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| 'Bad Spock' and... bad Kirk? Or is it good Kirk in bad Kirk's clothes? Star Trek enters the arena of the parallel universe with Mirror, Mirror |
In a recent post, I touched on the
fictional conceit of the parallel universe: fifty years ago, one of
the great British examples was being played out on television in the
form of the Dr. Who serial Inferno. And, later that same year,
viewers in the UK would be introduced to another, more celebrated
example, Star Trek’s season two episode Mirror, Mirror.
These two stories have distinct similarities in that each posits an
alternate version of the world as we know it, populated by fascist
döppelgangers of familiar
figures. The very word döppelganger
also suggests another example of the same plot device, cooked up by
Gerry and Sylvia Anderson for their 1969 film of the same name. So
what is it with these parallel universes? Where did they get started?
Are we, in fact, living in one right now? Looking around at 2020, I’d
say it meets most of the requirements: populations living under
strangely altered circumstances, bad guys in power, killer virus at
large. Perhaps the question for us today is not ‘are we living in a
parallel universe?’ but how do we get back from it?
Wikipedia has a lot to say on the
subject of parallel universes, alternate realities, call them what
you will, but their article is muddled and lacks focus, allowing far
too much material under the ‘parallel earth’ umbrella. I would
argue that the ‘classic’ parallel universe of speculative fiction
– and, indeed, quantum physics – is not merely ‘another world’
or a strange, new country such as are visited in the likes of the
Narnia series and Gulliver’s Travels (both of which find their way
into Wikipedia's very muddled discussion). It is a fictional world whose
characters and settings duplicate an existing fictional world in a
way that allows the author to engage in often complex moral debate
about the actual world we inhabit. That, after all, was the original
purpose of science fiction.
Looking back at the aforementioned Dr.
Who serial, Inferno, I reckoned that this was probably the
first time I’d come across the idea of a parallel world, inhabited
by a cast of döppelgangers,
and I was almost right; but not quite. The very first example I saw
was in the Fireball XL5 Annual published in 1964, in which
series writer Alan Fennell penned a comic strip adventure called Solar
System II. In this six-page story, the crew of Fireball XL5 are
pulled across the universe by a time-travel beam invented in the
distant future by their counterparts on a parallel version of Earth,
‘with people and things the same as the Earth we know,’ as Steve Zodiac explains (to his parallel self). The only difference is that the new Earth is
one hundred years ahead of the one they’ve left behind.
The parallel Earth visited in Dr. Who’s
Inferno serial added the intriguing notion of the duplicate
world being a fascist dictatorship, with the implicit notion (never
stated as such) of the Nazis having won the Second World War. Back in
1970, this was still a relatively novel idea. Star Trek had
already been there, albeit on a different planet (with ‘parallel
development’) in the 1967 episode Patterns of Force
(screened in the UK in 1970). Of all the many parallel world
fictions, the ‘what if Hitler won the war’ has become the most
widely explored – to the point, I would argue, of tedium. Examples
are too numerous to list, but the idea seems to have first taken root
with Philip K Dick’s 1962 novel The Man in the High Castle, and
has been doing the rounds ever since. Stephen Fry
turned the whiskery concept on its head with his novel Making
History, which speculates on the consequences of Adolf Hitler’s
removal from history. Needless to say, it doesn’t end well...
Pulp sci-fi writer Murray Leinster’s
Sidewise in Time is widely cited as being one of the first
instances of the parallel universe in fiction, although H.G. Wells had
toyed with the idea of alternate worlds running along parallel but
altered lines to our own in novels such as Men Like Gods. But
it seems that Star Trek’s Mirror Mirror was the first
example in this emerging sub-genre to use the conceit of ‘evil
döppelgangers’ as part
of the alternate reality set-up.
The döppelganger
is, of course, a fictional trope of its own, with examples including
the 1970 thriller film The Man Who Haunted Himself, based on the
1940 short story (later expanded into a novel) The Strange Case of
Mr. Pelham. Star Trek was only a few episodes into
production when the series offered up its own take on the idea in the
‘good Kirk v. bad Kirk’ episode The Enemy Within. But
these ‘evil doubles’ operate in our own world rather than being a
manifestation of an entirely altered reality. Gerry and Sylvia
Anderson fused the idea of döppelgangers
and alternate realities in their 1969 feature film Döppelganger
(aka Journey to the
Far Side of the Sun) where
the alternate reality is identical to our own, but a mirror image.
