"Mirror, Mirror" physical transference?

If one were to nitpick we could say evil does not necessarily wear a snarling bestial face. True evil, on its face, is often more subtle and not always easy to spot right away.

Both “Mirror, Mirror” and “The Enemy Within’ could be said to lack a measure of subtlety in spots.

 

"The Enemy Within" was a brilliant allegory for the human psyche—an alternative take on the Jekyll and Hyde theme. The fact that it was played out in the open to facilitate the telling of the story is of little consequence. It could have been told as the same sort of internal struggle we see in Spock.

"Mirror, Mirror" simply reversed everything without offering a credible explanation of how everything else could be so "similar"—even down the remarkably coincident beaming both times. Kirk lectures Mirror Spock on the unsustainability of the empire. Realistically, I can't see how the empire got so far, and had all the exact same people on a ship so similar, etc. Twin I-beam suspension of disbelief isn't enough for that.

 

Those were all different methods, though.

Spoiler: More discussion of the spinoffs

No, the real wrinkle in later episodes with the mental-transferrence idea is Lorca in Discovery. He had a swap by sending a transporter beam through an ion storm, just like in "Mirror, Mirror," but it was definitely a physical transit (aside, apparently, from his clothes), since mirror-Lorca kept his physical scars (debatable, but they were probably from his earlier years and not injuries during the six months he was impersonating the real Lorca), and his anatomical differences with his dark-adapted eyes.

 

I guess I found it perfecly fine, and enjoyable as a plausible scenario.

 

Add to it that there weren't two Kirks from two different places, both Enterprise captains - just two halves of a whole Kirk that could be and were reunited. Both came from the same place and so you didn't need to invent a whole reality for him.

Was it the intention originally that the mirror universe was formed, having previously not existed, at and for that moment in time, so at least all the major parts were present to begin with? After which it could unfold like a flower, altering the past of its current and prior inhabitants within the bubble?

 

As someone else theorised on here, the TOS MU could have been an illusion for our landing party, as a test by the Halkans. Don't forget the council leader appeared the same in both realities.

 

''One may smile and smile and be a villain.''-------Kevin Costner from JFK...and quoting HAMLET if memory serves.

As it's an election year we see at least five times as many smiles.

 

Kira got into the MU via the wormhole, not via transporter. And mirror Kira stated that since TOS era, transporter tech in the MU had been altered specifically to prevent such incursions in the future. Which can explain the difference between TOS and DS9 MU mechanics.

Not exactly. Technically it's possible, just of very low probability.

 

No, he was more haggard in the MU.

 

Yes, I did flub that. However, when the Intendent visited DS9 in "Resurrection," she used a reconfigured transporter to leave ( and presumably arrive, earlier in the episode).

The Alliance claims of preempting multidimensional transporting seem to be lies, because both the rebels and the Alliance have devices to force physical transfers between universes at will.

 

Don't overthink it. The writers didn't. Nor should they have.

 

Yes, if the Halkans were secretly a super-race, they could have staged the whole illusion to put Kirk Prime and Spock Prime through their paces.

Another idea is that the Mirror "Universe" is not a universe at all. It's just a local inter-dimensional bubble that was flashed into existence by the combination of storm and transporter beam. The MU bubble is created like a flawed Xerox copy. The Alt or Evil people in it have heads full of memories that never happened, and the stars they see in the distance just an echo of the real universe's stars.

This explains how nearly identical people could exist in both dimensions, despite a different world history and all their different behaviors. The same people wouldn't marry, to say nothing of having identical children, to say nothing of having those kids grow up to be exact counterparts on a starship Enterprise. The Alts and their ship exist only because the accident flashed them into existence. And when Scotty's "window between the two universes" closes, the MU bubble and the Alt people cease to exist.

This satisfies all the logical problems with "Mirror, Mirror," and I'll say it: TOS owes nothing to the spin-off series. The spin-offs make their own way, and they can think up their own logic, if any.

 

Yes, I like this!

