by Ryan Silberstein, Managing Editor, Red Herring

If the last six years have taught me anything, escaping to an alternate timeline seems like an attractive idea, at least at first. The conceptual idea of other versions of reality actually goes back to Ancient Greece, but has been popular in science fiction off and on over the last century and a half, depending on how loosely you interpret the idea. The Wizard of Oz, It Happened Here, Sliding Doors, Run Lola Run, Donnie Darko, and even The Super Mario Bos. movie all offer various interpretations of this idea. It’s popped up in both Everything Everywhere All at Once and Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, so I feel it warrants examining why these kinds of stories resonate, and look at how successful these two films are at using mutiverses effectively.

There will be spoilers for both movies in this article.

There are three basic flavors of multiverse/alternate universe stories. The first is where the protagonist is unchanged, but they experience alternate realities, often displacing that universe’s version of themselves. This is the kind from the end of Back to the Future and the 1985 sections of Back to the Future Part II. Marty McFly is the only person unchanged by the changes time travel has rendered upon the present, while his family and Biff are noticeably different in the new 1985 created at the end of the first film. This is expanded in the sequel with the alternate 1985 created by Biff’s use of the Sports Almanac. To the other characters, this reality has always existed, but Marty remembers how things are “supposed” to be. 

The second flavor was popularized by “The Flash of Two Worlds” in Flash #123 by Gardner Fox and Carmine Infantino in 1961. In the story, Barry Allen, The Flash, accidentally travels to an alternate earth where he meets Jay Garrick, The Flash. Garrick was the original comics character, and this opened a way for DC Comics to feature multiple versions of their characters and have them interact, often teaming up to solve a major “Crisis” affecting the multiverse. Most recently, this kind of approach was used to great results in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, where Miles Morales (Spider-Man) met other versions of Spider-Man, who were different people all with the same powers, but were not intended to be other versions of Miles.

The third, and probably most common take on multiverses is the ‘branching timelines’ flavor. For some reason, the present is entirely different because of something that happened in the past, causing it to morph into a different timeline. Star Trek is the go-to example here, with both the original series episode “Mirror, Mirror” and the 2009 film using this version of multiverse storytelling (plus at least a half dozen other examples across other series). This can be mixed in with the first flavor, as in “Mirror, Mirror” where Kirk, Scotty, Uhura, and Doctor McCoy find themselves swapped with the evil counterparts of themselves. But either way, this branching timelines version is the one used in both 2022 movies under discussion. The source of the branching timelines may or may not be shown or explained, but each universe stems from a choice or event that happened differently in the “main” timeline. 

Regardless of the flavor, all three takes allow the main character (and sometimes supporting characters) to see a “what if” version of their own lives. Marty McFly gets wish fulfillment for cool, upper middle class parents so he can have a cool truck instead of his beaten down, lower middle class parents. It’s the Reaganite American dream. But more often, the multiverse is used to put its characters into an existential crisis, allowing them to gaze into an alternate life path. So while the multiverse can seem like a complicated science fiction concept, the key to it working is a strong sense of character. I suspect that this is one reason we tend to see it on television even more than in movies, and not just because it seems like a fun diversion for cast and production design. This is also why Spider-Man: No Way Home is more about the audience's feelings than Tom Holland’s Spider-Man. 

Final spoiler warning for Everything Everywhere All at Once and Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness!

Everything Everywhere All at Once, the newest film from The Daniels (Swiss Army Man) completely understands this, centering everything on the family at the center of the story. Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh), who co-owns a laundromat with her husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan) is facing an audit by the IRS when her husband reveals a message from another universe that she might be the key to saving the fabric of reality as we know it. Evelyn’s past contains some obvious points in time for a branching timeline to occur, most especially when she left China as a young woman, following Waymond to America against the wishes of her father (James Hong), who did not approve of their relationship. Meanwhile she struggles in her relationship with her daughter, Joy (Stephanie Hsu).

One thing The Daniels’ concept of the multiverse allows for is characters borrowing skills from alternate universe versions of themselves. So from a universe where Evelyn stayed in China and became a martial arts devotee/actress, the laundromat-owning Evelyn can gain a deep knowledge of kung fu. Or from other universes, singing skills, hibachi knife-work, etc. Through this Evelyn is exposed to wildly different versions of herself, each shaped by a series of choices that she could have made but didn’t. In The Daniels’ multiverse, we are the culmination of our own choices. It may seem that on the surface, the multiverse is about exploring all of these different paths, but it is actually the opposite, it is about The One (not to be confused with the Jet Li multiverse movie)–the Unified Theory of Evelyn. 

