Tony Todd was great as adult Jake as well.
@14: When you mentioned Crusher having a daughter named Leslie, for some reason I immediately thought of Leslie Knope. And now I really want to see a Star Trek version of Leslie Knope.
14, yeah, I don’t think that first episode counts as an “alternate” universe (any more than the one with the Greek Gods would have), but the one with a replacement for Spock, I don’t recall if it changed anything else.
Sure are a lot here though.
Year of hell was great I would of loved for the plan that it was going to be a whole season had planned out as it could of been Voyagers best season
So I might be the only person on the planet who actually liked Enterprise… but the Mirror Universe episode where they actually CHANGED THE INTRO to show humanity tearing the rest of the quadrant to shreds was kinda awesome, just in how utterly shocking it was to see.
@19, that was the animated episode Yesteryear, a beautiful episode. I don’t think it changed anything else(unless it was the sehlat’s death? Can’t recall) but it was a bit odd that somehow Spock had not been there to save himself because he was somewhere else observing another time through the Guardian and then could just go back and do it. Still, a lovely episode.
Some oddities in STNG. The alternative Tasha survives and gives birth to her Romulan daughter so she can appear as the villain in a later episode. But she’s an alternative Tasha – so did the one from this universe even exist? Does she have two places of death, one on that scary planet, one on Romulus? In the same universe?
@22/sbursztynski: The way I understand it, when the Enterprise-C went back through the rift, the alternate reality was replaced by the one we know. So the Tasha from this universe existed and died on Vagra Two, and twenty years earlier, the other Tasha lived on Romulus for five years and died there.
I agree with @6. I too am really glad Star Trek is back. Even with a funky name like “The orville”, it still keeps up the traditions.
My favorite alternative realities are (in no particular order) : The Kelvin timeline, some of the realities Worf encounters in the episode Parallels, the original timeline of The Visitor and the timeline where the crew of The Defiant stays on Gaia.
The strands of time…
http://www.angelfire.com/ut/branton/timelines.html