 

I mean...it's a good story, but it's not more plausible. The transporter creates an entire physical person of Kirk, manifesting both sides of himself. Never minding the idea of a "good" and "evil" half, since that approaches a black and white morality Star Trek often eschewed, the fact that the transporter can create a whole person begs the question were did that come from.

To me, the Mirror Universe has some measure of quantum entanglement with the Prime universe, but over time it became less of a mirror reflection, and more distant. I don't see the issue with it existing, any more than Lazarus existing in an antimatter universe.

 

Well. we have seen people transported out of their clothing, so it's not too big a stretch to assume that two groups of identical people could be transposed into each other's clothing.

 

On a philosophical level, some of the sci-fi/fantasy ideas should and do get some flexibility regarding inconsistencies and just accepted by the audience. Especially if the episode remains engaging and succeeds with its biggest points, the nitpicks seem far less prominent.

"The Enemy Within" was never about the technology, that was just a springboard and means for the psychoanalysis and suspense-driven horror (a la Twilight Zone) - neither was it overblown nor swept under the rug. But at least they acknowledge and use consistently the cause of the problem for its solution. Does "Mirror, Mirror" flow as convincingly in this regard? Indeed, would it have been better if Kirk and crew woke up in Sickbay where Chapel informed them the transporters were rendered inoperative so the crew were recovered via shuttle craft and are now recovering -- during which it was just Kirk having a little dream. Which actually makes sense, given one of Marlena's comments, teehee... (As well as being an early example of the "it was just a dream" trope. Or an unintentional callback to what "The Wizard of Oz" did.) Plus it'd be a fun poke at "The Enemy Within" having to pretend they had no shuttlecraft at all in order to keep the drama for the grounded crew going. (In real life, if memory serves, they were scrambling for the means to get the craft built and it wasn't ready, and they had to get stories completed to film and get aired. The result? Look the other way, put fingers in ears, and say "La-la-la and I also coughed". But unlike for early season 1, season 2 didn't have that hindrance. They didn't need to make a contrivance to later skate around.)

I'll agree that overthinking when watching can be a problem (been there, done that a few thousand million times - true). But just whizzing out any old script "because plot" can be just as much rubbish, if not more so. The more mental gymnastics become needed to justify the situations in "Mirror, Mirror" can and will take the audience out of the story or scene it's supposed to remain engrossed in. The audience is being asked a lot for this story: Outfits magically change with new bits added or removed. The cause is a freak storm during simultaneous exchange except all of a sudden they have to just get to the transporter room before the ion storm ends and for no reason it no longer matters where their opposites are - one can potentially headcanon around the storm and the coincidence of their counterparts beaming, but the minutiae with their clothes and shiny new weapons? Let's throw out the "simultaneous exchange" as the story seemed to have done that by the end as well, and if it were a factor then surely they'd beam back wearing the wrong outfits and/or end up in the brig. Pre-DS9, the crew only having their spirits transposed could arguably be made to work... Good sci-fi doesn't need to address everything, but great sci-fi keeps enough plot coherence and without spoonfeeding all the minutiae at the same time, since the plot coherence makes it easy for the audience to resolve any loopholes or issues on their own. It's been a while since I've seen it, but I never got the impression "Mirror, Mirror" even tried after the second act. Maybe they were running out of time as much as our crew were.

To go even one step further: The story also - and ironically - treats the viewers as a gaggle of ninnies with the "Tantalus Field". First, let's put to the side how "Tantalus" was the rehabilitation hospital colony for criminals in "Daggar of the Mind", as now that begs some genuinely cool questions about how nasty the mirror universe was, assuming that was the intent. But it also just describes a throwaway maguffin used to take care of the Batman villain cartoon goons mirror universe conspirators in a quick bit of fisticuff-focused shlock. Oh, and it does so all while leaving Sulu alone to be knocked unconscious because... someone decided that if they saw red shirt Sulu magically disappear they'd think our prime universe Sulu would as well?! There is zero reason why Marlena wouldn't have popped him out of his world as much as the rest of them because she's on Team Kirk, at least when not oiling her traps with that dialogue that somehow swooshed so far over the censors, oddly... (1000 bonus Quatloos if you were anticipating my returning to one-liner. ) At least they didn't have his buddies having wordy iron-on decals pressed onto their shirts like what Batman 66 did every week, so it could have been worse. Indeed, even bad-universe Uhura got to show her navel, so the censors who otherwise never let anyone show theirs understood the difference on a contextual level they could relate to. Well, possibly anyway, it'd be fun to be a fly on the wall in the script proofreading room circa sixty-seven. I once saw a fly on a wall, so I asked it if it knew English. It just started, then buzzed toward the cats' litter box. That's the most I'll ever get to time traveling to 1967 after not using Dr Seth Brundle's device. Plus, the 1986 remake of "The Fly" is an early example of how a reboot/reimagining can actually be as effective or better than its progenitor. Loved it and the 1958 original, but I flygress...

