Hey Everyone and Welcome to What Did I Miss, where today I am looking at the Ten Darkest Timelines in Star Trek history. One of the things that Star Trek is most well known for, is for showing the audience alternate versions of known events and characters by taking their stories to different timelines and dimensions.
This troupe seems to be coming to the forefront of the franchise once again, with rampant rumours that the future of the series Star Trek: Picard will have a storyline that includes one or both of these elements and that the series will perhaps affect the other series currently being produced. While each story tends to take our crews in stranger directions, the one constant seems to be that most of these different timelines don’t seem to turn out so good for the human race. From invasions by cybernetic races to time paradox’s to ecological disasters; travelling between different timelines just seems like a bad idea, but the writers of Star Trek can’t seem to stop creating these universe bending stories.
So here I thought I would take a look at some of the bleaker timelines from the history of the franchise, but I would love to hear what your favourite story is so be sure to let us know in the comments.
The Mirror Universe
Since we can’t get very far on a list of dark timelines without mentioning possibly the most infamous alternate timeline in Star Trek history, let’s start out by talking about the vast and often used Mirror Universe.
If you are not aware, the Mirror Universe is a dimension in which everyone and everything from the main Star Trek universe is present but reflected in a distorted fashion so that each is an opposite representation of the original. The concept was first shown to the viewers in the Original Series second season episode “Mirror, Mirror”, from which this universe takes its namesake, and which featured a transporter malfunction that sends four members of the Enterprise crew to this alternate universe while also sending their counterparts to the main one.
Jerome Bixby, who also wrote the infamous Twilight Zone episode “It’s a Good Life”, wrote the original episode and is credited with creating the concept, which does feel like a Twilight Zone version of a Star Trek episode. In this universe, Earth has created the Terran Empire that is built on conquest and has enslaved many other races, a far cry from the utopia that Starfleet strives for.
This would be the first of twelve storylines across four different series that would include this universe and would even lead to one character from this universe, Philippa Georgiou, being a large part of the first three seasons of the series Discovery.
It is not known if one event caused this massive universe to be different or if it is just designed to be in this manner, as in the intro to the Mirror universe Enterprise episode “In a Mirror, Darkly” we see that in this universe the Terran Empire has lasted longer than the Federation has been in an existence in the main timeline.
What probably makes this concept so popular is that it is not only scary but pretty fun, since we get to see alternate versions of known characters that are very different from their archetypes.
The City On The Edge Of Forever
Star Trek produced one of its franchise defining episodes at the tail end of just its first season in 1967, with the episode “The City On The Edge of Forever“.
This episode also introduced the character “The Guardian Of Forever” which is an entity that has access to multiple timelines and dimensions. In this episode, Dr MCoy is sent back in time through a strange set of circumstances as such Captain Kirk and Commander Spock must follow him through the Guardian Of Forever not only to find Mcoy but to save their own future.
When Mcoy travelled back in time he saved a human woman called Edith Keeler and in doing so he changed Earths history in such a way that the Germans won the second world war.
Join me as I list off eight more times that Star Trek delved into dark periods of its own history…
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