It may not be obvious to more recent readers of this blog, but there used to be substantial ‘Star Trek’ content here. I reviewed every episode of TOS and gave a more general overview of the Animated Series and TNG. You can probably find them if you search for episode titles. I think there are around fifty of them. However, I am not a Trekkie or a Trekker. I don’t have a problem with Trekkers. It’s just that I think TV and cinema are not ideal media for science fiction because they rely more on the visual than the cerebral, and often have no choice but to appeal to a wider audience, which can lead to watered down content and in particular scientific implausibility, which I find really grating and distracting.
Spoilers for ‘Star Trek’, The Iliad and ‘Buffy The Vampire Slayer’ follow.
That said, I do have a particular interest in ‘Star Trek”s Mirror Universe concept and have given it considerable thought. Just in case you don’t know, the ‘Star Trek’ “universe” is in fact more of a duoverse, if that’s the word. Whereas it does have various parallel timelines, one of its biggest distinctive contributions to popular culture is the idea of “dark” and “light” versions of its universe, although the emphasis is of course very much on the light one. This idea has been adapted to other franchises, in the case of ‘Buffy’, in at least two different ways.
The idea is introduced in ‘Mirror, Mirror‘. The away team are on the Halkan homeworld having failed to negotiate for dilithium mining rights, and beam up during an ion storm. This leads to them teleporting aboard an Enterprise in a universe very unlike their own in the sense that all the worst parts of human behaviour have come to the fore and the best parts are repressed and the Terran Empire holds sway. Meanwhile, their counterparts from that universe have arrived aboard the Enterprise we know and love. The Terran Empire is basically fascist. “Behaviour and discipline has become brutal, savage” as Kirk puts it in his log in his much-imitated style. This mirror universe concept was later developed in subsequent works, both canonical and non-canonical, such as ‘In A Mirror Darkly’, a number of DS9 episodes and notably in ‘Star Trek Discovery’, which however I haven’t seen because I dislike the general ethos of the series.
People have had various thoughts about the nature of the Mirror Universe which often involve the common idea of a point of divergence (POD), used to explain alternate timelines in general. That is, a particular event in the past turned out differently, leading to a fork in history. This is a common science fiction trope and can be seen in ‘It’s A Wonderful Life’ and ‘SS GB’ for example. One claim, made in non-canonical writing, is that the POD occurred during the Trojan War when Achilles kills Priam rather than showing him mercy, but even accepting that this occurred this could also be seen as symptomatic of the general atmosphere of the universe rather than a specific turning point. I admit to not having read the book in question because, as I’ve said, I’m not really a Trekker.
What looks at first glance to be a very fruitful possibility here is Harlan Ellison’s ‘The City On The Edge Of Forever’, which I reviewed here. Dr McCoy, Kirk and Spock go back to the 1930s CE and rescue a peace campaigner from being killed in a car accident, which leads to the US becoming non-aggressive in the Second World War and the triumph of Nazism. This might be expected to lead to a scenario where there’s a fascist interstellar empire dominated by humans, but in fact there is apparently no Enterprise at all, and quite possibly no interstellar human presence. This would not have happened in the Mirror Universe. Instead we would’ve seen the hostile, aggressive version present in ‘Mirror, Mirror’.
There are a few other suggestions. One is that the Terran Empire is a continuation of the Roman Empire, which I imagine would accord quite well with the Trojan War turning out differently. Another is that it simply represents the triumph of fascism in the mid-twentieth century, and a third suggestion is that it means the Age of Enlightenment emphasised opposition to democracy more strongly. However, the problem with all of these is that if it were as simple as a mere POD, or even several, we wouldn’t see what we do on screen. From a real-world perspective, it isn’t possible to show a completely alternative dramatis personæ from the majority of the episodes in a given series, so instead the same characters exist with different personalities. One impressive thing about ‘Star Trek’ is that it manages to make a virtue out of the necessity of working within the constraints of being a popular TV series and walking a tightrope between being liberal-progressive and still acceptable for mainstream American TV, and of constraints can be very stimulating to creativity. The presence of the same cast and props, scenery and the like is a different kind of restriction, but one which has been used very cleverly in these episodes.
Like some other people, I would go a different way with the idea. One possibility and I think the answer is to be found in a surprising place: phasers.