Even then, rolling along with what begs fair and reasonable questions, there is a great story to be had in "Mirror, Mirror" - even if it piggybacks on the themes of "The Enemy Within" but then applies a wider gamut via multiple people from a different dimension. Fast forward a few decades and it becomes a playpen for increasingly overdone fanwank -- never cared for it in DS9, though where DSC seemed to go with it (too early on or not), had something in its favor with Lorca.

All that said and I am known for word salad buffets with delicious vinaigrette, for what the 1967 original story did, nothing else in Trek comes close in terms of the story as a whole and there's both fun and ideas to be had. But even then, the 1967 isn't without a fair amount of valid nitpicks. Overlook those and the story has its rewards when not reveling in the shlock.

And now I have it penciled in for viewing, as I want to be in full nurd mode to see what I may have missed the last time I saw "Mirror, Mirror". The answers might be there and I misperceived. Or they never were and was driven more by contrivances than "The Enemy Within" ever could. Nitpicks aside, I do enjoy both stories and are very worthy examples of TOS. The latter became quite famous and iconic, so it's not bad!

 

The "duplication" idea is inherent in the matter transmitter concept. There have been debates among Trek fans as to the nature of the transporter: is it a wormhole, or a disintegrator/re-integrator? If the latter, the usual assumption in most sci-fi stories, then a duplicate is the result. One of the Trek novels had McCoy worrying about that. What happens to the soul when one is disintegrated and re-integrated? The transportee is not the original person, but a duplicate with the same memories who thinks he is the original. (The same could be said for "cloning" movies like Sixth Day with Schwarzenegger. The duplication is not immortality, it is just duplication. Each individual will come to know death.)

Should "The Enemy Within" be taken literally, or was the transporter gimmick merely clever allegory? In the movie TRON, did Flynn really get disintegrated and pulled into the virtual computer world, or was he only symbolically "in" the computer world through the terminal in the laser lab? The beauty of the allegory is that it can be taken both ways.

I enjoy both "Mirror, Mirror" and "The Enemy Within." Although I consider one more parody, while the other is allegory. "A Piece of the Action" and "The Trouble With Tribbles" both address serious subjects, yet are executed as parody.

Come again? "Mirror, Mirror", "Where No Man Has Gone Before", "Charlie X", "Space Seed", "The Alternative Factor" (cringe), "Wolf in the Fold", "And The Children Shall Lead" (double cringe)...

 

I consider both Enemy Within and Mirror, Mirror, good allegory.

And those are declaring things evil?

 

In my mind, it's a physical transfer. There's nothing in the episode to indicate otherwise, and it's the simplest possible explanation. If the ion storm created enough instability for the crews to switch places, it's no great leap to me to also assume they beamed into their counterparts' clothing.

I don't have enough eyerolls for this theory. Talk about assuming facts not in evidence.

Exactly. I don't need some convoluted "explanation" for why the two universes are in sync with each other, or anything like that. All I need to know to understand and enjoy the episode is that they're trapped in an alternate universe where the Federation is an evil Empire. Easy.

Yeah. Again, if we're buying that the landing party switched universes, it's not exactly a big leap to also assume they were beamed up into their counterparts' uniforms. If you need an explanation, just assume that the transfer only affected organic material.

 

When did we see that?