Parallels (TNG episode)

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Star Trek: TNG episode
"Parallels"

Episode no.	163
Prod. code	263
Airdate	November 29, 1993
Writer(s)	Brannon Braga
Director	Robert Wiemer
Guest star(s)	Wil Wheaton Patti Yasutake
Year	2370
Stardate	47391.2
Episode chronology
Previous	"Inheritance"
Next	"The Pegasus"

"Parallels" is an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation directed by Robert Wiemer from a script by Brannon Braga.

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

[edit] Synopsis

Lieutenant Worf returns to the Enterprise in a shuttlecraft from a bat'leth tournament, in which he won first place. When he arrives on the Enterprise, he cautiously enters his quarters, apprehensive that his crewmates are probably going to throw him a surprise birthday party, which he hates. Sure enough, when he arrives at his quarters, the crew jumps out in surprise, with much rejoicing and celebration.

Then odd things begin to occur that only Worf notices. The cake, which was originally chocolate, is suddenly yellow. Captain Picard is attending when Riker had earlier said he couldn't make it. Data's painting, which ship's counsellor Deanna Troi had hung on the wall, has changed, and has even moved across the room in an instant. Worf continues to experience all these changes throughout the episode, which escalate in severity; at one point, he suddenly finds himself at his tactical station on the bridge in the middle of a crisis situation.

Worf's jumps tend to stick to a theme; once he gets into a universe where Riker is captain, he seems to stay there; once the Bajorans and Cardassians switch roles and become (respectively) enemies and allies of the Federation, they stay that way; once La Forge is dead, he stays dead; however, in one universe Nurse Ogawa is Doctor Ogawa, Chief Medical Officer, in place of Beverly Crusher, but Worf moves to time streams where Beverly is back. Also, his standing in the bat'leth tournament deterioriates, then he comes to time streams where he never went to the tournament at all, having instead asked his brother Kurn to go in his place. Wesley Crusher, now a lieutenant, serves on the last Enterprise that Worf jumps to. Worf also has the rank of Commander on that Enterprise and is Captain Riker's first officer (Picard having died in this universe during the battle with the Borg).

Most significantly, after the third or fourth jump, Worf finds that he is married to Deanna Troi from that point on.

It turns out that Worf's RNA has a different quantum signature than that of the universe — meaning that he is in the wrong universe. Data speculates to Captain Riker that when Worf was returning from the bat'leth tournament, he accidentally entered a time-space fissure. The warp engines on his shuttle caused a reaction in the fissure, sending Worf into quantum flux through the endlessly branching universes that occur when events in different universes follow different paths. Based on the fact that Worf's quantum jumps during the episode always occur when he is in proximity to Chief Engineer Geordi La Forge, Data determines that Geordi's VISOR must be interacting with the quantum flux in Worf's RNA to cause Worf to jump from one quantum universe to another.

Hoping to find where Worf actually belongs, the crew returns to the fissure and scans it with a subspace differential pulse. While they search, the Enterprise is attacked by a Bajoran ship (in this universe, the Bajorans are an aggressive and hostile empire), and the fissure begins to destabilize. Realities begin to merge into one another, and hundreds of Enterprises appear. Data realizes the only way to stop this phenomenon is to find Worf's Enterprise and send him back through the fissure to seal it. Worf's true Enterprise is eventually located, and he boards his shuttlecraft, re-modulated to seal the fissure. However another Enterprise attacks the shuttle — an Enterprise commanded by a haggard, delirious Riker who is desperate not to be returned to his own Borg-overrun universe. To protect Worf, the Enterprise fires on the other ship, inadvertently destroying it.

Worf soon arrives in his own universe, the fissure sealed, with no one other than Worf left with any memory of the events that just transpired. He returns to his room expecting a surprise party, but instead finds Deanna. She says that Riker wanted to throw the party, but she dissuaded him. As she leaves, Worf asks her to stay so they can have dinner. Deanna appears pleasantly surprised as Worf tells the replicator, "Champagne."

[edit] Trivia

The insignia pins seen in Worf's final alternate universe were reused from the episode "Future Imperfect"

An early version of the script portrayed one of the thousands of Enterprises appearing at the end of the episode having come from the Mirror Universe. The script was changed to show an Enterprise from a Borg infected universe instead, possibly because of information about the Mirror Universe revealed in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, which stated that the Terran Empire had collapsed by the time frame of the 24th century. However, there still could be Enterprises from universes where the Empire never fell.