"Mirror, Mirror", the Vulcans and the Romulans

[Wingsley]

"Mirror, Mirror", for all its quirks and plot holes (how did they materialize inside the uniforms of their Evil Empire counterparts?) is one of the most memorable and interesting TOS eps, for the 2nd year if not the entire series.

There are a couple of things bouncing around in the back of my brain.

1: The I.S.S. Enterprise represents "the Empire", but it was never explained what empire they were talking about. People automatically assumed the Empire originated, and was headquartered on, Earth; but there is never any explicit reference to this.

2: In the wireless dialogue between Spock and Sulu, Spock warns Sulu about those "who would avenge my death... and some of those are Vulcans" which makes Sulu uncomfortable.

3: Kirk appeals to Spock to "be the captain of this Enterprise", which seems odd. While it isn't clear that the Prime Directive applies to the crew of the I.S.S. Enterprise, why would Kirk bother? (Unless Kirk picked up on something of significance about the nature of Vulcan in the Empire)

Setting aside all the subsequent "mirror universe" derivative stories, why should a viewer assume that the Empire is Terran? We know that the Vulcans and Romulans have a very interesting and complex relationship from the way the female task force commander regards Spock. Why couldn't the I.S.S. Enterprise either be a Romulan vessel or the empire be the product of a close alliance between the Romulans and the Vulcans?

If, instead of the supposition of "In a Mirror, Darkly" that the Empire originated on pre-warp Earth, what if one of these scenarios occurred:

1: The Romulans somehow outmaneuvered Earth, winning the Earth-Romulan Conflict 100 years before TOS; or

2: The Vulcans and the Romulans conspired together to avoid the Earth-Romulan Conflict, instead pre-empting the Coalition/Federation by allying with Earth and others to form the Vulcan Empire, with the Romulans pulling Vulcan's strings?

 

[Rojixus]

Well, the imperial sigil did have a stylized picture of Earth on it.

 

[Christopher]

"Mirror, Mirror", for all its quirks and plot holes (how did they materialize inside the uniforms of their Evil Empire counterparts?)

I figure it was just their minds that got switched.

1: The I.S.S. Enterprise represents "the Empire", but it was never explained what empire they were talking about. People automatically assumed the Empire originated, and was headquartered on, Earth; but there is never any explicit reference to this.

Well, its emblem is Earth with a dagger through it, so Earth has got to be pretty central to it (although that could also be taken to mean that it had conquered/destroyed Earth and defined itself by that act, I suppose -- but it would seem rather odd and maybe overly defensive for a vast interstellar empire to define itself by only one planetary conquest, or to make its symbol the world of a defeated enemy rather than its own world).

I'm actually a bit surprised to realize that the term "Terran Empire" was apparently never used in Trek prior to "In a Mirror, Darkly." I guess I'm familiar enough with the term from Poul Anderson's work that it just felt like it had been around a long time. Looking through various tie-in books and comics, it seems they usually just called it "the Empire," though Diane Duane's novel Dark Mirror called it the United Empire of Planets.

2: In the wireless dialogue between Spock and Sulu, Spock warns Sulu about those "who would avenge my death... and some of those are Vulcans" which makes Sulu uncomfortable.

In either universe, Vulcans are stronger, smarter, and more robust than humans and have freaky mind powers. And clearly they've adapted to the Empire's more bellicose ways to survive. So that's more than enough reason for Sulu to be alarmed.

3: Kirk appeals to Spock to "be the captain of this Enterprise", which seems odd. While it isn't clear that the Prime Directive applies to the crew of the I.S.S. Enterprise, why would Kirk bother? (Unless Kirk picked up on something of significance about the nature of Vulcan in the Empire)

What he picked up on was that Mirror Spock was not too different from Spock Prime, that he understood the illogic of the Empire's continued existence and could be reasoned into working for reform. So it's not odd at all that Kirk pushed Spock to take command and spare the Halkans, since Spock was the only person Kirk knew of in the entire MU who had the opportunity and inclination to do so. It's got nothing to do with Vulcans as a race, it's about Spock himself, and Kirk's faith in him.

Why couldn't the I.S.S. Enterprise either be a Romulan vessel or the empire be the product of a close alliance between the Romulans and the Vulcans?

Because we only see one or two Vulcans on the ship other than Spock and everyone else is human? Because the lighting, atmosphere, and climate conditions are still Earth-normal, given that the humans weren't sweating and short of breath? Because the signage is in English?

 

[7thsealord]

Interesting to note.

As many here will know, there were various VERY non-canonical 'Star Trek' comic book series done. In one of these (I believe it was the DC run between TWOK and TSFS), their idea of why the Mirror Universe came to be was that Earth and its allies lost the Romulan War, and were conquered by the Romulans. Naturally, the Roms were especially brutal and oppressive, and inevitably there was rebellion. When they finally threw off the Romulan yoke, Earth and the other worlds decided to go the conquest route, and never looked back.

Yeah, I know. Canon has long overtaken this interpretation, but I thought it worth mentioning.

