Before the multiverse became a whole thing, the Star Trek franchise has been introducing parallel and divergent timelines for decades. While the 2009 J.J. Abrams Trek movie might have made a big deal about skewered timelines — holding the audience's hand like Doc Brown drawing a diagonal line on the chalkboard — overlapping realities are almost mandatory to our understanding of the Trek timeline. When Kirk and Spock “restored” the timeline in “The City on the Edge of Forever,” they also created two others: One in which the Federation never existed, and a new one, in which they now are an integral part of Earth’s past.
But rebooting the present (or the future) throughout the Trek canon leads to an interesting question. Would we ever really know if we’re watching the same Trek timeline episode-to-episode or movie-to-movie? What if the differences between timelines were so small, that we couldn’t tell? The first episode of Lower Decks Season 5 suggests that maybe we wouldn’t.
