Mirror Mirror question..

Well watching this the other day I wondered (again) why the Halkan's in the mirror mirror-universe weren't savage as well?

 

The mirror Halkans were notorious for giving each other wedgies, indian burns and noogies. That's why they looked the way they did. They just didn't show it on camera.

 

Because it was "what if the Federation was evil?" not the "what if EVERYONE was evil?" later MU stories degenerated into.

 

Oh, I am sure that the writers could've come up with some cheesey reasoning as to why only our fav crew changed, but that wasn't the point of the ep!

 

"Mirror, Mirror" was meant to infer a reflection, where perception is reversed. But it doesn't necessarily mean polar opposites. If it did mean that then the Federation might not have existed at all, and Earth winds up being a weak minion of some vast empire run by the Halkans.

 

The Mirror Universe wasn't some magic cartoon realm where everything is backwards. That's taking the title too literally and Star Trek as a whole too fancifully. It was simply an alternate timeline where human history turned out differently and produced an empire instead of a federation. After all, we saw that Spock was basically a decent man in both realities; it's just that the circumstances of the world he inhabited had forced him to become more ruthless to survive. It was really just humanity that was more savage and ruthless.

 

Same goes for Maxwell/Maximilian Forrest in ENT.

(sorry, just had to throw that in)

 

Hey, 'The Counter-Clock Incident' from TAS wasn't that bad.

Seriously though, it's a good point that 'mirror' in the Trek universes is really synonymous with 'parallel'....where the variables are different but not necessarily perfectly opposite.

Along that theme, I'd like to lend support to the non-Trek novel 'Dante's Equation' by Jane Jensen. While the 'how' of moving between parallel universes is a bit hollywoodish, it's still a thought-provoking and entertaining story.

 

The point of that episode was differences in Humans, not everybody in the universe. That's why the DS9 follow-ups are hated (by most fans, not by me), because they took the concept of the "mirror universe" too literally.

 

Oh-h-h-h, yes, it is.

Well, it's not actually called "the Mirror Universe" within the Trek universe. That's our term for it in real life based on the title of the episode that introduced it. In-story it's always called either a parallel universe or alternate universe, interchangeably (although in DS9: "Crossover" neither term is used, with the universes simply being referred to as "sides"). So we shouldn't take the "Mirror" thing too literally. It's just a metaphor. (It was probably The Star Trek Concordance that introduced and popularized the term "Mirror universe" for that alternate reality, though that book often drew on terminology used in scripts and production memos, so it could've originated there.)

Not at all. The differences in the DS9 era all grow out of the change in humanity. Because the Terran Empire was a brutal dictatorship, it drove the Klingons and Cardassians to unite against it. The Klingons and Cardassians aren't really very different in the two universes; they're just more exaggerated in the MU, perhaps because as successful conquerors they've been freer to indulge their worst impulses, or perhaps because decades of fighting the fierce Terrans made them fiercer in response. And since the Terrans occupied Bajor, the Bajorans joined with the Empire's enemies to win their liberation. They then rose to become a major partner in the alliance they joined, much as they've subsequently done in the Prime Universe, just sooner because they were liberated sooner.

And the differences in the individual characters can be explained simply by their different upbringing and experiences, growing up in a society where the tough and ruthless thrive and the compassionate and honest are ground under.

Anyway, who says "most fans" hate the DS9 mirror episodes? I've never heard any suggestion of that before. And what complaints I have heard haven't been about overly literal mirroring, because clearly that hasn't been the case (if it were, the Klingons and Cardassians would be pacifists, Garak would be the galaxy's most honest man, etc.).

 

Just check the comments by other fans. The comments made toward the DS9 MU episodes, as well as the ENTERPRISE two parter are typically negative. Not always, because nothing is an absolute, but in general.

It's not an opinion that I share because my favorite type of sci-fi story is the "parrallel universe" concept, weither it's Star Trek centered or not, but when the subject of discussion is the MU episodes, nine times out of ten, the response toward the DS9 episodes are negative.

At least, that's what I've seen.

 

In what context? The Internet? There's always a minority of complainers who make a disproportionate amount of noise and create the impression that there's widespread hatred, but if you actually count up the names it generally amounts to a handful of people voicing the same complaints over and over again. As a rule, people are more motivated to speak out on something they disapprove of than something they approve of, while those who are neutral have no incentive to say much at all. So the negative side tends to be overrepresented in online comments, letters to newspapers and magazines, etc. The negative side doesn't outnumber the positive or neutral groups, it just out-talks them.

