Star Trek: The Next Generation/Recap/S7 E10 Parallels

Series:Star Trek: The Next Generation
Episode: Season 7, Episode 10
Title:"Parallels"
Previous: Inheritance
Next: The Pegasus
Recapper: IlGreven

Worf returns home from a Klingon bat'leth tournament that he won to a surprise birthday party thrown by Riker. As he celebrates being "old enough", he notices several subtle changes in his own reality: The flavor of the cake changes, Captain Picard is at the party when he said he wouldn't be available. As the Enterprise works on the Argus Array, a space telescope that is having problems, Worf has more dizzy spells, with more slight perception problems: officers switching positions, appearing and disappearing. More troubling, Doctor Crusher remembers him complaining about a concussion he suffered when he lost the bat'leth tournament. He returns to his room to find his champion's trophy replaced with one for ninth place.

More and more things Worf has been party to are being forgotten by his crewmates, while things he doesn't remember are being claimed by them. He claims the Array was being tampered with by the Cardassians, but no one believes him. Angry, he takes himself off duty, and Troi tries to comfort him. As La Forge enters his quarters to tell him what they found with the array, he blacks out twice...the second time putting him in a battle situation with Cardassians. The disorientation proves costly, as the attack badly injures La Forge. Worse, when he's relieved of duty for his "memory loss", he now doesn't have any bat'leth tournament trophy, as he apparently skipped it for repairs to the ship. Another shock comes in the form of Troi, who announces she is his wife. Worf has Data try and find any temporal anomalies that might explain the changes, but the now blue-eyed android can find none, so they search for commonalities in the events. Worf figures out that La Forge was present in all of them. As they head down to sickbay, the doctor (Ogawa instead of Crusher) informs them that Geordi is dead.

Geordi's body gives no indication, so they check his visor...and Worf gets dizzy again. When he comes to, he's in a red command uniform and is informed that he's the first officer of the Enterprise under Captain William Riker, ever since Jean-Luc Picard was killed in the Borg incident (a deviation from what happens in "The Best of Both Worlds"). Data scans Worf and finds what Worf is saying himself: He doesn't belong in this reality, where the tactical officer is Lieutenant Wesley Crusher and the conn officer is a Cardassian. A search for anomalies finds a quantum fissure in the space-time continuum that was crossed by Worf's shuttle in his own timeline. As the Enterprise scans the fissure, Worf returns to his quarters with Troi, who again is his wife, and they have two children in this timeline, but Alexander doesn't exist. The scan is interrupted by a Bajoran warship (as the Bajorans turned warlike after defeating the Cardassians, who joined the Federation), and the battle disrupts the fissure; hundreds of thousands of Enterprises appear out of nowhere.

Riker sends out Worf's genetic info to the Enterprises, as it has the signature of his own reality encoded in it. They find the Enterprise that matches his information, and sends a shuttlecraft to get him. However, before he can get to the fissure and seal it, another Enterprise starts to fire on it. This Enterprise is from a world where the Borg are everywhere, and a disheveled and panicking Captain Riker proclaims they won't go back. The "current" Enterprise destroys it with one photon torpedo, and Worf enters the rift and fixes it. He finds himself in his own uniform, with a Bat'leth tournament Champion's trophy. This time when he returns to his room, only one person is waiting for him: Deanna Troi. Thinking about the Trois of the other universes, he decides to invite her to a birthday dinner for two.