History WMG / Counterpart2018

* Confirmed in "In From the Cold" (2x08).

* Mostly Confirmed in "In From the Cold" (2x08).

* Mostly Jossed in "Twin Cities" (2x06): Myra wants the Alpha and Prime worlds to go their separate ways. While it was the first step, the rest of the plan is simply making the current lack of contact a permanent state.

** As of "The Sincerest Form of Flattery" (01x07), it is revealed that the disease first manifested within pigs and then spread to humans. Diseases that cross species tend to be fairly rare, lending credence to the possibility of biowarfare instead of an unfortunate mutation.
* The theorys posted here are pretty unlikely, for a few simple reasons. The reasoning behind the previous tropers biowarfare theory is wrong, because cross species diseases ARE fairly common, at least when it comes to pandemics. Nearly all the pandemics that killed significant portions of the worlds population have come from domesticated animals, ESPECIALLY super-flus. An illustration of this is the fact that the native Americans had no such plagues prior to contact with the Europeans due to the relative lack of domesticated livestock, and were decimated by such diseases upon the arrival of Europeans. Examples of these cross species pandemics are just about any diseases referred to as plagues, and almost all the superflus that surfaced in the 20th/21st century - the most recent being the "avian" flu scare and perhaps far more relevant, the "swine flu" that was quarantined and pigs culled before it could become a pandemic that killed hundreds of millions of people. The writers likely decided it would be a swine flu that killed all those people to reference that event in real life and hint that that was the specific flu that killed all those people on earth prime, and I'd even go so far as to say it was deliberately picked to indicate that earth actual/alpha was NOT responsible for it, considering as how the same thing almost happened to us in real life. The idea of mutations of microbes being the cause of the superflu is unlikely because just a few seemingly unrelated points of divergence could've snowballed and caused the swine flu pandemic we averted in real life to fail to be quarantined and spiral out of control on earth prime. An example of a possible small divergence that could've caused it could be just a farmer that culled his herd in the real world deciding not to in Earth prime, allowing the flu to spread and kill everyone. I'd say something like that is a lot more likely than separate viral development, while being MUCH more likely than biowarfare.

** It seems that everyone here is discounting the fact that while the worlds did diverge immediately, it has repeatedly stated that the divergence was insignificant at first, and in all likelyhood the cause of the divergence was the creation of the two worlds and "butterfly effect" of the two worlds reactions to the existence of their counterpart world causing knockdown effects. So while things did change immediately, for the first decade the vast majority of divergences would likely be geographically confined to the Berlin area, with more serious run off effects taking much longer to manifest. So, the two of them could've easily had virutally identical childhoods even after the initial point of divergence for the world at large. This ia supported by the statements that when people meet their other they sometimes go insane trying to trace the exact point where things changed - meaning that the time that each "other" pairs lives changed is different for everyone.

* The theorys posted here are pretty unlikely, for a few simple reasons. The reasoning behind the previous tropers biowarfare theory is wrong, because cross species diseases ARE fairly common, at least when it comes to pandemics. Nearly all the pandemics that killed significant portions of the worlds population have come from domesticated animals, ESPECIALLY super-flus. An illustration of this is the fact that the native Americans had no such plagues prior to contact with the Europeans due to the relative lack of domesticated livestock, and were decimated by such diseases upon the arrival of Europeans. Examples of these cross species pandemics are just about any diseases referred to as plagues, and almost all the superflus that surfaced in the 20th/21st century - the most recent being the "avian" flu scare and perhaps far more relevant, the "swine flu" that was quarantined and pigs culled before it could become a pandemic that killed hundreds of millions of people. The writers likely decided it would be a swine flu that killed all those people to reference that event in real life and hint that that was the specific flu that killed all those people on earth prime, and I'd even go so far as to say it was deliberately picked to indicate that earth actual/alpha was NOT responsible for it, considering as how the same thing almost happened to us in real life. The idea of mutations of microbes being the cause of the superflu is unlikely because just a few seemingly unrelated points of divergence could've snowballed and caused the swine flu pandemic we averted in real life to fail to be quarantined and spiral out of control on earth prime. An example of a possible small divergence that could've caused it could be just a farmer that culled his herd in the real world deciding not to in Earth prime, allowing the flu to spread and kill everyone. I'd say something like that is alot more likely than seperate viral development, while being MUCH more likely than biowarfare.

** So, Jossed.

* The theorys posted here are pretty unlikely, for a few simple reasons. The reasoning behind the previous tropers biowarfare theory is wrong, because cross species diseases ARE fairly common, at least when it comes to pandemics. Nearly all the pandemics that killed significant portions of the worlds population have come from domesticated animals, ESPECIALLY super-flus. An illustration of this is the fact that the native Americans had no such plagues prior to contact with the Europeans due to the relative lack of domesticated livestock, and were decimated by such diseases upon the arrival of Europeans. Examples of these cross species pandemics are just about any diseases referred to as plagues, and almost all the superflus that surfaced in the 20th/21st century - the most recent being the "avian" flu scare and perhaps far more relevant, the "swine flu" that was quarantined and pigs culled before it could become a pandemic that killed hundreds of millions of people. The writers likely decided it would be a swine flu that killed all those people to reference that event in real life and hint that that was the flu that killed all those people, and I'd even go so far as to say it was deliberately picked to indicate that earth actual/alpha was NOT responsible for it, considering as how the same thing almost happened to us in real life. The idea of mutations of microbes being the cause of the superflu is unlikely because just a few seemingly unrelated points of divergence could've snowballed and caused the swine flu pandemic we averted in real life to fail to be quarantined and spiral out of control on earth prime. An example of a possible small divergence that could've caused it could be just a farmer that culled his herd in the real world deciding not to in Earth prime, allowing the flu to spread and kill everyone. I'd say something like that is alot more likely than seperate viral development, while being MUCH more likely than biowarfare.

* Not true at all. Nearly all pandemics that killed significant portions of the worlds population have come from domesticated animals, ESPECIALLY super-flus. Examples of these cross species pandemics are just about any disease referred to as plagues, and all the superflus that surfaced in the 20th/21st century - the most recent being the "avian" flu scare and perhaps far more relevant, the "swine flu" that was quarantined and pigs culled before it could become a pandemic that killed hundreds of millions of people. They likely decided it would be a swine flu that killed all those people to reference that, and I'd even go so far as to say it was deliberately picked to indicate that earth actual/alpha was NOT responsible for it, considering as how the same thing almost happened to us in real life, and just a few seemingly unrelated points of divergence snowballed and likely caused it to fail to be quarantined and spiral out of control.

* Seems Confirmed as of "Shaking the Tree" (01x05) when Emily Prime discusses a mass flu epidemic in the 1990s that killed seven percent of the world's population, or between 350 and 400 million people. Such a "superflu" is comparatively rare in modern times.

* Given the advertisement which portrays a child choking and the the other children immediately putting on masks, as well as the remarks about advanced vaccines and treatments the alternate world has developed, this WMG now proposes that the divergence had an almost immediate effect on disease mutations which triggered off a much more dangerous airborne disease epidemic (possibly Ebola), but because of the temporal proximity to the hole being made between the two worlds, the alternate world's leadership began to suspect the normal world of conducting biological warfare to "clear the path" to plunder that world's resources. Supporting this WMG is the insistence of the normal world's diplomatic personnel on gaining geological coordinates of natural resources as well as detailed population census data.

* Given that alternate Howard is in contact with an apparent hard-liner, Alexander Pope, in his world, he could be deliberately or unknowingly subverting the normal-verse Howard to help lay the ground for an invasion or takeover attempt.