There is more than one mirror universe. We've got one with an extant Terran Empire in TNG: Q & A, and that DS9 novel where Sisko meets his counterparts.
The DTI's Stance on the MU
- Thread starter Captain Clark Terrell
- Start date
There is more than one mirror universe. We've got one with an extant Terran Empire in TNG: Q & A, and that DS9 novel where Sisko meets his counterparts.
And two MU's in DS9 - one where the Klingon/Cardassian Alliance has cloaking devices, and one where they don't. 
I´m inclined to agree. But the MU, IMO, is essentially the same, only interpreted differently. On-Screen MU and Litverse MU, for instance. Jadzia Dax being joined (on-screen) or not (novels).
Importance has nothing to do with it. We saw in "Parallels" that two universes can differ in things as simple as where a painting was hung. The premise is that every decision causes a divergence. Many-Worlds quantum theory says that every single duality of state in every single quantum particle creates its own split between universes, so it's definitely not about importance. There's not some threshold of impact that has to be reached before it takes effect (except in the Quantum Darwinist interpretation, but that's another conversation); the hypothesis is that it happens every single time. Fiction merely tweaks that hypothesis so that macroscopic, classical events like human decisions or coin flips cause the splitting rather than subatomic, quantum events.
Which is the same response to those who want to claim that the Abramsverse is a completely unconnected reality. That's narratively unsatisfying and unparsimonious, because it robs all the meaning from the inclusion of Spock Prime, who was intended to be "our" Spock rather than some other-universe duplicate.
But since we're talking about splitting timelines, it's easy enough to conclude that those different Mirror Universes diverged from each other after the events of "Mirror, Mirror." Just as the Prime and Abrams timelines share Enterprise as part of their common history since they didn't split until afterward, so all the 24th-century Mirror Universes share "Mirror, Mirror" as their common origin -- not alternate versions of "Mirror, Mirror," but the same single event, which later spawned multiple divergent timelines, because timelines are always spontaneously branching off of one another.
Of course many, if indeed not most, events in "Enterprise" flowed from interference in the timeline by "future guy" and the "sphere builders" (Future Guy and the Sphere Builders would be a great band name by the way.).
I've always felt that the events in TOS resulted from the "Enterprise" we didn't see, the one where the timeline progressed without said interference.
Maybe "Spock Prime" wasn't.
(Ducks to avoid thrown objects.)
I've always felt that the events in TOS resulted from the "Enterprise" we didn't see, the one where the timeline progressed without said interference.
Maybe "Spock Prime" wasn't.
(Ducks to avoid thrown objects.)
^But the events of TOS also resulted from a history where Kirk and Spock were "always" a part of the events surrounding Gary Seven in 1968, where Spock was "always" required to go back to his own childhood to save his own life, etc. Not to mention that Scotty caused transparent aluminum to be invented, Picard saved Guinan's life in the 1890s, and Quark and Rom were the Roswell aliens. The Trek timeline as we knew it has always been shaped by intervention from the future; ENT did not introduce anything new in that respect. There was no "original," temporally uncontaminated timeline; causality loops were always a part of it. If we learn about a time-travel loop in a new episode or film, that doesn't mean it wasn't already part of history; it just means we didn't know about it until then.
The intent of ENT's creators was always to show us the events that led to the timeline of TOS, TNG, DS9, and VGR, not to branch off into some alternate one. The Temporal Cold War arc was pushed on the producers by the network over their protests; they wanted to tell the actual story of how the Trek universe as we know it was created. We see this particularly clearly in the fourth season, where so many episodes show us the foundations of the Trek universe we know from the later series (a process I'm continuing in Rise of the Federation). The same arguments of parsimony and narrative satisfaction that Idran mentioned apply here as well. All these timelines are meant to be related to each other, and they lose significance if they're not.
