Spoilers Discovery and the Novelverse - TV show discussion thread

Spoiler

I'm going to assume the show people told Dayton about this twist before he started writing.

 

^ They told me you were the funny one.

 

That doesn't make sense. If the MU were literally another universe with different physical laws, it probably wouldn't even have stars and planets, let alone identical individual humans. The laws of physics are so precisely calibrated that even a slight change would make life as we know it impossible. At the very least, a slight change in any physical constant would cause things like star formation, planetary motion, molecular biology, etc. to happen slightly differently, so it's impossible that they'd produce the same results right down to having the same individuals being born and designing the same starships.

The only thing the MU can possibly be is an alternate timeline -- a different quantum state of our physical universe, having exactly identical physical laws but differing only in the course of history. Nothing else makes sense. Burnham's observation about the quality of the starlight could only have been figurative or psychosomatic.

Bashir said in "Crossover" that he learned about the Mirror Universe at Starfleet Academy. So it was declassified by the 2360s at the latest.

 

She had a standalone Challenger novel in development -- she talked about it in interviews, with Starfleet assigning a new ship to the New Earth sector while Nick Keller basically becomes a privateer with Challenger -- but, obviously, that never came out.

It was a novelization on a very tight schedule, so the vetting may not have been as rigorous. It may have been as little, "We know what the story in this is, and this looks like a publishable manuscript, so send it to press!"

I have wondered over the years if Carey put in the asides and the meta-commentary into the manuscript as a way of finding some enjoyment in a writing process that she clearly didn't enjoy on the assumption that John Ordover would red pen the living shit out of that manuscript, only because of the time pressures that didn't happen. That wouldn't be the first time something that was never meant to go to press went to press, nor will it be the last.

 

Spoiler

So we had Emperor Philippa Georgiou Augustus Iaponius Centarius somewhere in between Sato I and Sato II. This seems like a manageable thing to reconcile. Either she came in between those two, or Sato II was somehow temporarily deposed and exiled, then came back to power.

But for some dumbass reason the Mirror universe humans are semi-nocturnal, which is less manageable. To be fair, the sets for Mirror Terok Nor did seem dimmer than usual, but I don't recall the Mirror Defiant (NX-74205) being darker. I've been pretty pleased with Discovery overall but that is maybe the most idiotic thing they've added to canon.

 

I remember hearing about something similar, where a newspaper or magazine writer wanted to prove his editor was a lazy sloth who didn't care about his job, so instead of the article he was supposed to write he wrote a rant about how much of a lazy stupid jackass the editor was, and sure enough it got printed.

 

Spoiler: DSC spoilers

Between Sato II and Sato III, I think it was -- with Sato II getting pillow-smothered by Sato III in 2267.

Also, the both the ISS Enterprise in TOS and the USS Defiant on ENT each appeared to possess "normal" lighting-schemes pretty much identical to their Prime Universe counterparts -- it doesn't seem that Archer and Sato adjusted the lighting when they seized command of the Defiant, for example.

 

I'm still going to say spore drive takes the prize there.

 

Fair point.

 

Instantaneous interstellar drive based on magic mushrooms? It's one of the most random ideas I've ever heard.

 

This Mirror Universe arc really brings back memories of the old DC comics Mirror Universe Saga.

 

Yeah, what caused them to think of that? Eating magic mushrooms?

 

If a comic book ran with that, I wouldn't even look twice at it. It's something Warren Ellis would do. See Supergod , for instance.

 

Star Trek did it and I didn't think twice, beyond the obvious conflicts with shows set chronologically later.

Come on guys, Genesis, Red Matter, warp drive powered by sentient alien corpses on the Equinox, Haribo brains in a jar placing bets on fights to the death... Trek does totally whacky stuff over and over and over again, why does anyone still expect a high standard of realistic science from this show?

 

Not so much "expect" as "prefer." Star Trek was one of the first SFTV shows to make any attempt at scientific credibility, to have actual science consultants involved rather than just making up random nonsense and treating outer space as a magic fairyland. The only previous shows to do that were the '50s shows Men into Space and Tom Corbett, Space Cadet, IIRC. Sure, TOS took a lot of dramatic license with things like humanoid aliens and psi powers, but when I was growing up, it was just about the only show on TV that got even the grade-level basics right, like understanding what the word "galaxy" meant or that you needed some kind of special faster-than-light drive to make interstellar journeys. To a space-loving, hard SF-reading kid like me, Star Trek was the only refuge of borderline scientific competence in a media landscape of pure idiocy. And that mattered to me. The believability of the Trek universe compared to other SF franchises was one of its most appealing features, because my real life sucked, so I needed to believe that a better future was really possible, that it wasn't just some nonsense fantasy but was a world I could see myself actually inhabiting. And I wasn't the only one. Part of the reason Trek was so much more popular and enduring than the likes of Lost in Space and Battlestar Galactica was the care it put into making its world feel believable and grounded -- at least on a character level if not always on a scientific one. Audiences connected to it more strongly, cared about it more deeply, because of the care it put into its worldbuilding, because of how real it felt to them compared to the other nonsense out there.

So when Trek producers approach it as just one more generic SFTV fantasy with no grounding in reality, it takes away one of the things about Trek that was most important to me as a child and an adolescent, as well as one of the things that made it special and successful in the first place. So naturally I find that disappointing.

 

Not technically a novel, but:

http://trekcore.com/blog/2018/01/second-star-trek-discovery-comic-series-succession-due-in-april/

The next DSC comic story line will be set in the mirror Universe

 

Isn't *The Light of Kahless* behind schedule? First issue's indicia registers it as an October release, but it came out in November. Second issue is only coming out this week.

 

That article says it will "follow" the MU storyline on the show, which implies it's set after it. And with a title like "Succession" it kind of hints at how that storyline will be resolved.

I'm kind of surprised they allowed this information to be released this early.

 

"Follow" is TrekCore's word, not the announcement's. Based on the other four announced tie-in stories to Discovery, I'd assume it's another prequel, showing the Emperor's origin story.