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Georgiou and Georgiou: Two sides of the same coin?

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.
She committed genocide on their homeworld, leaving only a few survivors. Not exactly what I think of when I hear ”keeping the peace“.
 
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.
I thought he was a dinosaur.
 
She committed genocide on their homeworld, leaving only a few survivors. Not exactly what I think of when I hear ”keeping the peace“.

She didn't commit it in the Prime Timeline. Though, yes, that is what happened in the Mirror Universe.

And she told L'Rell everything she needed to do to make the Klingons fall in line. The minute they turn on L'Rell, the peace with the Federation would be over. That's what I mean by keeping the peace. It's a dirty method of "keeping the peace" but Section 31 itself is dirty.

Just so we don't look at previous Star Trek through too rosey of a lens, Sisko basically ordered Worf to assassinate Gowron without putting it in so many words. He and Starfleet also went along with lying to the Romulans to drag them into the Dominion War.
 
Huh, of course she did. What difference does it make which timeline/universe it happened in?

I edited my post to include say that she did do that in the Mirror Universe. And no, it doesn't make a difference in terms of what she's done before. She has committed genocide. Nevertheless, in the Prime Universe, she's taken steps to make sure the Klingons and the Federation aren't at war.

Sure, initially she wanted to commit genocide on Qo'noS in the Prime Timeline as well but the minute she backed down, it seems like she's stuck to playing by at least Section 31's terms. She's not an Emperor in the Prime Timeline and, though not a virtue, I don't think she particularly cared what happened to Qo'noS one way or another in the Prime Timeline, but is playing within Section 31's blurry lines.

But that's not where I want to go with that in this thread. The thread is about whether or not they're completely different people from top to bottom or basically the same people who just lived through different circumstances.
 
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Thanks for the mention of Sliders. I want to get around to seeing that soon.

There is a rather decent novel called Dante's Equation, by Jane Jensen, that I have read twice so far. It's about travelling to parallel universes that are more negative or less negative by percentage. One of the universes, I believe the 30-70 toward the darker side, is like a much more brutal version of Planet of the Apes. Quite fascinating.

The other day I was reading about photon teleportation and how the idea relates to cloning, in a way. There's also the theory that a universe exists whole in all of its history and lifespan the moment it comes into being. Probably not the most realistic of ideas, but for imaginative purposes I can take that and think of a second universe that is in some kind of a proto state just before emerging and is somewhat different but is in some way influenced by the first universe and when it comes full-blown into existence it exhibits much that is superficially identical to the first universe, but altered because of its own underlying nature that keeps things from being 100% identical.

Just a little thought exercise there....:D
 
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.

The other take on this is that a Mirror Universe is what you get when you Slide into one of the infinitely many realms, but with two settings locked: you must find a you-shaped hole there, and the previous occupant of that you-hole must have been evil.

This places no demands on the local butterflies. You don't access an entire history of the universe, you only access a specific point with specific specs. Infinitely many paths could have led to that point, some involving a segue into the Belgian Global Violin Quartet Empire, purple and three-eyed Edwardians, or a peanut-shaped Sun - but the point would exist by the infinite token, and indeed infinitely many such points would exist for slight variety.

This also completely negates the nature vs. nurture argument. The specs dictate the "outcome", and the route to that outcome is ultimately uninteresting. Yes, evil people no doubt come from evil families in an evil world, so the Emperor has been "nurtured" into what she is - but she never had a choice, as instead she was chosen from an infinite lot to meet the specs on her "nature".

So it's not "the" Mirror Universe, but a smorgasbord: Burnham gets to visit the one with a Burnham-shaped hole in it, Sisko gets the one with the Sisko-sized bit missing, and Kirk in between gets the Kirkless universe. And there are infinitely many of each of those, including a set of three that seemingly falls on one and the same timeline, with Burnham's actions affecting Kirk's experience that in turn affect Sisko's; the later visits just further "select" for this serializing for the very same reason they "select" for the user-shaped holes. That is, the hole is shaped like the user, including the history of the user.

Timo Saloniemi
 
My theory is that the Mirror Universe isn't a real place, but some manifestation of the prime universe created by some omnipotent being or beings ( a kind of cosmic holodeck as it were). Therefore, any mirror character when spending significant amounts of time in the prime universe will be forced into adapting into what fits for their 'real' character in the primary universe, as Lorca did, for instance.

