Sorry if this was asked before When the correct enterprise realizes they have the wrong quantum signature worf they make contact with the ship that has the correct shuttle. When talking to the riker of that ship there is a worf behind him. I don't recall seeing anything about returning that worf back to his correct quantum ship. And troi says goodbye to "our" worf and she thinks (my assumption) that she won't have a husband when this is done. Shouldn't they have tried to get both worfs back to the correct place? Did I miss something? Thanks
The theory is that when the Worf of our universe returned to this reality that every other Worf would return to its proper universe automatically. It's not surprising that Troi believed otherwise, as she was always depicted as something of an idiot.
I always assumed that when our Worf entered any given universe, he only "temporarily" replaced the Worf that was supposed to be there, and that universe's Worf automatically returned to his proper place when ours left it. Meaning: At any given time, there are only two Worfs that are in universes not their own: ours, and the Worf of the universe he's currently in. (The reason I think this is: our Worf is 'in flux' due to his unstable genetic makeup - due to his travel through the anomaly - and that's why he's constantly universe-hopping. The other Worfs don't have this problem and thus would be automatically returned home after our Worf displaced them.) Then again, there's that weird scene towards the end with the shuttlecraft with a dozen or more Worfs in it. I can't explain that bit.
^ That scene was awesome! The only thing missin' was a blue-uniformed Worf. And it would have been cool to work a DS9 style uniform in there, too.
I've always thought of that as a sort of space-time junction point where Worf temporarily intersects with versions of himself from other quantum realities before the fissure is closed and each Worf returns to where he's supposed to be.
^ But our Worf is the only one making the shuttle trip. He should have been the only one in that scene. It's not like there were dozens of Worfs who all had to make shuttle runs at the same time - just ours.
^ Our Worf had different "level" trophies in all the realities he was in. I always assumed many or all Worfs had just returned from the tournament. That was probably the only real parallel.
But as far as we know, only one Worf - ours - flew his shuttlecraft through the anomaly, thus causing this whole kerfuffle.
Maybe only one Worf needed to fly through the anomaly, but I got the impression many Worfs were in shuttles, returning from the tourney.
The shuttle trip also took him back in time to his return from the tournament. Obviously more than one Worf went to the tournament - that was established in the episode's alternate realities. So, Worf Prime gets the shuttle, he goes through the anomaly, and intersects with every other Worf returnin' from the tournament before the anomaly shuts down.
But the tournament was days ago, wasn't it? Or are you suggesting that the tournament took place at different times in different realities? (In an infinite multiverse, though, I'm sure it did.)
I love this episode, it's a great episode, but the idea of infinite realities.has always been a foolish one to me, and I'm a Larry Niven fan (All the Myriad Ways). You'd need a new universe created, not just for every choice or outcome in every sentient person's life, but for every single physical event in the universe that could have gone another way, up to and including every single subatomic interaction. In the whole universe. At every "moment," whatever the smallest definable moment would be. Where in HELL could all those universes exist? And where did the energy come from to create all those universes? No way. GREAT episode, though. Just gotta suspend disbelief.
I interpret things this way: Our choices don't literally create alternate universes. They already existed, and always did. For instance, let's say you wake up in the morning and decide among four different sweaters to wear for the day. By doing this, you don't literally create four different universes springing off from that point. They already existed, but up until you made the decision, all four were identical. Same story here, really.
But not just any universes exist, but the universes that reflect the possible outcomes of an event. The possible paths any given event can follow are many, but not infinite. How could the "multiverse" have "known" ahead of time--that is, since the Big Bang (BB)--that, oh, say 10 billion years after the BB, a particular photon was absorbed by an electron (photoelectric effect), OR resulted in absorption plus change in energy of the electron plus production of a new lower energy photon (Compton scattering), OR was of sufficient energy to result in an electron-positron pair (pair production). How can all those outcomes exist already (ready to be found like your sweaters), when the event hasn't even occurred? Don't get me wrong--I think this is easily one of the 10 best TNG eps. But the science seems pretty sketchy to me (as do all "myriad ways"-type conjectures).
I concur. It is a very abstract concept but I bought the idea that multiple (usually unseen and inaccessible) universes could exist parallel to us. Yet I suspect that our imagination and conditioning has an inevitable tendency to regard only "our" primeverse as authentic and the other ones as "secondary" and/or somewhat "redundant". At least that could explain some of the profound aversion when I suggested in the closed thread and the other one that what we saw in "Yesterday's Enterprise" actually occurred in a "parallel universe" (quote Richard Carson, after t/his apparent premise change in "Redemption II"). I'm confident the protagonists in each parallel universe would think that they are equally authentic and real, and I think "Parallels" did a good job sending this message. It also was a great analogy, IMHO, to illustrate (by showcasing different parallel universes that apparently had a common point of convergence in the past) how little decisions we do every day can affect the future. In one universe the Enterprise-D had defeated the Borg in BoBW but Picard had died in the process, in another one the Enterprise-D was sort of the last ship standing against the Borg. Of course, "Parallels" would have been another opportunity to have Densie Crosby reprise her role as the Tasha Yar character. A little pity that we didn't see this happening. Bob
And along similar lines, some of the differences between the universe are only very minimal, but just enough to show that events were ever so slightly different in this parallel due to one specific decision having been made over another at one specific time. A small thing, changing the entire course of a bigger thing.
Didn't Christoper Bennett speculate in the first DTI novel that what basically happens is that alternate timelines are created all the time but generally collapse back to a single timeline shortly afterward? I'm not sure I'm remembering correctly, and some of what he wrote was techy enough that I had trouble following it in any case, but I was left with the impression that only timelines that manage to diverge in a significant way (yes, yes, that's kind of a weasel word) end up standing alone.