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As some of you may be aware, I’m currently completing a project: watching all seven seasons of Star Trek: TNG. I just got to watch my second favorite episode of the show today, season seven’s Parallels (my favorite episode is Tapestry (which interestingly also deals with alternate realities)). If you have seen much of the show, it’s the episode where Worf becomes unstuck in time. This episode scared the shit out of me when I was little.

The way the mechanics of the story work, Worf flies through a quantum fissure and ends up jumping between parallel universes whenever he get’s near Geordi’s visor. Part of the fun of the episode is watching Worf get completely disoriented when he discovers that he’s married to Deanna Troi and that they have two kids together. Anyway, when other eleven year-olds were dealing with real problems (like, i don’t know, girls and sports and , maybe, nuclear war), I was worrying (and I mean lying awake for hours at night in a complete panic) that I would go to sleep and wake up in a parallel universe where everything and everyone I knew was different or just gone (it got really bad when one day, I thought: “what if I wake up in a universe where I’m already dead?”).

Anyway, most people worry about: school / life problems. Andrew Pilsch worries about: quantum physics.

Also, as an aside, Parallels has one of my favorite lines in TNG: Parallel-Universe-“Riker”:http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/William_T._Riker says to Worf “You don’t remember any of this, do you?” Worf responds, “I do remember. I just remember it differently.”