******STARSHIP-SIZED SPOILERS!******

In light of the wildfire emergencies here in SoCal–the worst of which are about forty-odd minutes northwest of me–I’ve been reluctant to punch out another column just now, in case my electricity is suddenly cut to prevent sparking from fallen power lines. However, since I need the diversion, here goes. For this column, I wanted to take a look at the current state of the Star Trek universe, or rather multiverse; the totality of which has been wrapped up in a bow with the conclusion of “Star Trek: Lower Decks” (LD).

First, a confession; I am not a fan of LD at all. I’ve tried it, but it just doesn’t work for me. I find it terribly unfunny, overly-cliquey, and somewhat irritating (none of its characters belong in the Starfleet I remember as a kid). However, I don’t want to write a hate piece on LD, because I don’t like writing them, to be honest. So, I decided to watch the LD series’ finale, “The New Next Generation,” which left fans of “Star Trek: Discovery” (DSC) up in arms, as it suggested (in a throwaway sight gag) that the Klingons seen in DSC were only a figment of an alternate reality, as seen through a “Schrödinger’s Probability” field. This little sight gag suggested the entire five-year run of DSC was nothing more than a hiccup in an alternate reality, and not ‘official’ canon of Star Trek’s “Prime Timeline” (events chronicled from the Original Series onward).

Back six or more years ago, I suggested that ALL of Star Trek has been an alternate timeline since the events of “Star Trek: First Contact” (1996), the time-traveling feature film which saw Picard and his crew diddling a bit with history in order to save Zefram Cochrane‘s historical first warp spaceflight on April 5th, 2063 (“The issue of Star Trek and its continuity…“).

I wrote then, and still believe now, that the 1996 movie “First Contact” directly led to the creation of the “Archerverse”; a divergent timeline which now has an earlier starship named Enterprise; the NX-01, captained by Jonathan Archer (Scott Bakula), which was launched in the 22nd century, some 100 years before Capt. Kirk’s (and Captain Pike’s) famous Federation starship. The NX-01’s adventures were chronicled in “Star Trek: Enterprise.”

We never saw this ‘famous’ United Earth starship among the 1701-D’s (or E’s) Enterprises in its ready room; nor was it among the recreation deck’s row of famous ships called Enterprise, as seen in “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” (1979); a wall which included the 20th century nuclear aircraft carrier, and a ringed-spaceship from the 22nd century… yet no NX-01.

When Picard came back to his 24th century after “First Contact,” the Federation he came home to was close enough to the one he left, but with this curious, yet significant change. Somehow, thanks to movie-TV magic, the altered timeline still managed to line up sufficiently for Picard and company’s satisfaction (against all logic). As Homer Simpson says in the The Simpsons’ Halloween story “Time & Punishment,” a time-traveling Halloween episode based on Ray Bradbury’s “The Butterfly Effect”: “Eh, close enough.”

Sometimes, close enough is good enough in the Star Trek multiverse. Prior to the events of “First Contact,” we saw the original Star Trek series (TOS) still intact and still concurrent with the prime timeline of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (DS9); as seen in the franchise’s 30th anniversary episode “Trials and Tribble-ations,” from 1996.

In that delightful anniversary gift of an episode, Captain Benjamin Sisko (Avery Brooks) and his crew found themselves thrown back in time to the events of TOS’ “Trouble with Tribbles” aboard the original starship USS Enterprise (1701; no bloody A, B, C, or D). The old ship still existed as we saw it in the original series, with no Apple inspired-aesthetic upgrades; and no cast changes, either (Captain Kirk was still played by William Shatner–not Chris Pine or Paul Wesley). That’d soon be undone after “Star Trek: First Contact” debuted a few months later. “First Contact” was one of the last Star Trek movies or episodes to feature ‘past-erasing’ parodoxes, which were commonly used in TOS and The Next Generation (TNG), leading those crews to ‘fix’ the past whenever it was disrupted.

This brings us to the alternate Kelvinverse of the 2009-2016 Star Trek quasi-reboot movies (“Star Trek,” “Star Trek Into Darkness,” “Star Trek Beyond”), which saw Mr. Spock (Leonard Nimoy) thrown back in time to the mid-23rd century with an angry, vengeful Romulan named Nero (Eric Bana), following the future destruction of Romulus in the late 24th century. This event didn’t so much rewrite Star Trek history as it redefined it.

Star Trek was no longer accountable to its former outdated linear model of ‘erasing’ history seen in TOS and even TNG; it now adopted multiverse theory, which made new timelines each time history was ‘rewritten’ by errant time-travelers. We’d already seen examples of this in prior Star Trek, with TOS’ “Mirror, Mirror” (which established the darker, more savage–and very popular–Mirror universe), and the multiverse ‘explosion’ seen in the Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG) episode, “Parallels,” which was sort of a prototypical step in the eventual Kelvinverse direction. In “Parallels,” Lt. Worf (Michael Dorn) finds himself in a series of ever-changing realities, as the barriers between universes break down. In the end, Worf is returned to the reality which matches his own unique quantum signature.

This drops us off at the doorstep of “Star Trek: Discovery” (DSC); an earnest, yet deeply troubled series that debuted for streaming in 2017 on what is now Paramount+, and which reinvented Star Trek with higher budgets and feature film production values for each episode of its much shorter seasons. However, the series was unconvincingly presented as a prequel to the era of TOS, setting it at the end of the 2250s.