If the Mirrorverse is an alternate timeline then, looking at either 'Mirror, Mirror' or 'In A Mirror Darkly', the divergance was very recent. Why? Because they still have lots of people in common and, looking at the rate that Mirrorverse people are expended, this parity cannot remain for long.

Of course, there are still lots of Mirror versions still around by the time of DS9, when things have taken an extremely nasty turn for many, but it is something to think about.

 

[Christopher]

If the Mirrorverse is an alternate timeline then, looking at either 'Mirror, Mirror' or 'In A Mirror Darkly', the divergance was very recent. Why? Because they still have lots of people in common and, looking at the rate that Mirrorverse people are expended, this parity cannot remain for long.

Of course, there are still lots of Mirror versions still around by the time of DS9, when things have taken an extremely nasty turn for many, but it is something to think about.

It can be argued that quantum probability creates a certain "pressure" that guides different timelines toward the most probable configuration of events despite their divergences. Human decisions aren't random; we're guided to particular places and roles in life by our personal inclinations and interests, and so even if circumstances were different, we might still tend to take up equivalent careers and be interested in the same people. It seems there should be a lot of external random factors that could take us in many directions, but in a larger sense, what seems random may actually be the result of countless different forces interacting to push things in a certain way. The way one person moves through life may be the net result of how millions of other people move through life, creating currents and ripples in the flow of events that come together in a certain shape. So if you change the way a few people move, then that could ripple outward to have a major effect on the flow of events, or it could be cancelled out by the pressure of all the other decisions that stay the same. Or it could have a major impact on some aspects of life, like whether the ruling government is egalitarian or tyrannical, but not on other aspects, like whether George Kirk's skills and career choices bring him into contact with a woman named Winona and whether they find each other attractive.

And yes, a lot of people do get killed off in the MU, but in a lot of cases, that doesn't happen until after they would've had children. Mirror Sisko and Mirror O'Brien never had their kids, but Mirror Rom lived long enough to have Nog.

One interesting thing to consider is that, with each successive generation, a given individual's genetic contribution to one's descendants gets smaller and smaller, until after about 700 years, your descendants won't have even a single gene that comes specifically from you. So it's possible that removing a certain person from history wouldn't have any significant effect on who was born, say, a thousand years later. That doesn't really apply on the timescale of the Mirror Universe, of course, but it's interesting. We tend to think that changes ripple outward and have more impact over time, but it's important to remember that there are other forces in play that can damp down or swallow up a ripple effect. A really major, lasting change may require a number of different ripples that reinforce each other and overwhelm the damping forces -- or one ripple that begins at a particularly significant point where a lot of key processes converge.


And of course the Mirror Universe is an alternate timeline. There's nothing else it could be.

 

[SonicRanger]

And of course the Mirror Universe is an alternate timeline. There's nothing else it could be.

No, it could be another universe within the multiverse. And when Hodgkin's Law of Parallel Planetary Development has been proven correct to the point that several parallel Earths were encountered by one ship in a few short years, why not a version for universes?

 

[Christopher]

And of course the Mirror Universe is an alternate timeline. There's nothing else it could be.

No, it could be another universe within the multiverse. And when Hodgkin's Law of Parallel Planetary Development has been proven correct to the point that several parallel Earths were encountered by one ship in a few short years, why not a version for universes?

Because Hodgkin's Law is idiotic, a lame excuse for saving money by recycling props and costumes from the Desilu/Paramount warehouses. Less metatextually, because most of those parallel Earths have been given explanations such as cultural contamination, Preserver seeding, or the like.

The idea of it being "another universe within the multiverse" doesn't wash either. Sure, sure, I know the rationale: if the multiverse is infinite, then any possible combination of particles is bound to repeat over and over, so some of the other universes will be near-exact copies of ours. But that overlooks the flipside of that argument: if the multiverse is infinite, then the probability that any given universe we encounter will be a virtually exact duplicate of ours is some finite quantity divided by infinity -- which is to say, zero. If you could visit those other universes, you could search an infinite amount of time before finding even a rough duplicate of our own. So even if their existence is inevitable, it's equally inevitable that we'll never actually interact with any of them.

 

[SonicRanger]

And of course the Mirror Universe is an alternate timeline. There's nothing else it could be.

No, it could be another universe within the multiverse. And when Hodgkin's Law of Parallel Planetary Development has been proven correct to the point that several parallel Earths were encountered by one ship in a few short years, why not a version for universes?

Because Hodgkin's Law is idiotic, a lame excuse for saving money by recycling props and costumes from the Desilu/Paramount warehouses. Less metatextually, because most of those parallel Earths have been given explanations such as cultural contamination, Preserver seeding, or the like.

The idea of it being "another universe within the multiverse" doesn't wash either. Sure, sure, I know the rationale: if the multiverse is infinite, then any possible combination of particles is bound to repeat over and over, so some of the other universes will be near-exact copies of ours. But that overlooks the flipside of that argument: if the multiverse is infinite, then the probability that any given universe we encounter will be a virtually exact duplicate of ours is some finite quantity divided by infinity -- which is to say, zero. If you could visit those other universes, you could search an infinite amount of time before finding even a rough duplicate of our own. So even if their existence is inevitable, it's equally inevitable that we'll never actually interact with any of them.

