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leave the anxiety-riddled person with the nagging feeling that this all could have been otherwise.”Įxploring the question of “what if” continues to be lucrative - there’s even an entire Marvel show called “What If…?” While multiple universes may start to feel spread thin as a plot device, the trope isn’t going away.Īfter all, if you can remix popular characters while retaining the potential for a reset in a “prime universe,” what is there to lose? Well, there’s this: If everything is reversible, how high can the stakes really be? “The number of difficult developments the past few years - the pandemic, political upheaval, effects of climate change, etc.

“We’re bombarded with things that seem arbitrary, random,” says Hannah Kim, an assistant professor of philosophy at Macalester College. That’s no small thing in a post-COVID world where convulsive change can seem the only constant. These works are united by one theme: There are always possibilities, for better and for worse, and exploring them is entertaining, enlightening and escapist. One crowning example of multiverse success: The Oscar-sweeping “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” which showed all the different lives Michelle Yeoh’s main character might have lived - with the point being that across the multiverse, her family remains a family. “It’s a way to explore a problem that’s never actually happened in the main story,” sums up Nic Lemire, a California teenager who co-hosts the occasional “Marvel Mondays” podcast with his mother (a former Associated Press film critic). (Marvel Comics’ “Brand New Day”) the universe where a Ben Affleck Batman never existed but the Michael Keaton Batman stuck around and got old (“The Flash”) and the “mirror universe” of “Star Trek” that reveals the baser instincts of beloved characters. You have the reality where Spider-Man never married M.J. It’s a canvas that cuts across genres, from rom-com (1998’s “Sliding Doors”) to near-musical (2019’s Beatles jukebox “Yesterday”).

#Newport news vip passport tv

Imaginary characters - particularly beloved ones with established stories - are toyed with in books, TV shows and movies that airlift them out of one life and into another. Kennedy hadn’t been assassinated (“11/22/63”)?įictional worlds are more malleable.

What if the South had won the Civil War (“CSA: The Confederate States of America”)? What if Germany and Japan had won World War II (“The Man in the High Castle”)? What if John F.