Periodically in this newsletter, we’ll be talking about other shared universes in addition to the Star Wars universe. Perhaps the best known these days is the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which has just entered what it calls “Phase Four.” I like the MCU, but I prefer Star Wars. I think that preference has to do with the fact that Star Wars expands its storytelling by exploring history, whereas Marvel Comics and now the MCU have tended to be more interested in parallel realities, what the MCU now calls the “multiverse.” Star Wars has been invested in the idea of history from its opening image, the title card that read, “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.” Right now, the Star Wars universe is in the midst of a publishing project called “The High Republic,” focusing on a period that begins roughly two centuries before the prequel trilogy.

 

In contrast, superhero storytelling has tended to retell its heroes’ stories over and over with variations: witness the various incarnations of Batman and Spider-man on film. The multiverse concept allows the MCU to bind variations together so that they represent not mutually exclusive alternatives, but rather aspects of a single overarching whole, a confederation of realities. And then, having established such a concept, who could resist blurring the boundaries and having elements from one reality cross over into another? The original Star Trek did it with its “mirror universe,” a concept introduced in the iconic episode “Mirror, Mirror” and revived recently in Star Trek Discovery. 

 

The MCU introduced the idea of the multiverse in Doctor Strange, when the Ancient One (played by Tilda Swinton) explains the idea of parallel realities to Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch). Strange will play an important role in the MCU’s expansion of the multiverse idea in two upcoming films, this year’s Spider-Man: No Way Home and next year’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.

 

In the teaser trailer below for Spider-Man: No Way Home, Strange says, “The multiverse is a concept about which we know frighteningly little.”

 

 

The build-up to these films has taken place in several of the television shows that premiered this year on Disney+. WandaVision shows us Avenger Wanda Maximov’s evolution into Scarlet Witch, and she will play a role in the next Strange movie. Loki introduced us to the idea of “variants” whose existence threaten the integrity of “the sacred timeline.” The Loki variant (played by Tom Hiddleston) who is the protagonist of the series is the result of a comic moment involving time travel in Avengers: Endgame (2019).

 

It’s in the animated series What If …? (2021), however, that the MCU really starts to play with the idea of the multiverse. This series draws on the idea of alternative history, a genre of speculative fiction exemplified by novels like Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1962) and Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America (2004), both of which present alternative histories of the Second World War in which events and outcomes are different from the history that we know. (Dick’s novel cleverly finds a way to embed the history we know into his alternative history.)

 

What If …? shows us universes in which some crucial aspects of the stories told in the first three Phases of the MCU (basically the Avengers arc that begins with Iron Man in 2008 and concludes with Endgame) are changed. For example, the premise of the first episode in the series is: “What if Captain Carter were the first Avenger.” It’s not much of a spoiler to say that although the series seems at first to be an anthology of alternative reality stories, it turns out to be something else in the end.

 

I’m going to end with a what-if question of my own: What if the blockbuster space fantasy of the 1970s wasn’t Star Wars, but rather the adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune that the Chilean-French avant-garde director Alejandro Jodorowsky was seeking to make?

 

We’ll explore the ramifications of that question—and the history behind it—in the next newsletter.