I'm not talking about recycled props or sets -- I'm talking about history (the Roman Empire, the Constitution) and even the continents being the same:

http://tos.trekcore.com/gallery/thumbnails.php?album=29

Note that, in almost every case, the interaction requires a virtually identical transporter system -- and that may only exist in one other universe and therefore interaction is limited to that particularly good match. It's basically the anthropic principle: they only interact with one mirror universe because that's the only sufficiently identical with which to interact.

And what about the antimatter universe? That's not an alternate timeline.

 

[Christopher]

I'm not talking about recycled props or sets -- I'm talking about history (the Roman Empire, the Constitution) and even the continents being the same:

http://tos.trekcore.com/gallery/thumbnails.php?album=29

Same thing. The reason Roddenberry included parallel Earths in TOS in the first place was to convince the network that he could produce a science fiction series on a reasonable budget by repurposing paraphernalia left over in the studio warehouse from historical films and shows. For instance, "A Piece of the Action" was conceived to reuse materials from Desilu's The Untouchables. Various episodes came up with various rationalizations for that unavoidable compromise of credibility, some of them sillier than others, with Hodgkin's Law being one of the silliest. But it certainly wasn't something Roddenberry ever wanted to be treated as absolute gospel decades later, or he would've perpetuated the practice in TNG. It was a compromise he had to make to get the show on the air, and once he no longer needed it, he abandoned it. (In the modern shows they used holodecks as the way to save money by reusing historical props/costumes/etc.)

Note that, in almost every case, the interaction requires a virtually identical transporter system -- and that may only exist in one other universe and therefore interaction is limited to that particularly good match. It's basically the anthropic principle: they only interact with one mirror universe because that's the only sufficiently identical with which to interact.

Clever, but doesn't work, because it's contradictory. The only way you can argue that these randomly occurring duplicates exist at all is by assuming an infinite multiverse in which any possible entity is not unique but repeats multiple times. So you can't suddenly turn around and propose that one of those duplicates is unique, because that contradicts the whole basis of your argument. Either uniqueness is possible or it's impossible. If uniqueness is possible, the multiverse must be finite and so incredibly unlikely exact duplicates aren't required to exist. If the multiverse is infinite, then uniqueness is impossible and you can't legitimately make an argument that requires it.

And it's just so vastly simpler to assume the Mirror Universe is a parallel timeline. I don't see any reason not to. Parallel timelines are grounded in a theory that has vastly more experimental support. They're far more likely to exist in reality. And though the thing that would make it possible to access them (nonlinear quantum mechanics) probably doesn't exist in reality, we know that it must exist in the Trek universe, because we know that parallel timelines do exist there and can be visited. We know from TNG: "Parallels" that there are at least a third of a million parallel timelines that include a starship Enterprise. Even without an infinite number, that's more than enough to make it possible that an alternate timeline could exist where most of the same people get born and end up in the same approximate positions in life even though the nature of their government and society is far more brutal.

And what about the antimatter universe? That's not an alternate timeline.

If you mean the one from "The Alternative Factor," that episode is so incoherent and contradictory both of other episodes and of itself that it pretty much has to be considered apocryphal. It claimed that any matter-antimatter interaction would destroy the entire universe, even though it was established 13 episodes earlier in "The Naked Time" that the Enterprise was powered by matter-antimatter interactions. It treated dilithium as the ship's source of power, even though the rest of the series treated dilithium as a means of channeling the power generated by M/AM annihilation. Every subsequent episode of the franchise that ever mentioned antimatter or dilithium ignored and contradicted "The Alternative Factor." No subsequent show or movie and virtually no subsequent work of tie-in fiction has ever alluded to it. It's pretty clearly been effaced from canon.

Bottom line, they were making this stuff up as they went and sometimes they had some bad ideas. They were willing to ignore those bad ideas and try to do better, which is one of the cool things about fiction. Since you're just pretending any episode happened in the first place, you can just as easily pretend it didn't happen if you come to regret it later. In real life, you have to live with your mistakes; in fiction, you can just retcon them.

 

[Unicron]

As many here will know, there were various VERY non-canonical 'Star Trek' comic book series done. In one of these (I believe it was the DC run between TWOK and TSFS), their idea of why the Mirror Universe came to be was that Earth and its allies lost the Romulan War, and were conquered by the Romulans. Naturally, the Roms were especially brutal and oppressive, and inevitably there was rebellion. When they finally threw off the Romulan yoke, Earth and the other worlds decided to go the conquest route, and never looked back.

Yep, that was DC's "Mirror Universe Saga," which picked up right after the TSFS left off (which was then the most recent movie). It's interesting to note that while the mirror Vulcans are not given much detail, it's implied that they're similar to their counterparts in many respects. Mirror Spock initially hated his counterpart, who had the luxury of enjoying pursuits like logic and science without always having to guard his own position, to be a "true" Vulcan.