One thing I've tried to wrap my head around was the differences in exactly how the Confederacy expresses xenophobia, authoritarianism, and general violent expansionary behavior versus the mirror universe's particular flavor of those themes. I want to think they aren't necessarily as bad (somehow) as the Terran Empire because if they are then that means the humans in the prime universe and timeline are only good because circumstances have permitted them to be good - not because humanity naturally gravitates toward being 'good'. I feel like this negates a lot of the messaging around humanity evolving to better ourselves and canonizes Quark's speech in The Siege of AR-558 about Humanity being just as monstrous as any other race should circumstances prompt it. Anyone else feel like this negated a bit of the 'hopeful future' vibe in lieu of a 'well, maybe we'll get lucky in the future' vibe?
Confederacy as Commentary on How Bad the Prime Universe Could Be
- Thread starter MikeReed013
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I think it's nice to believe that humanity gravitates toward being 'good', but I also think that it takes a hell of a lot of work and vigilance.
Off the top of my head, then, perhaps the MU timeline is one where humans were less prone to gravitate toward being 'good', while the Confederacy timeline is one where humans ultimately didn't put in the work and vigilance needed to remain good.
Off the top of my head, then, perhaps the MU timeline is one where humans were less prone to gravitate toward being 'good', while the Confederacy timeline is one where humans ultimately didn't put in the work and vigilance needed to remain good.
I always had the impression that Mirror Universe humans are basically physically identical to the Prime Universe humans (aside from occasionally having more sensitive eyesight). Like you say, Star Trek's always had messages about humanity being monstrous in the right circumstances, and the Federation's Earth has all the same horrors in its past as ours does. Maybe humans will physically evolve into awesome energy beings some day, but in Picard's time it's pretty much just their society that's evolved. It seems to me that his Star Trek future comes from people in his past like Kirk staying true to their morals, doing the right thing, and inspiring others to do so as well. We learn from example. Also it's easy to be a saint in paradise, so that helps.
Picard s2 kind of messed up the message by saying "Maybe we'll be lucky enough to find something awesome on a space mission that will save us!" but generally Trek's philosophy seems to be 'if we look after each other, make intelligent choices, and work towards fixing our problems, then our children can inherit a brighter future and be better people'. If we don't, then we get the Mirror Universe or the Confederation.
Star Trek is one of the few sci-fi franchises to imagine that we can sort ourselves out as a society and I think that's incredibly hopeful. And maybe the Mirror Universe can find its happy future someday as well.
Picard s2 kind of messed up the message by saying "Maybe we'll be lucky enough to find something awesome on a space mission that will save us!" but generally Trek's philosophy seems to be 'if we look after each other, make intelligent choices, and work towards fixing our problems, then our children can inherit a brighter future and be better people'. If we don't, then we get the Mirror Universe or the Confederation.
Star Trek is one of the few sci-fi franchises to imagine that we can sort ourselves out as a society and I think that's incredibly hopeful. And maybe the Mirror Universe can find its happy future someday as well.
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Hmmm.
Confederation and Empire timelines...... didn't have Section 31 working in the dark to make it all believable.
Once corruption has taken over, it is hard to combat it, let alone hide it anymore.
The Federation is good because it thinks it has always been good. It has security and principals and never had to publicly choose between them.
Confederation and Empire timelines...... didn't have Section 31 working in the dark to make it all believable.
Once corruption has taken over, it is hard to combat it, let alone hide it anymore.
The Federation is good because it thinks it has always been good. It has security and principals and never had to publicly choose between them.
Aliens: "Why do humans keep killing each other?"
Humans: "Practice makes perfect".
Humans: "Practice makes perfect".
I definitely saw Confederacy Picard and decided that between him, Shinzon and the Mirrorverse Big Poppa Picard from the comics, it's very lucky we got the rare "good" version.
If a good outcome really is that rare, maybe that's why everyone is so concerned with the prime timeline, God like aliens, entire time wars.
If it is really that rare, then the temporal Cold war to preserve the federation both in its formation and postburn becomes a thousandfold more important than we thought.
It also adds to my personal theory that section 31 is there to help preserve the path to the 31st century.
If it is really that rare, then the temporal Cold war to preserve the federation both in its formation and postburn becomes a thousandfold more important than we thought.
It also adds to my personal theory that section 31 is there to help preserve the path to the 31st century.
Every time we get an evil universe, most of the character-analogues there are also evil. That seems a clear nurture-over-nature argument, and a statement that no, humans do not inherently tend towards good; they’re shaped by the society that raises them. We all want to think we’d be the dissidents in an evil society, but without being raised to be, most of us probably wouldn’t.
I don’t think this negates anything. If you want people to be better, Trek says, make your social institutions better.
(The Confederation and the Empire strike me as pretty much the same thing as each other, and equally evil. Maybe the Empire’s more about conquering while the Confederation’s more about destroying, but they’re both awful through and through.)
