Georgiou and Georgiou: Two sides of the same coin?

Just for the Hell of it, I feel like watching "The Enemy Within". It's been a while. A long while. Here's an interesting thought that occurred to me while I was thinking of putting it on: the two Kirks are opposite sides of the same coin. Are the two Georgious, even though they're whole people, really opposite sides of the same coin?

Captain Georgiou is a model example of a Starship Captain who's supposed to represent the best of Starfleet and follows the rules. Emperor Georgiou, on the other hand, is a model example of someone who doesn't follow the rules so much as someone who makes them and, as someone who doesn't have an easy of a time fitting into the Prime Universe, is someone who's a better representative of the Mirror Universe than Lorca.

To look at Kirk and Spock's perspectives on their Mirror Universe counterparts in "Mirror, Mirror"...

Kirk: "What worries me is the easy way [Spock's] counterpart fit into that other universe. I always thought Spock was a bit of a pirate at heart."

Spock: "Indeed, gentlemen. May I point out that I had an opportunity to observe your counterparts here quite closely. They were brutal, savage, unprincipled, uncivilized, treacherous–in every way splendid examples of homo sapiens, the very flower of humanity. I found them quite refreshing."

Kirk [to McCoy]: "I’m not sure, but I think we’ve been insulted."

So are two versions of Georgiou really basically the same people, except their experiences are what made them so different for each other? Would Emperor Georgiou have been like Captain Georgiou if she'd lived in her Universe?

 

Shinzon of Remus approves of this question..!

 

That is the general conceit of the Mirror Universe, yes. I hate to keep referencing back to this comic, but I love this panel showcasing Spock's life in each universe:


It showcases that at each step Spock had to prove himself as unscrupulous, and dangerous, willing to fight for his very survival. In the Mirror Universe that is very much a reality, as promotion and advancement come through manipulation, maneuvering and murder-the game of Survivor played out in their reality as you had to outwit, and outplay and outlast everyone.

And, as much as I like the analog, I also appreciate the idea presented in "The Enemy Within" which showcases the "evil" Kirk as being part of his ambitious nature, his drive to succeed. I think that can fit with Georgiou as well.

 

Why should you? It's a good comic. They showed some stuff that, if TVH hadn't been a comedy and was more serious in tone, I would've expected to see in a fourth film. Carol's reaction to David's death. The way Kirk's let off. The surprise twist in the Mirror universe

Spoiler

That Kirk is the one who killed David!

and the aftermath of "Mirror, Mirror" is a more realistic example of what would've happened than what we found out about on DS9. Great space battles. And Stiles is a complete, total asshole. Nothing better than seeing him be told off...

... Shit. I almost wish this was Star Trek IV. And I say this as someone who likes TVH a lot!

 

Here's an interesting thought: Captain Georgiou was unable to figure out a way to stop the Klingon War from happening. Emperor Georgiou knew how to stop it dead in its tracks and even though it didn't go exactly the way she wanted, the war still came to an end. Later on, she knows how to keep the war from breaking out again.

Captain Georgiou cared about keeping the peace but didn't know how to do it. Emperor Georgiou doesn't care about keeping the peace and yet knows exactly how to do it anyway.

 

Prime Lorca was similar in one of the novels. He had similar qualities to Mirror Lorca, without going off the deep end.

 

I see both versions of Georgiou as unbalanced, differing in degrees, and one to one side and one to the other.

Kirk, as a whole, was quite balanced. I don't see his 'negative' side as being ambition. I see it more as righteous anger, suspicion, cunning, etc. When balanced out they are useful, but on their own they can go to extremes. Ambition I see as something that comes from both sides, depending on the motivation behind it.

A person can be 'too good'. A guy in my class in high school was so literal with "Thou shall not kill" that he said that if anyone ever tried to kill his family, he would not defend them with deadly force. He would rather let them and himself be killed than kill someone in defense.

In the last 10 years or so, I have been all over the U.S. from coast to coast. I have been seeing a very disturbing trend. The understanding of even simple logic is seriously breaking down. Not only is it becoming more and more difficult to accomplish simple things, what's also going on is that people in even very minor positions of authority are abusing their power to the point of manipulating things and twisting and misrepresenting things to do with completely decent people to make them appear to be something else entirely. More and more, good people are needing to defend themselves at great length like never before....in situations that never arised in the past, because there was not such malice among authority figures and not such a high level of flat-line, robotic incompetence, either.

The way things are going right now, the future nasties of Section 31 are not implausible, by any means.

Whether anyone wants to see it or not, today more and more people are being set up, in large and small ways. Not just falsely imprisoned, but falsely accused of all kinds of things.

This all makes for fertile ground for an organization like Section 31 to plant its seeds.

 

One might divide the Kirk issue by nature and nurture. In Enemy Within, the Kirks are expressions of nature, each is behaving in the only way they can and each lack the strengths and weaknesses the other half possesses. In Mirror Mirror, it is entirely nurturing that made the difference. They developed in different contexts. While we didn't get to see much of Mirror Kirk or how he and the Mirrors interacted we do see subtle hints that there is more to Georgiou than the monster that EW Kirk was. She can be playful to children, she can be nurturing in her way to Burnham and L'Rell. She isn't an expression of unreleased Id like the Enemy Within.

It might be amusing to see Georgiou deal with the EW transporter effect. Evil by choice versus evil by nature.

 

As Gov Kodos suggested above, in "The Enemy Within", neither Kirk was functional. The passive Kirk was far too passive and fearful to properly function as a human, and he needed that "animalistic" side of him. On the other hand, the Prime and Mirror counterparts of a person both seem to be able to function perfectly well.

