Like most people, I sometimes wonder how life might have unfolded had I made, at critical junctures, a different choice. What I haven’t done is break into a parallel reality, identify a better version of myself, and force him at gunpoint to trade places. Laziness? The reader may suspect so. Then again, parting ways with the antagonist of Apple’s new series Dark Matter, I don’t have a Ph.D. in quantum theory. 

If the multiverse is having a moment, it is only because “the Science” continues to have a bigger one. One might expect, observing the hard sciences’ replication crisis, a little representational modesty. How about a series in which a heroic researcher eschews p-hacking and gets the same results twice in a row? Instead, we have quantum superpositions. Scratch a popular screen production these days, and one is likely to find the well-credentialed bending time and space to their will. In Everything Everywhere All at Once, the 2023 Oscar winner, Michelle Yeoh’s Alpha-Evelyn discovered “verse-jumping” seemingly by accident, so exceptional was her apparent brilliance. It wasn’t Mister but Doctor Strange who strode through Marvel’s “Multiverse of Madness” the previous year. It’s all nonsense, of course, but of a peculiarly triumphalist kind.