Series lead Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) was also the never-before-mentioned adoptive sister of Spock (now played by Ethan Peck). The series’ first season had a lot of behind-the-scenes drama going on with its producers (I won’t go into that now), which led to mixed onscreen results. Despite its gorgeous production values and groundbreaking casting (the first Trek to feature openly LGBTQ+ characters), the writing of this gorgeous-looking series was all over the place; with fleeting moments of brilliance amid its chaotic run.

Personally, I never really bought this super-luxe series taking place prior to Kirk’s scrappier, cheaper-looking 1960s show. The ships were much larger and far sleeker now, and the overall technology was just too advanced (holodecks, holo-communicators and other bits of tech all existing a full century before they are ‘invented’ in later Trek lore). Even the Klingons were far different than we’d seen in any iteration of Star Trek, with a radical hairless redesign that required a little bit of backpedaling in season 2 (even more than their revised look in “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” decades earlier). The series even included a devastating new Klingon-Federation war that was never mentioned previously; not even in TOS’ “Errand of Mercy,” which was supposed to depict the first time both Klingons and the Feds ever came that close to all-out war, not the second.

DSC felt more like a Kelvinverse idea of a prequel (no surprise, since both were overseen by producer Alex Kurtzman), and I could more easily accept it on those terms. So that’s how or less how I rationalized DSC all whenever I watched it. This series wasn’t a prequel to TOS; it was simply another new corner of a greater Star Trek multiverse which only vaguely aligned with the events of TOS.

Now Star Trek: Lower Decks, the Star Trek iteration I enjoy the least, has put a nice little bow on it all, with “Starbase 80” guarding this new multiverse portal, which came from the often-bumbling crew of the USS Cerritos trying to stop a ‘Schrödinger’s Probability’ thingamajig from disrupting all of reality (similar to Doctor Who’s “reality bomb,” as created by Davros, in “Journey’s End”).

While my eyes crossed a bit following the bottomless well of technobabble from LD’s “The New Next Generation,” I more than got the gist of it; Starbase 80 would stand guard over the entire Star Trek multiverse, much like the DS9 space station kept watch over the Bajoran wormhole leading to the hostile Gamma quadrant. This was a surprisingly elegant solution for this ongoing issue within modern Star Trek (or all of Star Trek, for that matter).

Even more recently, the promising prequel series “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” (SNW) has repeatedly bumped its own head on Star Trek’s continuity ceiling; most annoyingly so–for me, anyway–with its weak sauce reimagining of the reptilian Gorn species into terribly derivative “ALIEN” xenomorph-like parasites instead of the noble defenders of their territory, as we saw in TOS’ “Arena” (“The Gorn Identity: Star Trek’s revision of an iconic alien species…“). They’ve been reduced from a species with opportunities for growth and exploration into creepy, vicious little monsters; fodder for a ‘bug-hunt.’ Very disappointing.

Now these new Gorn, like the hairless Klingons of DSC (the Klingons were once called “fuzz-faced goons” in TOS), are all just variations of ideas trodded out in a greater Star Trek multiverse; like the ever-malleable ‘history’ of Khan Noonien Singh and the Eugenics Wars (see: TOS’ “Space Seed,” and SNW’s “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow”). It seems to change as we continue to pass the original ‘deadlines’ for both events (the mid-1990s, the early 21st century, etc).

To sum it up, “Star Trek: Discovery” still exists. Its bizarre variant of Klingons still exist. The Kelvinverse still exists. The continually-altered World War 3/Eugenics Wars of SNW still exist. And the original, unaltered “Prime Timeline” still exists; candy-buttoned consoles and all. But of course, all Star Trek is fictional and none of it is real (I can hear the snickering already), but in-universe? Star Trek’s evolving continuity is a way to make this fictional universe more credible, and it’s probably one of the reasons the franchise has remained aspirational for nearly 60 years now, as it continues to point to an impossibly bright future. Star Trek continues to create a tangible, detailed and desirable reality… no matter how many times it’s tripped over its own feet (James R. Kirk, anyone?).

So it’s not important if Spock is now played by Ethan Peck, or Kirk is now played by Paul Wesley, or that Spock has an adoptive sister we never knew about, or that the Enterprise suddenly looks a helluva lot more expensive than it did in the 1960s. All these faces of Star Trek are but possibilities simultaneously existing within a big, beautiful storytelling box–minus the alive/dead Schrödinger’s cat.

This provides a means and a freedom for future Star Trek writers to play in this sandbox without shattering too many canonical taboos, or writing themselves into corners, as both DSC and SNW have been guilty. While I may not personally agree with some of the storytelling or aesthetic choices made within these newer variations of Star Trek, I will always have my old Star Trek box sets and movies (another reason I still collect physical media; no one can alter it once it’s on my DVD/Blu-Ray shelf), and I can revisit those unforgotten corners of Star Trek whenever I wish. Star Trek is a pick-and-choose buffet, where we take only what we want and discard what we don’t. You don’t have to swallow it all to be a legit Trekkie.

As my favorite Vulcan might observe, “Infinite diversity in Infinite Combinations.”

Live long and prosper, everyone!