"Parallels" is my favorite Start Trek, The Next Generation episode. The first time I saw it, I had just come home from a meeting of a mental health board in a county in Michigan. During the meeting the topic turned to how to berate me, as the representative of a private company contracting with this entity, because my agency had failed to do exactly what they told us NOT to do the month before.
I was relieved to see TNG that night, because it explained to me why I was questioning my sanity all the way home. Insanity is kind of an occupational barrier for mental health professionals, so I was glad to find out I didn't have it.
This commercial for the program gives a pretty good synopsis of this episode, but in brief:
Warf, a Klingon officer for the Enterprise, goes to a tournament for some kind of game at which he excels. When he comes back to the ship, reality starts changing really fast....but only for him, not his shipmates. So the captain has died suddenly, and just as suddenly he's not dead; he finds out to his surprise that he's married to another shipmate, but wait! he's not; etc, etc. And that's the way dealing with apparatchyks of any type feels like. "But I thought you said..." "No, we never said that!" "Oh, I guess that was in a parallel universe, sorry."
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