Multiverse stories have absolutely taken over pop culture. You see them on TV with The Good Place, Riverdale (aka Rivervale), and even Black Lady Sketch Show. You see them in movies like Everything Everywhere All At Once and the recent Star Trek reboots. And of course, the Marvel contributions: What If. WandaVision. Spider-Man: No Way Home. And now The Multiverse of Madness.

Part of this cultural dominance is due to the rise of comic book movies. Multiverse plot lines have always been a staple of comic books. They give a writer endless chances to take zero-risk risks, including killing beloved heroes. (Before Avengers: Infinity War, comic books had gleefully killed off Superman, Batman, and Archie in independent timelines.) If the audience reacts too negatively to a franchise’s storyline, a multiverse gives you a lot of license to retcon things back on track. And, for whatever reason, audiences tend to be much more forgiving of multiverse logic than fixed point time travel.

But more than a useful plot contrivance, multiple timelines are also a mostly secular, vaguely scientific way of thinking about heaven and all the levels of hell. The good timeline can be what human perfection Rachel Menken explained the dual meanings of utopia to be: “'eu-topos', meaning the good place, and 'u-topos' meaning the place that cannot be.”

It’s undeniably fun to imagine how good your existence could get. The ‘verse where you didn’t miss that connection, where you followed through on the frisson you felt with the charming stranger on the subway, where you spent enough time with your parent before they died.

And it’s comforting too to think of how much worse some of your other versions have it than you. In one timeline, you came back from picking up pizza to find your apartment on fire and your study groupmate bleeding out from an accidental gunshot wound. Whatever hell you’re going through in your current timeline, it probably isn’t that.

In some multiverse stories, the heroes can—through force of will, or force of self-improvement—rescue themselves from the most horrifying prison of a bad timeline and into the timeline they really deserve. And there’s perhaps nothing more comforting than the idea that we can earn our good timeline.

This is how our generation is processing what every generation has to process: our lack of power in the face of a system designed to disempower, shame, and blame us while it enriches and protects itself. In the ‘70s, it was paranoid political thrillers and serial killer narratives, all with decidedly downbeat endings. In the ‘80s, we saw the deification of the Maverick, a movie star who could change the system by beating the system at its own game, either with his muscles or his aviators and an abundance of Xenu-given charisma. That bravado gave way in the ‘90s to irony and self-awareness suffused through every genre, which protected us from feeling ANYTHING about our place in the world except wry detachment. And in the ‘00s (a stupefyingly bad decade for the culture), an overwhelming fear of The Other wore our empathy down to a nub, and cruelty became the baseline for all humor, horror, and cultural criticism in general.

Now, as millennials lurch from one generation-defining global crisis to another, multiple timelines provide a flippant but still melancholy container for all this. The search term “darkest timeline” spikes at notably disastrous times for us, like November 2016 and May 2020. Meanwhile, “this is the bad place” has grown steadily in popularity ever since Eleanor Shellstrop first crowed it in early 2017.

I don’t know where or how far the multiverse trend goes from here. Themes are resonant until they’re not, and Gen Z will find a new theme to process systemic injustice and existential dread. It would be reassuring of me to end talking about how we’re heading for our “on your left” moment, when we take control of the multiverse and make our current timeline the good timeline. But truth be told, right now I don’t have that reassurance to give. Chalk it up to too much time spent in the bad place.