The intent of ENT's creators was always to show us the events that led to the timeline of TOS, TNG, DS9, and VGR, not to branch off into some alternate one. The Temporal Cold War arc was pushed on the producers by the network over their protests; they wanted to tell the actual story of how the Trek universe as we know it was created. We see this particularly clearly in the fourth season, where so many episodes show us the foundations of the Trek universe we know from the later series (a process I'm continuing in Rise of the Federation). The same arguments of parsimony and narrative satisfaction that Idran mentioned apply here as well. All these timelines are meant to be related to each other, and they lose significance if they're not.
^^Except that there was no timeline without interference. We're conditioned to think of cause-and-effect relationships as being one-way, meaning that the cause always precedes the effect. But time travel makes it possible for an effect to precede a cause.
The interference from the future was part of what was supposed to happen as part of the normal flow of time. Events may have unfolded differently without said interference, but that doesn't mean the interference was a departure from a previous reality in which no interference occurred.
Edit: Looks like Christopher beat me to the punch.
--Sran
The interference from the future was part of what was supposed to happen as part of the normal flow of time. Events may have unfolded differently without said interference, but that doesn't mean the interference was a departure from a previous reality in which no interference occurred.
Edit: Looks like Christopher beat me to the punch.
--Sran
^Exactly. (Sran, you were responding to E-DUB's post, right? You and I are both saying basically the same thing.)
Yes, I was. We were posting at the same time.
I'll add that as the events of "Trials and Tribble-ations" differ slightly from those of "The Trouble with Tribbles" that DS9's episode depicts the events as they actually occurred. The elder Darwin was always supposed to travel back in time, and Sisko and his crew were always meant to prevent Kirk's death and help him expose the younger Darwin as a Klingon spy.
Any other discrepancies between the episodes likely result from the different perspectives of the characters--as Sisko's crew viewed the events as having already occurred.
--Sran
^Well, there are a couple of clear discrepancies between the two, for instance, Bashir and O'Brien being chewed out by Kirk when they weren't there in the first go-around. I tend to assume there was a slight temporal divergence created, but it was minor enough that the timelines reconverged.
I certainly don't wish to disagree with Christopher, whose work I've enjoyed immensely, however I kind of have to.
In "Trials and Tribbleations", Dulmer and Lucsly differentiated between "predestination paradoxes" in which time travel is needed to make sure events occur as recorded (the business with Data's head, for instance) and other events that can muck up the timeline.
If the events we saw in "Enterprise" were the genesis of TOS, and by extension TNG/DS9/VOY, then why in "The Enemy" when Picard was mentioning "sneak attacks" did he mention Pearl Harbor and "Station Salem One" and not the Xindi attack on Earth which only killed seven million people!
Why was the fake Starship in "Hope and Fear" called "Dauntless-NX-01-A" and not Enterprise? And why didn't anybody on Voyager say something to the effect of, "It's gotta be a hoax, everybody knows that the original NX-01-A was Archer's Enterprise?"
In the final analysis I guess it doesn't much matter. You pays your money, you takes your choice.
In "Trials and Tribbleations", Dulmer and Lucsly differentiated between "predestination paradoxes" in which time travel is needed to make sure events occur as recorded (the business with Data's head, for instance) and other events that can muck up the timeline.
If the events we saw in "Enterprise" were the genesis of TOS, and by extension TNG/DS9/VOY, then why in "The Enemy" when Picard was mentioning "sneak attacks" did he mention Pearl Harbor and "Station Salem One" and not the Xindi attack on Earth which only killed seven million people!
Why was the fake Starship in "Hope and Fear" called "Dauntless-NX-01-A" and not Enterprise? And why didn't anybody on Voyager say something to the effect of, "It's gotta be a hoax, everybody knows that the original NX-01-A was Archer's Enterprise?"
In the final analysis I guess it doesn't much matter. You pays your money, you takes your choice.
Because this is a fictional show and Enterprise didn't exist yet in real life when those episodes were made. As Watsonian as I am, sometimes the only answer is Doylist. It's the same reason that Spock was half-Vulcanian, that Ro was a Bajora, and and that Odan had ridges.