There is another episode of the original series which I think goes some way towards explaining what’s going on if you choose to accept it. In ‘The Tholian Web‘, the Enterprise discovers a “ghost ship”, the USS Defiant, which Spock establishes is trapped in an “interphase”, and humans affected by it become aggressive and murderous because the fracture in space “damages” the human nervous system. Kirk vanishes but appears in a mirror in Uhura’s quarters. It turns out he’s appearing at regular intervals and is beamed aboard, leading to him becoming permanently physically manifested.
In the mirror universe in 2155 CE (‘In A Mirror Darkly‘) the Tholians detonate a tricobalt warhead inside the gravity well of a dead star, creating an interphasic rift to 2268 in the “Prime” universe. This is retconned as the cause of the deaths of the Defiant’s crew in a mass murderous rampage, and allows the Terran Empire to access twenty-third century technology.
Phasers and disruptors work by producing artificial particles called nadions. They can also be used to close subspace fractures, similar to the fractured space encountered by the Enterprise in ‘The Tholian Web’. In some TNG episode I can’t track down, Geordi La Forge and one other character find themselves on an empty version of the Enterprise while having apparently disappeared from the prime version.
This is what I think nadion particles do. In the real world, and presumably in the Star Trek duoverse, particles manifest as waves of probability. If the likelihood of them being in a particular position in space is plotted on a graph, this will show up as peaks and troughs like a wave form. These waves have a particular phase. When a quantum goes out of phase, if it’s a boson it can cancel out another boson and there can instead just be nothing in that position. Fermions are different due to their spin and cannot cancel each other out. Nadions, in my opinion, change the phase of particles in general, such that they cannot interact with particles in the prime universe. It’s also known from Star Trek canon that there is a void between the prime and mirror universes. When a phaser or disruptor is fired at a life form or object, it doesn’t destroy the object or kill the life form, but shifts its phase so that it is no longer in ordinary space but in the interphase void. This is what happened to Kirk in ‘The Tholian Web’, although in his case the particles making up his body hadn’t been fully shifted out of phase and therefore periodically came back into phase before slipping back out, like an interference pattern. This is nightmare fuel, because it means that when a phaser or disruptor is fired at someone, rather than killing them, it shifts them into a void where they may, depending on how well they’re protected, suffocate or die of thirst slowly over a period of days in black nothingness.
Now back to the mirror universe. The mirror universe is out of phase with the prime universe. People in the mirror universe have the same disruption to their nervous systems as was seen in ‘The Tholian Web’, making them more aggressive and violent. However, their societies and biology have evolved to cope with this. In the meantime, in the prime universe we tend to see people behaving in a much more peaceful and calm manner than they do in our own world, which we generally tend to put down to the fact that they’re living in a post-scarcity utopia. This, in my head canon, is not the case, or rather it is, but there’s a cause for it. I would claim that the prime universe comprises matter in an optimal phase. Hence the mirror and prime universes are not separate timelines but two versions of the same timeline. Moreover, they depend on a third, more fundamental universe which is intermediate. Events in both of them are dragged along by this third universe and don’t follow exact cause and effect, because if they did there would be very rapid and radical divergence between the two other universes. There must be a common controlling factor between them. The “prime” universe is in fact not prime at all, but as divergent as the mirror one.
Finally, I would also claim that this third fundamental universe is our own reality, not literally of course because ‘Star Trek’ is fiction, but in the sense that our future is neither dystopian nor utopian but something in between. We can glean certain things about our future from the nature of both universes, such as the fact that there are other intelligent life forms in the Universe, that the protagonists we encounter in them also exist in our own future and that there is some space-faring organisation involving humans, but it’s a kind of average place.
To conclude, I do think it’s worthwhile as well as entertaining to speculate in this way because applying real world physics to ‘Star Trek’ to see how it would be difficult to make work helps one to understand how the actual Universe works. For instance, if what I’ve just suggested is coherent it would mean that there are no fermions in the ‘Star Trek’ universe, which is true in a sense because it consists only of images on screens and the photons which impinge upon our retinæ. This also connects to the Holodeck, Emergency Medical Hologram and Captain Proton threads, since in ‘Star Trek’ it seems that light does resemble the matter composing the likes of Picard, Janeway and the Enterprise much more closely than it does in reality. Also, it provides two fruitful sources of fan fiction: an intermediate, morally neutral future involving the same characters and setting, and a horrific void into which the victims of phasers are ejected to die slowly and horribly. So it’s all good.
A Box Of Chocolates 