Mirror universe, Day to day and Civilian life

[WesleysDisciple]

something even the novels dont seem to tell us, is what are day to day and civilian life like in the mirror universe?

How different is what we'd see on TV, or such.

Are Wedding Ceremonys, more focused on pledges of obedience... lots more I could ask but you get the idea I think.

 

[yousirname]

Instead of waking up in the morning, brewing a pot of coffee and fixing bacon and eggs, people wake up in the EVIL morning, brew a pot of EVIL coffee and fix EVIL bacon and EVIL eggs.

 

[iguana_tonante]

Eating bacon and eggs in the morning is evil even in this universe.

Croissant and cappuccino, now that's good.

 

[F. King Daniel]

In Mirror Universe, eggs and bacon eat YOU!

 

[Metryq]

Realistically? I think the mirror universe would be unsustainable. "The Enemy Within" is also a dramatic conceit, yet is a metaphor for the human psyche. That the mirror universe would be "just like" our own, only evil, is ridiculous.

Common political labels, such as party names or even descriptors (liberal, conservative) turn over so rapidly that they serve little purpose, except to get people riled up. I prefer terms like "creator" and "destroyer," although they seem a bit colorful. The mirror Starfleet are depicted as destroyers. They might last for a time, riding on the backs of a civilization that had been created. But eventually they would consume everything, and the system would collapse. (The Nazis would be the closest analogy.) In the climactic transporter room scene, Kirk tells "evil" Spock that it can't last:

KIRK: The inevitable outcome?

SPOCK: The Empire shall be overthrown, of course.

KIRK: The illogic of waste, Mister Spock. The waste of lives, potential, resources, time. I submit to you that your Empire is illogical because it cannot endure. I submit that you are illogical to be a willing part of it.

Unless one happens to be a collaborator, civilian life is probably short and miserable, and everyone has his own, personalized agonizer and booth.

 

[The Wormhole]

Imagine this, a man in the Prime Universe goes into his bathroom and shaves his face. When he's all clean-shaven he walks out, grabs his briefcase and carries on with his day. The screen flips and we see the Mirror Universe, shaving his face. When he's done and has a neatly trimmed goatee he walks out, grabs his dagger and carries on with his day.

 

[Sci]

I imagine that day-to-day life in the Terran Empire for most people is akin to day-to-day life in the Third Reich, in Franco's Spain, Chile under Pinochet, or Argentina under the military junta. It does seem to be a totalitarian state; it doesn't seem to have any egalitarian rhetoric, implying that it's not what we would call a "nominally leftist" dictatorship.

 

[WesleysDisciple]

Somehow, not sure why, but somehow, Im willing to bet, that Civilians are probaly not required to carry agonizers...

But I do think Agonizers, and agony booths, are used on Civilians yes.


Im thinking that Schools probaly have uniforms, liberal use of Corporal punishment, And Shameless propaganda.

schools for children of privilige, as opposed to public schools, probaly differ only in that the propaganda, is designed a bit more to make people into individual achievers, and less into making people feel that their special by playing ANY role, in the TErran war machine, even if its by working at a Restaraunt, That workers at a factory sometimes go to.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

I doubt it's as bad as, say, Warhammer 40,000, which is basically non-stop bloodshed from birth to death. Life in the Terran Empire is probably good for collaborators and loyalists, bad for revolutionaries.

 

[scotpens]

The really important question is: In the Mirror Universe, do civilian women go around in public with their bellybuttons showing?

 

[The Wormhole]

The really important question is: In the Mirror Universe, do civilian women go around in public with their bellybuttons showing?

Yes. And they are all lesbians or at least bisexual.

 

[Temis the Vorta]

Instead of waking up in the morning, brewing a pot of coffee and fixing bacon and eggs, people wake up in the EVIL morning, brew a pot of EVIL coffee and fix EVIL bacon and EVIL eggs.

Like this?

[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ej8-Rqo-VT4[/yt]

 

[Temis the Vorta]

I imagine that day-to-day life in the Terran Empire for most people is akin to day-to-day life in the Third Reich, in Franco's Spain, Chile under Pinochet, or Argentina under the military junta. It does seem to be a totalitarian state; it doesn't seem to have any egalitarian rhetoric, implying that it's not what we would call a "nominally leftist" dictatorship.

The MU always struck me as more piratical than totalitarian in the sense we're used to, the notion of some government with total control over people. In TOS especially, the structure seemed a lot looser and more chaotic, with people being encouraged to commit murder in order to advance.

Really, it doesn't seem like a society that could exist on an ongoing basis, but assuming it could, it's more like libertarianism or anarchy run amok than fascism or communism. Or even the ultimate in laissez-faire capitalism, with the entrepreneurial spirit encouraged to a murderous degree.

In other words, if Americans invented a totalitarian system, it would be the MU.