So I have seen, and will expect the Emperor to show more Captain Georgieou-like characteristics over time.
 
I edited my post to include say that she did do that in the Mirror Universe. And no, it doesn't make a difference in terms of what she's done before. She has committed genocide. Nevertheless, in the Prime Universe, she's taken steps to make sure the Klingons and the Federation aren't at war.

Sure, initially she wanted to commit genocide on Qo'noS in the Prime Timeline as well but the minute she backed down, it seems like she's stuck to playing by at least Section 31's terms. She's not an Emperor in the Prime Timeline and, though not a virtue, I don't think she particularly cared what happened to Qo'noS one way or another in the Prime Timeline, but is playing within Section 31's blurry lines.

But that's not where I want to go with that in this thread. The thread is about whether or not they're completely different people from top to bottom or basically the same people who just lived through different circumstances.

As far as I am concerned they aren't even people in any real-world sense. Causally, the mirror universe makes no sense, so it is likely to be something else, such as I noted above, a kind of cosmic holodeck a sort of Oz of Funhouse. For example, was Lorca the same man when he was in the prime universe, or did it reshape him, and was he reshaped back when he returned to the funhouse universe Lorca he was over there?

"I went to the Mirror Universe," said Midshipman Gale. "And you were there, and you were there and you were there! but you were all evil..."
 
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The other take on this is that a Mirror Universe is what you get when you Slide into one of the infinitely many realms, but with two settings locked: you must find a you-shaped hole there, and the previous occupant of that you-hole must have been evil.

This places no demands on the local butterflies. You don't access an entire history of the universe, you only access a specific point with specific specs. Infinitely many paths could have led to that point, some involving a segue into the Belgian Global Violin Quartet Empire, purple and three-eyed Edwardians, or a peanut-shaped Sun - but the point would exist by the infinite token, and indeed infinitely many such points would exist for slight variety.

This also completely negates the nature vs. nurture argument. The specs dictate the "outcome", and the route to that outcome is ultimately uninteresting. Yes, evil people no doubt come from evil families in an evil world, so the Emperor has been "nurtured" into what she is - but she never had a choice, as instead she was chosen from an infinite lot to meet the specs on her "nature".

So it's not "the" Mirror Universe, but a smorgasbord: Burnham gets to visit the one with a Burnham-shaped hole in it, Sisko gets the one with the Sisko-sized bit missing, and Kirk in between gets the Kirkless universe. And there are infinitely many of each of those, including a set of three that seemingly falls on one and the same timeline, with Burnham's actions affecting Kirk's experience that in turn affect Sisko's; the later visits just further "select" for this serializing for the very same reason they "select" for the user-shaped holes. That is, the hole is shaped like the user, including the history of the user.

Timo Saloniemi

Sliders doesn't make any causal sense either. I mean, they go into worlds where everything is the same, except for one thing, which was different all along and would have changed things massively over time.

Fun thought experiment, but a rather creatively stunted one.
 
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?

I certainly had trouble telling the Mirror Universe Archer from the real universe Archer.
 
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?

But are the two Kirks from The Enemy Within opposites? All I saw was one version with his aggression/empathy slider turned up to maybe 9 aggro/1 emp, and the other with his aggression/empathy slider turned emp/9 aggro 1 and how that one, allbeit extreme alteration changed their characters. Interestingly enough, The Last Ship (a kind of Star Trek knockoff in its own way) spent an entire season on that topic to mixed results.
 
I certainly had trouble telling the Mirror Universe Archer from the real universe Archer.

Basically the only real difference was that he liked to whisper a lot. I think Disco's Mirror Universe episodes knocked ENT's completely out of the water.

But are the two Kirks from The Enemy Within opposites? All I saw was one version with his aggression/empathy slider turned up to maybe 9 aggro/1 emp, and the other with his aggression/empathy slider turned emp/9 aggro 1 and how that one, allbeit extreme alteration changed their characters. Interestingly enough, The Last Ship (a kind of Star Trek knockoff in its own way) spent an entire season on that topic to mixed results.

Somewhere else in the thread, Post #13, I said that Scotty got his analysis wrong. Cutting and pasting from the other post...