It would be totally reasonable to react to the multiverse by saying that ‘nothing makes sense, nothing matters,’ which is ultimately how Joy (Stephanie Hsu), Evelyn and Waymond’s daughter, reacts to her knowledge of the universe. In a field of unlimited possibilities, why does anything have value? The answer is to invert the question. In a field of unlimited possibilities, the particulars of the life we have matter even more. Accepting our past choices is a form of self-acceptance. It doesn’t mean that we are stuck with those choices permanently, but those choices all carry weight and shape the particular versions of ourselves as shaped by circumstantial and systemic conditions as well as our own free will. 

Through her experiences in the multiverse, Evelyn realizes that she has many choices left to make in her life, and those choices are the only thing she can actually control. The experience most fundamentally changes her outlook on life. At the beginning of the story, she is just going through the motions in her life, letting things happen around her. By the end, she is making active choices, summed up perfectly by her statement: "Of all the places I could be, I just want to be here with you." We actively choose who we want to be everyday, moment to moment, and because we are the culmination of our choices, accepting those choices is the same as accepting ourselves. Walking out of Everything Everywhere All at Once I felt a sense of renewal, a sense of peace in what feels like an increasingly chaotic world. I wish I felt any of that from the newest Marvel Cinematic Universe film. 

I wrote a full review of Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness last week, so I won’t rehash too much of those thoughts. Going back to Avengers: Infinity War, Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) first looked into multiple realities to see how The Avengers in other realities fared against Thanos (Josh Brolin) and found that out of 14,000,605 examples, there was 1 where they came out on top. So presumably Multiverse of Madness isn’t the first time Strange has peeked in on other versions of himself when he reality hops with America Chavez (Xochitl Gomez). In a reality where he died–the world thinks it was fighting Thanos, but the Illuminati actually executed him for tapping into the evil and corrupting power of the Darkhold–we think he is learning about his own tendency toward hubris. This, again, despite supposedly being the lesson of the original Doctor Strange movie as well as the havoc he caused in December’s Spider-Man outing. 

So why bring Doctor Strange into the multiverse to begin with? His first appearance started the dimension hopping, as Strange faced off against Dormammu in the Dark Dimension in the climax, but it wasn’t about the multiverse, really. Michael Waldron zeroes in on the existential aspect, asking the question if Strange is happy. But other than a nightmare–really a vision of a different version of himself and America being attacked by a demon–and a conversation with former colleague Michael Stuhlbarg, we don’t really know much about what the doctor’s state of mind is since returning from the dead in Avengers: Endgame. There’s not much in the way of revelation or advancing the character from where he was in his first film in 2016. Using the “Flash of Two Worlds” style of multiverse might have had additional resonance for him here, but instead, his dealings with the Illuminati–who are really only introduced to be killed off and establish just how much of a big bad the Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen) is–are just replaying the Strange from that universe’s experience with them. Of course, Strange is changed by the events of this story, but more by his experience with the Darkhold than from the multiverse. It isn’t centered on how his past has shaped him, but on how close he is to creating a disastrous future.

Ultimately, the vastness of the multiverse and the way it is used within DSMM underlines the futility of the situations. If there are infinite realities, why should we care about any of them? And furthermore, why should we care about what happens in any of them besides the core Marvel universe? In practice, the multiverse mostly functions as a way to add stakes without adding consequences. This makes it even more frustrating that Wanda was relegated to being the villain here while dealing with the fallout from WandaVision. DSMM never truly takes on her perspective in an empathetic way. Rather, her pain is dismissed, she is declared to be irredeemable, except as a meaningless self-sacrifice at the end of the movie. Her motives–to reunite with the children that were taken away from her–are relatable and understandable. And no matter how much Doctor Strange insists that they aren’t real, that’s absolute bullshit. WandaVision treated them as real, and effectively used them to explore emotions. I’m not even going to dwell on the fact that Strange also uses the Darkhold and is still treated as a hero, because I don’t think the script is self-aware enough to recognize the misogynist bent to this particular hypocrisy. 

Some of this is due to outlook. DSMM sees the multiverse as a catalog of failures, with “our” Doctor Strange needing to remain on the good path after seeing realities where things went wrong. In contrast, Evelyn is often seeing universes where she has developed additional skills–often connected to what are dismissed as ‘hobbies’ by the IRS–and so the multiverse is showing us the possibilities of life, and how it isn’t too late to grow, change, and try new things while actively choosing to accept yourself. It’s fine that DSMM doesn’t share that outlook, offering a darker take on possible realities. The issue I have is that it rarely connects the multiverse to the character journey except to offer a cautionary tale to Strange’s arrogance, which is the subject of at least two other films in the franchise. But that’s what you get when you commit to an announced title even after the script has to be rewritten from the ground up.

The more I think about it, the more that DSMM is a disaster when it comes to story. Many of the moments feel off and out of character because they are so thinly connected to each other. In contrast, Everything Everywhere All at Once shows we are all connected in the great bagel of existence, and the only thing that ties us to our own mediocrity is fear. In an infinite universe, we can do anything, because we already have. DSMM might agree, but it wants to punish a grieving mother and reward an arrogant know-it-all.