Ponderings from a Parallel Universe

'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...