Anyone who has watched even a handful of Star Trek episodes knows that this premise is a recurring theme in the universe, whether it be the recurring Mirror Universe where the Federation is a warmongering society, or simple, one-off episodes featuring lives not lived, or episodes that simply never happened. Well, this collection has it all.
The five discs are broken up into four sections: Mirror Universe, Parallel Dimensions, Twisted Realities and Alternate Lives. With the exception of the Parallel Dimensions section (which only has two episodes), you will find at least four episodes to represent a particular group.
The Mirror Universe section includes not only the original two-part show from The Original Series, but also the Enterprise two-parter and three from Deep Space Nine, where visiting the Mirror Universe became a seasonal plot device.
While the Parallel Dimensions section only has a pair of episodes, the ones that were chosen are pretty good. "The Alternative Factor" from TOS has Kirk and Spock dealing with a man who keeps switching places with versions of himself from other dimensions, while TNG's episode "Parallels" has the same thing happening to Worf. We watch everyone's favorite Kilngon as he moves from reality to reality. Needless to say, this makes Worf a bit agitated.
The Collective's Twisted Realities section features an episode where a transporter accident splits Kirk into his good and evil parts, while another episode from The Original Series has someone steal Kirk's body. Meanwhile, the episode "Frame of Mind" gives Riker a bit of a headache as he keeps switching between a play he is performing in and a psychiatric ward and Star Trek: Voyager's episode, "Shattered" has Chakotay suffering from the type of injury only seen in Star Trek, he gets unstuck in time and ends up being able to pass through temporal rifts and see different parts of the ship's history since the show's beginning.
Alternate Lives is the last and biggest section of Star Trek: Alternate Realities Collective with eight episodes spanning the four latter series. This section includes one of my favorite episodes from TNG, "The Inner Light," where Picard is struck by an energy beam and ends up living out a whole life on an alien planet in the blink of an eye. The other episode from this series, "Yesterday's Enterprise", brings back the dead crewmember, Tasha Yar, as a space/time rift causes the Enterprise-C to appear 22 years in the future and force the Federation to go to war against the Klingons.
This section of the Collective also contains the DS9 episode, "The Visitor" where Jake spends his entire adult life looking for his dad, who was trapped in subspace due to an accident on the U.S.S. Defiant. The Voyager episodes include "Before and After", "Timeless" and "Course: Oblivion" which focus on different lives for Kes, Chakotay and Kim, as well as an episode that starts with Paris and Torres' wedding, but the celebrations are cut short when the crew starts to disintegrate on the molecular level.
This really is a solid collections of episodes featuring roads not traveled, though I think I would have liked to see Voyager's "Year of Hell" two-parter in this collection, but maybe that wasn't included because it required a bit more setup than the other shows. Either way, any Trekker would enjoy Star Trek: Alternate Realities Collective, and if you are a fan of the show, or at least this premise, then you should look into the collection. Of course, it would be hard to recommend any of the Collective boxed sets if you already own all of the series.
