Star Trek as crosstime travel

[stevebowers]

One episode of The Original Series makes no sense as space opera, but it does make perfect sense as a parallel Earth story.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Omega_Glory

From Wikipedia

Cloud produces a very old American Flag and ancient manuscripts from which he poorly recites the Pledge of Allegiance. When Kirk completes the Pledge of Allegiance, the Yangs are shocked. Spock surmises that the cultures may have developed along very similar lines to Earth. Kirk speculates that the Kohms were "Communists" and Yangs were "Yankees." Apparently, the Omegans had a war, similar to the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States. The conflict resulted in a war that destroyed both cultures many centuries earlier. Even Spock found the parallel between the two worlds to be "almost too close".

Spock was right. The parallels are much too close to be explained by convergent evolution; only a divergent timeline in a many-worlds universe makes any sense.