 

[Sci]

In other words, if Americans invented a totalitarian system, it would be the MU.

We did. It was called slavery.

Also, the Terran Empire is established to be controlled by an Emperor or Empress in "In A Mirror, Darkly."

 

[Shawnster]

In other words, if Americans invented a totalitarian system, it would be the MU.

We did. It was called slavery.

Anglo had slaves before whites settled in North America. In other words, Americans didn't invent slavery.

 

[TheRoyalFamily]

I've always seen the MU as a place where the universe was ever so slightly more aggressive. The Murder Promotion was probably just the extreme end of "person moves up when the one ahead of them dies." That's not unusual, even in today's society. We just, as a society, look down on murder, and think it's a thing we should investigate and prosecute. The MU folks (at least in TOS time) didn't put that high a priority on that. That, and the MU people put more stock into power, and somewhat less into arbitrary rules made by dead people than we do: in IaMD, if Archer had been successful in his mutiny, but not capturing the Defiant, he would have been prosecuted and executed when/if he got back home. They still had rules made by living people; otherwise, their society wouldn't have advanced. It was when that rule of law fell apart that the Empire fell. However, Smiley and Worf both seemed to have things under control, and there didn't seem to be too much actual backstabbery (Kira was just a psychopath).

In other words, if Americans invented a totalitarian system, it would be the MU.

We did. It was called slavery.

Anglo had slaves before whites settled in North America. In other words, Americans didn't invent slavery.

Slavery has been around since walking apes figured out they could own stuff.

 

[Sci]

We did. It was called slavery.

Anglo had slaves before whites settled in North America. In other words, Americans didn't invent slavery.

Slavery has been around since walking apes figured out they could own stuff.

The American slave system was uniquely different and oppressive on a level its ancestral systems had never achieved.

 

[scotpens]

The American slave system was uniquely different and oppressive on a level its ancestral systems had never achieved.

That's a topic for a TNZ thread, isn't it?

Anyway, where were we?

Oh, yes -- BELLYBUTTONS!

 

[iguana_tonante]

The MU always struck me as more piratical than totalitarian in the sense we're used to, the notion of some government with total control over people. In TOS especially, the structure seemed a lot looser and more chaotic, with people being encouraged to commit murder in order to advance.

Really, it doesn't seem like a society that could exist on an ongoing basis, but assuming it could, it's more like libertarianism or anarchy run amok than fascism or communism. Or even the ultimate in laissez-faire capitalism, with the entrepreneurial spirit encouraged to a murderous degree.

In other words, if Americans invented a totalitarian system, it would be the MU.

That's pretty much how I saw it, and it made the Empire more interesting, original, and flamboyant than your run-of-the-mill fictional dictatorship. Compare with much more stereotypical (and duller) tyranny of the Klingon-Cardassian Alliance.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

Realistically? I think the mirror universe would be unsustainable.

Exactly. It certainly wouldn't be sustainable according to the principles that govern the Prime Universe.

---

Looking at it from another point of view, one of the problems that none of the MU sequels ever grasped so to speak was that the MU made the most sense only in the context of the events of Mirror, Mirror involving the Halkans. The MU was a reflection of the Prime Universe, centered at those events, with the Halkans themselves as a fixed point, essentially identical in both universes.

That inversion makes sense from a literary perspective, to provide a pulpy "what if" scenario: What if the Federation took dilithium crystals by force?

Until the MU sequels came upon us, I always interpreted Scotty's technobabble about how the local field density between the universes was increasing to mean that the two universes were diverging, and once they had separated too far, they would never be similar enough to transport between again. The flip side of that was that the two universes had never been similar enough to transport between before, either, until they coincided closely enough in their respective Halkan incidents.

This whole business with the two universes having similar characters in various centuries, oh that just happened to be our main characters, never minding that most of the other people around them must have been dying off out of synchronization, if not completely different, threw any last vestige of sensibility out the window, as far as I'm concerned. The DS9 MU episodes are just gratuitous garbage.

ENT's IAMD was at least fun by comparison, warranting multiple fangirly squees. And its opening theme rocked.

---

To reconcile all that, we're back to our currents in time idea from The City on the Edge of Forever and Star Trek (2009). Somehow, both sweeping historical trends and important individuals in history occur simultaneously in both universes.

And this is the problem with revisiting the MU: day to day life in both universes is irrelevant, in the sense that individual choices don't alter the flow of history; the two universes are fated to stay synchronized as Bizarro-like versions of each other. Your day to day life is just whatever realizes that fate.

And this implies that human nature is fundamentally different in the MU. The two universes just couldn't stay synchronized otherwise. Additionally, assuming that the Prime Universe is logical, there can't ultimately be what we consider logic in the MU; in the MU there can be only a Bizarro kind of logic.