I don’t think this negates anything. If you want people to be better, Trek says, make your social institutions better.
(The Confederation and the Empire strike me as pretty much the same thing as each other, and equally evil. Maybe the Empire’s more about conquering while the Confederation’s more about destroying, but they’re both awful through and through.)
There was a Shatnerverse novel where it turned out the Mirror Universe was the control universe and ours was the one will all the fiddling from the Preservers. Everything was just an experiment from advanced beings.
I did like how it explained the duplicate Earths from TOS, and mentioned duplicate Vulcans and another Andor spotted in the galaxy.
Was that the part of the Mirror Universe explanation? I thought the Preservers and duplicate planets was a separate thing, with the Shatnerverse showing the split between the normal and mirror universe was Zefram Cochrane flipping a coin to decide whether or not to tell the Vulcans about the Borg, and if he did, society became more militaristic to prepare for them.
It was the Preserver trilogy, but it's been well over a decade since I read them so details are a bit hazy.
My main problem with the Confederation being in an alternate timeline of the prime universe is that it implies no amount of effort can make our good natures win out over our darker impulses if we don't get our hands on some magic, atmosphere cleaning/ozone rebuilding space bacteria. It paints humanity as naturally hostile with the capacity for only situational niceness provided the universe arranges for a line of easy mode discoveries to drop into our lap.
I mean, they have replicators, warp reactors, and presumably the same fusion reactors that power prime timeline impulse drives (and everything else) by the Confederation's time - the only excuse for any 'want' to exist on Earth at that point is people want it that way. We ended up with effectively infinite energy, effectively unlimited and instantaneous production of any food/tool/consumer good anyone could desire and what is humanity's response? Nah, our sky's still wonky - subjugation for all the aliens it is!
The bleakness for me isn't that Humanity isn't painted as naturally good - it's that it's painted as naturally authoritarian and evil all the way up to Picard's time and only by a stroke of luck in finding that microorganism do we go with kindness. It's basically saying the only reason prime timeline Humans don't terrorize the galaxy is that we're comfy and couldn't be bothered.
I think I see where you’re coming from, but I don’t read the situation as “finding the microbes made good humanity happen” —though I can see how you could —but rather that it could have gone either way depending on whose voices ended up louder in the end. For some reason, in this particular instance, the Europan discovery happened to start a long chain of dominoes that helped lead to humanity improving, and without that particular instance the chain of dominoes would have happened to fall the other way in the end. But it’s a butterfly-wing situation; it’s not an Edith Keeler thing where the actions and results involved are super obvious and direct. In either version of the timeline, humanity could have gone either way; it just didn’t, in this particular variant.
EDIT: Actually, I’m reminded of the old DC TNG comic where Q prevents Picard’s long-lost younger brother from dying, so of course he grows up to be a galactic dictator making Starfleet evil, etc. This isn’t like that.
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Even "Star Trek," with all its optimism, recognizes how easily humanity gravitates towards bigotry and violence. Earth becoming a peaceful utopia is treated as somewhat of a miracle, after its long history of violence. This is mentioned throughout the franchise plenty of times. So it's no surprise that so many alternate timelines and universes show how easily Earth could have turned out for the worst.
On the plus side, so far it's also showed that when humanity finally figured out how to reach their utopia, the civilisation they built is extremely resilient to corruption and decline. The Mirror Universe and Confederation are examples of how things could've gone much worse for the Prime Universe, but even the dark timelines aren't not beyond hope and when they get they eventually get their Federation figured out they may be able to keep it for thousands of years.
I would argue that we have seen a whole lot of corruption and that they merely maintain that facade through Black ops outfits and temporal policing.
Who knows how many times it has fallen and been repaired through outside machinations and we have no idea.
There have been a few badmirals and infiltrators but there's always a Picard to sort them out.
It's one of the reasons that I love TOS so much. It was honest about human vices as well as the virtues. It didn't look at the MU and go, "You're so beneath us." They looked at them and said "we could be come this, or we could become better."
It's why the idea of "evolved" humanity gets under my skin. People can become better, and often times humanity learns and grows. But, as much as we like to learn the easy way, we often need to learn the hard way, through pain, challenges and difficulties. The alternate timelines are ones were often human vice wins out over human virtue.
I don't know. I feel DS9 may have nailed this with the admiralty's attitude toward S31: "We don't like them and we don't approve of their methods and we publicly condemn them...but we're at war and what they're doing is helping us, so we've got more important things to worry about. Don't worry though; we'll get to them later!"
Though, given Odo's attitude toward S31 (at least, when it involved his people), I rather wonder how he would react if he ever found out about Sisko's actions in "In the Pale Moonlight".
You know, some people say that the concept of Section 31 has done more to damage Star Trek than improve it in the long term... and those people are me.