There is no good/evil dichotomy, which leaves the script floundering
somewhat. One of the fictional rules of any alternate reality is that
you’re supposed to use it to advance moral/philosophical arguments
about the world we inhabit... not merely as an excuse for a lot of
special effects and explosions. The big problem with Döppelganger
the movie is that it thinks it’s working on this deeper level...
there are moments when it thinks it’s 2001 instead of what
it really is – a very long episode of UFO.
Star Trek’s Mirror Mirror
episode is itself embedded in a kind of alternate reality, as least
as regards its first roadcast by the BBC. According to the Radio
Times database (BBG Genome), this was on Monday 15 June, 1970, a
date I cited in my earlier blog where I noted the close coincidence
of this broadcast and the transmission dates of Dr. Who’s
‘parallel parallel universe’ (if you will), Inferno. Only,
it didn’t happen that way. Despite being scheduled on the said
date, Mirror Mirror did not in fact air on 15 June
1970, its first UK brodcast being deferred until Wednesday 11
November of the same year. Genome lists both dates, but only the
November date is right. So what happened on Monday 15 June 1970 to
cause this Star Trek episode to drift into an alternate
reality? Simple: Britain got knocked out of the World Cup tournament,
losing in the quarter finals to West Germany in a match played in the
closing hours of June 14. The programme schedule for the evening of
Monday 15 was evidently altered to offer a retrospective of Britain’s
World Cup journey, and the World Cup Grandstand that had been scheduled to run from
18.00 to 19.20 that evening was clearly extended – kicking Star
Trek into touch. But it gets better... Britain’s World Cup failure was widely
interpreted as being a factor in the defeat, just three days later,
of Harold Wilson’s government in a General Election that returned
the Tories to power. The events that branch off from this single
moment in history are myriad and complex. Somewhere, there may exist a parallel England where Britain, if not winning the 1970
World Cup, at least made it past the quarter finals, and Harold
Wilson remained in number 10...
All of which suggests that there could be more to this whole parallel universe idea than a few science-fiction escapades. As recently as March of this year, scientists
were excitedly discussing the concept as the ‘only possible
explanation’ of a strange particle that did not behave as predicted
and seemed to hint at a parallel universe where time runs backwards,
an idea previously advanced by Stephen Hawking and others. As far
back as 1954, Hugh Everett III conceived of what is now known as the
‘many worlds theory’, a branch of quantum physics which argues
for the existence of parallel timelines occurring endlessly and
infinitely through a process of ‘branching off’. Put in the most
simple terms, the theory posits that for every event at the level of
quantum physics, there is an infinity of alternate outcomes, all of
which result in parallel but discrete realities. More than sixty
years later, the existence of these parallel universes is still hotly
debated by physicists, but most of the advocates of the theory are in
agreement that there can be no travel between the realities. They are
coincident, but self-contained. Unless, of course, you happen to be
in possession of the console from the TARDIS... or a red Audi A4.
I once conceived my own humorous
conceit regarding parallel worlds, partly to explain my own
experience of reality which has, over the decades, seemed to
oscillate between discrete and unconnected timelines. I’ve had, as
it were, various different lives, often involving different
protagonists who, typically, never interact with those from the
‘other’ realities. I decided there had to be a mechanism for
these ‘transitions’, and found it in the form of Radio 4’s
late-night shipping forecast. The shipping forecast had once prefaced
the news at midday and 6pm, but for some years, on FM radio at any
rate, it has been relegated to 12.45am where is always prefaced by an
‘iconic’ piece of music called Sailing By. I decided that
this would be my ‘gateway’ between realities and that the
transitions occured at those times when I was away from home and
heard Sailing By on the radio, usually in the car. This, as I
say, is merely a fictional conceit, not a genuine belief, before you
summon medical assistance... Then, just a few months ago, when the
present ‘lockdown’ situation had not quite kicked off, Radio 4’s
PM programme saw fit to play this piece of music as a ‘soothing’
theme at the end of an edition in late March. I heard it in the car.
‘This isn’t good,’ I thought, invoking my own fictional
conceit...
And, as if in acknowledgment of the
fact that there really might be ‘something weird going on’, as I
sat writing this piece, with the radio on in the kitchen, DJ Ken
Bruce uttered the words ‘parallel universe’. Which, if nothing else, serves to
illustrate how this once elegant science-fiction/moral philosophical
construct is now a part of everyday speech. At least it is in this
version of reality.
Whichever reality you inhabit, good
luck in getting back from there. Beam me up, Scotty...