Actually, it was Sisko who claimed the Defiant's temporal displacement was accidental; Dulmur followed up his statement by asking if he was sure it wasn't a predestination paradox, which Sisko confirmed.
Are you serious? Enterprise hadn't been produced yet. The Xindi attack hadn't been conceived yet. That doesn't mean it didn't happen from Picard's perspective; and as Picard was a student of archeology with an affection for ancient history, it's likely the attack on Pearl Harbor was an event that occupied greater personal significance for him if not historical significance.
Actually, the Enterprise was NX-01. Again, Enterprise hadn't been produced when "Hope and Fear" aired. Don't confuse the chronological order of when an episode was filmed or aired with the order in which the events depicted in the episode occurred. Audiences didn't learn Darth Vader's true identity until Return of the Jedi. That doesn't mean he didn't have a name other than his Sith alias until Obi-Wan mentioned it.
--Sran
The same reason he didn't mention 9/11 or the Romulan attack on Coridan or any other sneak attack in history. He mentioned a mere two out of a huge number of historic examples of sneak attacks, so the odds that he'd happen to choose a specific one are low. Really, there's no mystery there at all.
That's quibbling over minutiae. There are far huger continuity errors that we gloss over routinely in order to pretend that ST represents a consistent reality -- e.g. how come Leslie dies in "Obsession" but is alive in later episodes, how come Khan's followers in TWOK were twentysomethings when they were stranded as adults fifteen years earlier, how come Data used contractions routinely up until it was suddenly announced he didn't use them (and occasionally afterward), and how come Deanna said in INS that she'd never kissed Riker with a beard when we saw her do it multiple times in TNG? If you insist that every tiny continuity error requires postulating a separate timeline, you'd balkanize the Trek continuity into hundreds of separate realities.
And Idran is right about the Doylist interpretation. Gene Roddenberry himself put forth the idea that TOS was an imperfect dramatization of "actual" events and that later incarnations like TMP or TNG were more accurate dramatizations. His justification for the change in the Klingons' appearance in TMP was that they'd always looked that way and TOS just hadn't shown them accurately. Indeed, Roddenberry originally conceived Star Trek as a Gulliver-esque story being narrated entirely in flashback, a concept that evolved into the Captain's Log narration (which is often in the past tense in early episodes). So his approach was always inherently Doylist, that what we were seeing was a recreation and interpretation of events rather than a live documentary record. So contradictions in detail are merely errors in the storyteller's account of events.
"And for those of you who have been archiving this ISN special documentary..."
Incoming transmission, Captain Kettle. It's from Admiral Pot. He wishes to remind you: "Black."
Aside from being one of those "messages" that work on both sides of the divide, relevant in-universe and in real-life - and so rather ambiguous in how "canonical" its claims of non-canonicity are, so to speak (
) - I've always wondered about some of the implications of that. If the show is indeed future Anla'shok propaganda, how is it received by the people involved in its production who aren't colonial human or Minbari? Like, how does the actor portraying G'Kar (not Katsulas, the Narn actor ) feel about taking on the role of the great prophet, before, during and after his enlightenment? As interpreted from a non-Narn perspective, that is. How does the Centauri playing Mollari (assuming it's not a human in a wig because real Centauri find the whole thing demeaning) feel about portraying the greatest tragic villain in their history? Who played the Markab? Humans in rubber costume?
First of all, I think that questioning the seriousness of another poster is out of line, but putting that aside.....
The TOS episode "Balance of Terror" established that Federation members had no idea that Romulans were an offshoot of Vulcans. The film ST09, which was written after just about everything, showed no surprise on the part of anyone as to the Vulcaness of Romulans, this was set, of course in a timeframe before the events of "Terror". This would at least suggest that there were differences in the two timelines even prior to the Nero incursions. As would also the relative advancement, technically speaking, of both the Kelvin and the JJprise.
