Spoilers DSC: Die Standing by John Jackson Miller Review Thread

I'm imagining the Marie Antoinette of this universe is a brutal warrior queen.

I suppose it depends if the Mirror Universe is, as ENT implies, a divergence from Zefram Cochane deciding that after the Borg attack the best way to survive is to loot the technology of the Vulcans rather than go out in peace, or Earth-3 from the DCU where good is evil and evil is good....at least for humanity. The Klingons and Cardassians are the same bunch of mugattos as before.

 

Nope. It's been "evil" since day one

 

Enterprise doesn't imply that all. In fact it does the reverse, Mirror Phlox says Terran classical literature is darker than Prime. Unless the empire rewrote all the classics as part of their propaganda.

 

Except for Shakespeare.

 

Of course, his works are equally grim in both universes.

 

I do not want read Mirror Stephen King's books.

 

He writes the Sweet Valley High books.

 

Probably more like Buffy in the Mirror Universe.

 

I admit, I feel like the Empress is a very weird character that I feel essentially has the same problem as Spike and Anya in Buffy the Vampire Slayer [edit: jinx!]. I like Spike. I like Anya. I love seeing them play off the Scooby Gang. However, their presence causes a severe disruption to the believability and authenticity of the universe. I never could buy Xander and Anya because, in the back of my head, I'm thinking, "Anya is a mass murderer of thousands of people. She is a monster and unrepentantly so."

It's like Bill and Ted hanging around with Gengjis Khan. He's hilarious in the movie because it's a comedy except the dude has murdered millions.

So, it's weird on DISCO that they basically have her hanging around talking about cannibalism and genocide and they go, "Oh that Empress. Isn't she wacky."

It's also weird the show kind of ignores that she only exists and is free because Michael Burnham is possessing some serious mommy issues. I mean, ones that dramatically impact her ability to function as an officer.

Ah, right. Well that's a shame. I guess it is Earth-3. Honestly, I wish it had just been a point of divergence.

 

No, you really don't. And neither do I.

 

There his early career was terrible but the last 15 years have been amazing.

 

I've floated various "point of divergence" hypotheses before. Perhaps the Mirror Universe was the one in which "Requiem for a Martian" was not a hoax, but was a real TOS episode that discredited the whole franchise. Perhaps it was the universe in which George W. Bush got reelected. Perhaps it's the one in which Donald Trump gets reelected.

Or perhaps (dare I suggest a religious possibility) it's the one in which Jesus of Nazareth was the expected "Judah Maccabee on steroids" warrior-king, instead of being a man of absolute peace.

 

A favorite of mine is that Khan Noonian Singh won the Eugenics Wars and was the first Terran Emperor.

 

The opening credits for the Enterprise MU episodes show the animates graphic of Earth spinning the opposite direction. I always took this for a literal representation, meaning that in the MU the sun rises in the west and sets in the east. I imagine that back in caveman days, a critical decision was made by cavemen deciding to travel in the direction of the sun. In the Prime Universe, this ultimately resulted in the Federation. In the MU, it ultimately resulted in the Terran Empire.

 

That doesn't make any sense, though. In order for Earth to have a retrograde rotation, the very protoplanetary collisions that formed the planet in the first place would've had to be massively different, which means the planet that resulted would be massively different (literally, different in mass, as well as in orbital configuration) and might not even be habitable, let alone having the same familiar continents and evolving the human species in the same way.

 

Unless the landmasses are simply upside down, with respect to the direction of rotation (in which case, the directions of both rotation and revolution would be retrograde with respect to the landmasses).

Or maybe the whole universe (and all the galaxies and star systems therein) rotates in the opposite direction.

 

Same answer. Even aside from the improbability that a different process of continental drift could just coincidentally produce the exact inverse of the current configuration, the physical forces involved are of such magnitude that transforming them to that degree would've altered Earth's entire geological and evolutionary history beyond recognition.

The MU has to be just a parallel timeline the same as any other. Even calling it a "mirror universe" is taking the episode title too literally. The title "Mirror, Mirror" comes from Snow White and the invocation to the Magic Mirror which reveals everyone's innermost truth. The point of the episode was that the universe of the Empire exposed the truth of human savagery that we keep buried beneath the surface. That's why it was so easy for Kirk et al. to convincingly act like savages, because we already have that within us. So it's not about diametric opposites -- the whole point is how little change would be needed.

Plus, as we've seen, it's only humanity that's different. Other cultures like the Halkans are the same; the only differences in the history of the Vulcans, Bajorans, etc. come from the differences in their interaction with humanity, having to cope with an aggressive power rather than a friendly one. So it's not a whole-universe change, but one specific to humanity alone.

 

I've often wondered if it was a universe where the Roman Empire never fell. I've always gotten a little bit of Roman vibe from the Empire.

 

That seems to be what DSC Season 1 aimed for: that the divergence began at Rome. The transition from Republic to Empire might even have been accelerated in some way.

 

Unlikely. More probable that the Terran Empire just did what most Western cultures did and adopted elements of Rome to paint itself as an inheritor thereof. (Just look at the architecture of any American or British government building...)

Besides, it's ethnocentric to assume that Rome was the only empire that mattered. The Han Dynasty in China was just as big, or bigger, at the same time that Rome thrived. And though many dynasties have risen and fallen since then, the case can be made that Chinese imperial culture persisted pretty much continuously up until the Communist revolution (and arguably the Chinese Communist Party is just the next imperial dynasty, for all its pretensions otherwise). And until modern times, I daresay Chinese civilization had a more widespread influence on human history than European civilization did. Indeed, much of modern European history is a response to Chinese civilization. The whole reason the Industrial Revolution happened was because Europe envied China's wealth and was motivated to devise new manufacturing methods to compete with Chinese goods and faster transportation methods to facilitate trade with the East. And the Enlightenment-era thinkers of Europe who invented modern democracy were motivated in part by Confucian teachings about how the responsibility of a ruler was to the well-being of the governed.

Besides, would it really have made that much difference to world history if the Roman Empire as a political entity had continued? If the premise is that it would have continued to expand until it conquered the world, that's ludicrous, because any empire that expands too far is doomed to collapse (a point "Mirror, Mirror" made explicitly), and of course there were empires in China, India, and elsewhere that would've had their own well-armed objections to the idea. So it probably couldn't have grown much more, just entrenched and stabilized while other empires and states developed much as before. Besides, by the time the Western Roman Empire fell, it had been thoroughly Christianized, and Christendom continued to be a dominant force in Europe for centuries thereafter, as well as an imperial force in its conflicts with the Islamic world such as the Reconquista and the Crusades. Heck, most European rulers painted themselves as successors to Rome, and Rome still had considerable political influence through the Pope. So I'm not sure the persistence of the literal imperial state would've had that much of a practical difference on the way history unfolded, either in Europe or certainly where the rest of the world was concerned.