Case in point -- if you went by the comments on this BBS alone, you'd think that the 2009 Star Trek movie was the most hated one of all, but in fact it's the most popular one of all, the most critically acclaimed one of all, and one of the most financially successful ones of all.

 

I suspect that the actual answer to the question is for literary reasons rather than in-universe reasons.

Consider the exchange between Kirk and Tharn in the teaser [http://www.chakoteya.net/StarTrek/39.htm]:

It's basically a setup to the question, as KingDaniel put it, of, what if the Federation were evil?

The Halkans are the fixed point in the story around which the reflection occurs, in order to explore the conscience of the Federation. You can't explore the question of whether the Federation would succumb to the temptation to plunder, without keeping the Halkans the same in both universes. At least not as straightforwardly as a simple compare-and-contrast, to see how the Federations in the two universes react differently to the same situation.

 

And yet in Requiem for Methuselah Kirk orders phasers locked onto Flint's home when he refuses to give him the ryetalyn. Flint is just as independent as the Halkans are yet Kirk is willing to let Flint believe that he'll be killed if he doesn't had it over.

On Eminiar VII Ambassador Fox, with Kirk backing him up, intends to get a treaty port established for the Federation. A treaty port is one that is basically negotiated while the weaker party is staring down the barrel of a gun. It's how the British ended up running Hong Kong after the Opium Wars, a large scale operation to smuggle drugs into China in order to disrupt the government.

If the Federation was suffering a critical shortage of Dilithium I would imagine that the negotiations with the Halkans would have faced a much less friendly negotiation with Starfleet.

 

[rant]Anecdotal observation taken as fact gets arguments into trouble. "Majority" has no real definition here, as one person observing activity in a forum can't accurately assess a majority when the assumption is made that all fans worth counting come to TrekBBS and make a point of commenting in a thread about DS9 MU episodes. Now, a fair statement might have been to quantify it like "I've seen at least 8 people comment on the MU DS9 episodes and deride them, while fewer people contradicted them, in threads A, B, and C." The "proportion" of participation in a given thread at least suggests that in the right circumstances there is a momentary "majority", but by no means definitive of all fans across the board. [/rant]

That said, it's easy to say that there is no definitive "thumbs up" on these episodes.
But I do concur with the opinion that they took the MU idea in a direction not quite intended by the original. It doesn't really matter, as DS9 had its prerogative to interpret it as it wished, so long as there wasn't a blatant canon violation.

But I'm fully in agreement with 1001001 that "In a Mirror, Darkly" was a terrific episode. It's one of the best episodes ever created for Enterprise.

As for the Halkans compared to Flint... that's a huge stretch. The Federation wasn't starved of dilithium crystals, but found a terrific cache of them and wanted to secure it before a hostile force would step in. The urgency wasn't nearly as great as the need for the Ritalin, without which the crew of the Enterprise would perish. In the MU, one could say that the Empire's insatiable need for power meant that the Halkan's cache of dilithium was paramount to them. But their lack of basic human rights meant they'd indiscriminately kill for it. Kirk had a very good reason to threaten Flint, but again for a drug of which Flint had no vested interest.

 

Right. Plus it's only a majority of those people who choose to voice an opinion at all, and people who hold strong opinions are more likely to speak than those who hold neutral opinions. For any eight people who choose to deride a thing in the strongest possible terms, there could be hundreds of lurkers who just don't feel strongly enough about it to make the effort.

This is why the only legitimate statistical samplings are random ones initiated by the samplers rather than the subjects. Any forum where it's left to the choice of the individual whether to comment or not is bound to give you biased results that fail to represent the people who were less motivated to reply. So nobody should ever, ever take that kind of sampling as a legitimate representation of the views of the public as a whole.

Err, that's ryetalyn. They weren't suffering from ADHD.

 

As far as Board members like or dislike for the DS9 Mirror episodes, it seems the first one is fairly well liked, but, the later in the Series you go, the higher "Hated it" percentage you will find.

Enterprise:IaMD, while surprising to me how many negative comments you will find on the board, it seems to me it's more like 50/50

 

No, I didn't mean just this forum alone, although, yes, I have seen it here. I've also seen in on other forums, and had discussions with my friends in real life who felt that way.

That is what I was referring to.

 

As am I.