Furthermore, Captain Pike's assessment of Starfleet aside, there does seem to be a more martial aspect to the fleet as depicted in NuTrek and personified by Admiral Paxt..er, Marcus than we were used to for the TOS era. It is arguable that this different attitude was a direct consequence of Earths having been attacked by the Xindi.
I can quibble over minutia with the best of them, but there's more to it than that. As someone once observed, fiction isn't like real life, fiction has to make sense. A large part of that "making sense" is consistency.
In the case of "Enterprise" it was at its best when it respect and "fleshed out" existing Trek lore. It was on more dubious footing when it went beyond it and introduced new species and events, especially cataclysmic events, not part of the established landscape.
The TOS episode "Balance of Terror" established that Federation members had no idea that Romulans were an offshoot of Vulcans. The film ST09, which was written after just about everything, showed no surprise on the part of anyone as to the Vulcaness of Romulans, this was set, of course in a timeframe before the events of "Terror". This would at least suggest that there were differences in the two timelines even prior to the Nero incursions. As would also the relative advancement, technically speaking, of both the Kelvin and the JJprise.
Furthermore, Captain Pike's assessment of Starfleet aside, there does seem to be a more martial aspect to the fleet as depicted in NuTrek and personified by Admiral Paxt..er, Marcus than we were used to for the TOS era. It is arguable that this different attitude was a direct consequence of Earths having been attacked by the Xindi.
I can quibble over minutia with the best of them, but there's more to it than that. As someone once observed, fiction isn't like real life, fiction has to make sense. A large part of that "making sense" is consistency.
In the case of "Enterprise" it was at its best when it respect and "fleshed out" existing Trek lore. It was on more dubious footing when it went beyond it and introduced new species and events, especially cataclysmic events, not part of the established landscape.
That doesn't follow at all. We don't hear anyone in the film mention Romulans until the 2258 section, 25 years after Nero's incursion and the timeline split. It's easy enough to assume that someone found out the truth about Romulans sometime between the 2233 Kelvin incident and the events of the film a quarter-century later.
Again, that's a difference in artistic interpretation rather than an in-universe difference. The greater advancement is that of the filmmakers who are attempting to approximate the appearance of 23rd-century technology. Obviously the makers of TOS did not intend the Enterprise to look like it was made with 1960s lights and switches and materials; they just tried to approximate a futuristic technology as best they could with the materials, budget, and resources they had on hand. Modern versions are able to use more advanced techniques and can thus come that much closer to approximating the future technology.
I mean, seriously, do you believe that The Search for Spock is in a different timeline from The Wrath of Khan because Saavik has a different face and voice? She looks different, sounds different, acts different, but we suspend disbelief and play along with the pretense that she's the same person. So why can't we do the same when different production designers give us different-looking interpretations of Starfleet technology?
It is far more logical -- and obvious -- to assume that Starfleet's greater militarism was a result of Nero's attack on the Kelvin. I mean, think about it. A gigantic, super-advanced Romulan ship appears out of nowhere on the Klingon border and launches an unprovoked attack on a Starfleet vessel. How do you think Starfleet would react to that? They didn't know the Narada was from the future, so they'd have every reason to fear that the Romulans had developed new weapons and were preparing for a new war. That's more than sufficient to explain Starfleet's greater militarism.
I mean, the Kelvin attack was 25 years before the main body of the '09 film. The Xindi attack was 105 years before it. What has a greater impact on current US foreign policy -- the 9/11 al-Qaida attacks or World War One?
[sarcasm]Don't forget that the Enterprise miraculously suffered more battle damage during the battle with Khan, are there as scorch marks on the starboard side of the secondary hull and both nacelles--none of which was present during TWOK.[/sarcasm]
--Sran
Yeah, it's awful when a piece of Trek set before another piece of Trek introduces a new race as a cornerstone of the society of local space, but the chronologically-later Trek barely even acknowledges it. That's why I'm glad we had all those Andorians and Tellarites show up in the 24th century material.
Unless that's also evidence that TNG and on is in an alternate timeline from TOS due to the meddling from Trials and Tribble-ations?
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