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 :p). 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. :vulcan:
 
Basically the only real difference was that he liked to whisper a lot. I think Disco's Mirror Universe episodes knocked ENT's completely out of the water.



Somewhere else in the thread, Post #13, I said that Scotty got his analysis wrong. Cutting and pasting from the other post...

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 :p). 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. :vulcan:

I think Spock is more of a walking Super Ego, if we are going by Freud, as its about external suppression, which is a defense mechanism that the ego is supposed to use, but its always seemed to me that its Vulcan culture, its rules of behavior and what his dad instilled in him that he uses to provide that control, not his ego itself, which is often not straightforward and operates a whole host of tricks to manage the id, many of which are rather underhanded and manipulative.

I would posit that both Kirks are controlled, if we are going by Freud, by his Id, but different aspects of it in a full state - the "evil" version being the dominant Kirk, and the "good" version being the submissive Kirk, neither of which has an ego strong enough to control properly, because perhaps it is only operating at half strength in either body.
 
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.

As you are hinting the difference between dominance and submissiveness isn't quite the same as the difference between good and evil.
 
Sliders doesn't make any causal sense either. I mean, they go into worlds where everything is the same, except for one thing, which was different all along and would have changed things massively over time.

But that's quite irrelevant, as there is no "over time" involved there.

We only observe a snapshot in time, not centuries of history. For all we care, Mirror Kirk could be the child of a Tellarite gene smuggler and two Halfling princesses, and his five sons would later be responsible for demolishing dad's native planet Htrae; the only thing that matters is where the Mirror Universe is now, during the visit by the heroes and the audience. And any of the infinite possibilities can be arrived at, since there are infinite routes to choose from.

Timo Saloniemi
 
But that's quite irrelevant, as there is no "over time" involved there.

We only observe a snapshot in time, not centuries of history. For all we care, Mirror Kirk could be the child of a Tellarite gene smuggler and two Halfling princesses, and his five sons would later be responsible for demolishing dad's native planet Htrae; the only thing that matters is where the Mirror Universe is now, during the visit by the heroes and the audience. And any of the infinite possibilities can be arrived at, since there are infinite routes to choose from.

Timo Saloniemi
But that's quite irrelevant, as there is no "over time" involved there.

We only observe a snapshot in time, not centuries of history. For all we care, Mirror Kirk could be the child of a Tellarite gene smuggler and two Halfling princesses, and his five sons would later be responsible for demolishing dad's native planet Htrae; the only thing that matters is where the Mirror Universe is now, during the visit by the heroes and the audience. And any of the infinite possibilities can be arrived at, since there are infinite routes to choose from.

Timo Saloniemi

Yes in an infinite universe anything is possible, but likewise infinitely unlikely.
 
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?

Of course. Anyone can be either good or evil or both.


For all we care, Mirror Kirk could be the child of a Tellarite gene smuggler and two Halfling princesses, and his five sons would later be responsible for demolishing dad's native planet Htrae; the only thing that matters is where the Mirror Universe is now, during the visit by the heroes and the audience. And any of the infinite possibilities can be arrived at, since there are infinite routes to choose from.

For me, that's like saying Kirk's moral compass is only determined by his ancestry or his upbringing. That's not always the case.
 
I would posit that both Kirks are controlled, if we are going by Freud, by his Id, but different aspects of it in a full state - the "evil" version being the dominant Kirk, and the "good" version being the submissive Kirk, neither of which has an ego strong enough to control properly, because perhaps it is only operating at half strength in either body.

Half the control over one set of impulses versus half the control over an opposite set of impulses. Says a lot about the values of society, given the way those impulses are broken up: submissive is considered "good" and pro-active is considered "bad". Which is the type of judgment a society that would expect you to conform would have. So Kirk has to be a little bit of the Bad Boy to get things done, "The Enemy Within" argues.

Georgiou has to be a little bit of a Bad Girl to get things done, and has to make sure it stays a little bit, as Burnham and Leland essentially tell her in "Will You Take My Hand?" and "Point of Light".

"Well-behaved women seldom make history." -- Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, 1976

Or, to flip it the other way so it applies equally to both genders: Kirk's reputation as a rule-breaker, whether justified or not. Yet, apparently, he's idolized in the 24th Century.
 
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