Author: Chris Snelgrove Published
back enterprise After that flop, a new movie reinvigorates the world’s greatest sci-fi franchise: star trek (2009), a stylish reboot that brings back the characters and impeccable atmosphere original series. To appease fans’ concerns that the new films would be a complete rehash of old Star Trek media, Paramount is setting all of the Star Trek reboot films in a completely different parallel universe than the familiar “original” universe. What most fans don’t realize, however, is that this alternate “Kelvin Universe” (named after Kirk’s father’s doomed starship) wouldn’t have been possible without the oft-overlooked episode “In Parallel.” Star Trek: The Next Generation.
In that episode, Wolfe returns from a fighting tournament only to find himself in and out of different realities. This allowed him to experience life as a different Wolf while also seeing how different things were on Enterprise-D. For example, he is married to Deanna Troy in one reality and is the ship’s first mate in another. Eventually, Wolfe (with the help of Data, Jody, and other senior officers) discovered that it all started because his shuttle accidentally weakened the barrier between different quantum realities, and he was able to fly back to his own reality while closing the dimensional rift behind him.
How Wolff’s multiverse adventures created the Star Trek reboot
It’s an interesting plot (especially if you’re a Wolf fan), but what does this story have to do with star trek (2009)? Back in 2008, the film’s co-writer Bob Orci gave an exclusive interview to TrekMovie, and their conversation focused on how the new film’s timeline could exist without erasing all of the previous series’ stories. Orci basically gave fans a crash course in quantum mechanics, quoting Data’s comments in “Parallels” to conclude that “all possibilities that can happen do happen” in various other realities.
This may sound basic, especially to those familiar with Marvel’s various movies and TV shows involving the multiverse. But when Ozzie gave this interview, the MCU was less than a year old, and the multiverse wasn’t even a gleam in Kevin Feige’s eyes yet. So the author talks to Star Trek fans about how the upcoming Kelvin Universe movie is deeply rooted in real-world quantum mechanics (the interviewer helpfully pointed out that this is called the “many worlds theory”) and the “parallel” lore established in Star Trek.
Many yawn theories?
For Star Trek fans, the many-worlds theory is both a blessing and a curse: it allows stories to be told in alternate realities, contextualizing settings like the Mirror Universe, and explaining how the Kelvin Universe and any future reboot realities can exist alongside the main universe of shows like this one original series and next generation. But (as Red Letter Media recently pointed out ), this theory arguably diminishes the drama of the choices our characters make. Not only is there one dimension where they make completely different choices, but there are countless other dimensions that exist, meaning it doesn’t matter who lives and who dies, because everyone is alive somewhere else.
Whether you love or hate the narrative sandbox it created, Parallels paved the way for its existence. star trek (2009), the film that saved Star Trek when the series fell into cultural obscurity. These reboot films were controversial among some fans, but there’s no denying that their success helped Star Trek become a mainstream hit once again. If you’re one of the fans who hates it, that probably won’t bother anyone involved; after all, quantum mechanics tells us that there is a universe for your favorite movie series of all time!