I've never been convinced that the Mirror universe people had some sort of inherent evilness in them due to some physical characteristic of the mirror universe, but rather the Terran Empire people were evil due to circumstances.

 

Nurture not nature.

 

Well, they were evil even before there was a Terran Empire, as per Cochrane's gunning down of the Vulcans.

Then again, we were evil, too, as per the opening credits of that adventure all being from our gory history. "Our" Cochrane didn't gun down any Vulcans, though. So I'm quite ready to believe it's in "their" blood. Or in the quality of "their" light or something...

Timo Saloniemi

 

Yes, evil before the formation of the Terran Empire. So some other earlier events (maybe far earlier) already put humanity on an evil course -- a course that eventually led to the Terran Empire. That still doesn't mean that "evil" is in their DNA, so-to-speak (or maybe even literally).

 

At one point, I don't remember the thread, @Tuskin38 pointed out that the native language of the Terrans is Latin. Much like the Federation is supposed to be a stand-in for the United States (I'd argue more the European Union but that's a whole other debate), I think the Terran Empire is supposed to be a stand-in for the Roman Empire. In the Mirror Universe, the Roman Empire never feel and completely conquered the world.

I think you might be right. I was going to approach this from one way but as I started typing out my argument, it didn't work, so I'm not going to. Scotty said that the transporter created two opposites. So if Normal Kirk was at 50, then one Kirk was at 0 and the other Kirk was at 100. "Evil" Kirk could have his own moral code, it's just the exact opposite of "Good" Kirk's. That's the angle I was going to come from but we see no evidence of a code in "Evil" Kirk at all.

So it probably really is a matter of Kirk being broken down into superego and id. Scotty's an engineer, not a psychiatrist (like Kirk said later on in Generations ). He was making the best guess he could. Spock and McCoy have it right later on. McCoy says we all have our darker side. And then Spock points out how he as a whole person wins out of over his Vulcan half and Human half. Spock is a walking, talking Ego controlling his two halves. So there we are.

Captain Georgiou and Emperor Georgiou, though, might actually be opposites. They might actually be a case of what Scotty thought Kirk was. Emperor Georgiou is definitely a negative image, an opposite image, of Captain Georgiou. She has her own "moral" code, except it's the reverse of Captain Georgiou's. Whatever the Emperor does might be the opposite of what the Captain does.

If that's the case, then Emperor Georgiou, if she'd spent her entire life in the Prime Universe, would've zigged where Captain Georgiou would've zagged at every turn because it's not just that the Mirror Universe is an opposite, she's an opposite.

If Emperor Georgiou were split, then I don't know what the id would be to that. Maybe "I can kill them and I should". And the supergo would be "I can't kill them, so I shouldn't." One would be weak, the other would be strong. So the "Strong" Emperor Georgiou would be a leader who gets things done. The "Weak" Emperor Georgiou would be an opportunist who latches on to others so she doesn't have to get things done herself.

 

The Mirror Universe doesn't really make sense unless you assume people in the mirror dimension (or both dimensions) don't have free will.

There's no way that universes with completely different history would have the same people in them. Any major diversion in history between prime and mirror should have caused a "butterfly effect" that causes many people to not be born.

The only way it makes sense is if the mirror people aren't shaped by their environment but instead some sort of law of physics makes them act like evil reflections of people in the prime universe, it's more logical if you think of them as reflections of humans not humans will free will in other words.

Granted there's nothing on screen that indicates this, but it's the only way I can make sense of the nonsense behind the mirror universe concept.

 

I agree with you completely if we were to apply a more strict realism to the show.

However, I think the prime and mirror universes having two versions of the same people being in the same places and doing similar jobs is just something the show wants us to "just go with."

Is it nonsense? Yes. However, as I have just said in another thread (and to borrow a phrase) "it's just a show, and we should really just relax."

 

At this point it is only a fictional convention so we cannot apply strict realism to the show. Otherwise, yes, I can see your point. But, it's a fictional hook and that's it.

 

In the '90s, I used to watch a show called Sliders. It was about a graduate physics student who's a genius and invented a device that allowed him to slide between dimensions. Each dimension had different coordinates. He invited his professor and his not-girlfriend to see what he invented. Then a vortex opened that became so wide that a singer accidentally got stuck along for the ride. Only problem was, afterwards, they had no way to get back home to their dimension because the genius didn't have the coordinates to get back. So every episode, the four of them would jump from dimension to dimension, trying to get back to their universe.

Some universes were a little different, some universes were extremely different, and other universes were the same except they were different in a very specific way. What if the Russians won the Cold War? What if the Dinosaurs didn't go extinct? What if technology were forbidden? The show had a lot of potential. When I saw a DVD Series Set of it for sale at Wal-Mart for $20, I bought it on the spot. The entire premise is summed up here at the beginning of the intro:



But anyway...

... I think the Mirror Universe in Star Trek falls into the category of different but in a very specific way. Not the butterfly effect. Because you can have infinite universes, the Mirror Universe we see is just one particular combination that lines up with the Prime Universe enough that you can compare and contrast the similarities and differences.

 

Prime Georgiou is vegan, but Mirror Georgiou is not.

 

Kelpiens might be sentient plants.

 

Linus looks either plant-based or fish-based, I'm not sure which, but all I know is that he'd look right at home next to some marinated tofu and a curry plate. Whenever I see him, I want to order take-out. Except when he's sneezing on doofuses.