It occurred to me as I watched Parts I and II of "In a Mirror, Darkly" that Star Trek's much celebrated parallel, or "mirror", universe must have seemed like a dream universe to the Enterprise show runners: women are sex objects, white men rule, racism and xenophobia abound, violence is ubiquitous and all of the wonderful things that make Roddenberry's vision of the future so attractive to the intelligent Star Trek fan base don't seem to exist.
If only they could have set Enterprise entirely in that universe...
Mike Sussman wrote the two episodes and you can't really fault him, or the designers and set builders, for their knowledge of Star Trek history, Star Trek lore and TOS itself. "In a Mirror, Darkly" is, in many ways, a TOS fan's dream and, in the DVD commentary, Sussman shows off an impressive mastery of many things Trek.
Except, of course, for what really made Star Trek great. Because it is in all the ways that Roddenberry's universe is different from that parallel universe that Star Trek shines.
What makes these two episodes even more problematic is the fact that they are not even remotely connected to the "real" universe of the show. The events presented in "IaMD" have absolutely no relationship to, and no impact on, the people and events of the series. "IaMD" is a self-contained mini-Star-Trek-Mirror-Universe movie, nothing more.
There is no real drama here because we have not built up even the slightest relationship to these characters. We do not care one whit if Archer is successful or if he dies. Enterprise's destruction at the end of the first episode is visually spectacular but absolutely incapable of affecting us emotionally (as the death of Enterprise in The Search for Spock, for example, so poignantly did).
These two episodes fail for many reasons but, most importantly, because they are without meaning or impact.
The teaser of episode 1 is clever enough: we are treated to footage of the arrival of the Vulcan Lander on Earth from First Contact, only to have our expectations turned on their head when Zephram Cochrane kills the Vulcan leader and the Earth people storm the Vulcan ship. This, we find out soon enough, is the first step in the birth and development of the Imperial Space Service and the anti-Star-Fleet time line.
In the alt-universe, the Empire is facing open rebellion, apparently from the many alien races humans have subjugated (Vulcans, Andorians, Tellarites, and Dinobulans among them). The war is not going well for the Empire. On board Enterprise, Commander Archer overthrows Captain Forrest in order to take command so that he can investigate a possible way to save the Empire: it seems the Tholians have managed to connect to an alternative universe, lure a star ship from that universe and capture it. The key point: the star ship is an earth ship from 100 years in the future.
With its advanced weapons and technology, Archer believes, the Empire will be able to put down the rebellion for once and for all.
There are exactly two women who play significant roles in these episodes: Sato, as the Captain's concubine, and T'Pol, as the overly emotional Vulcan subordinate who seduces Tucker at a key moment in the story. Every other character in the show is male (well, the Tholian who is captured, tortured and eventually murdered is of mixed gender).
After a number of sex scenes, several fist fights and gun fights and the re-emergence of Forrest to wrest command of the ship back from Archer, they arrive at the Tholian base and discover that the stories Archer has heard are true. The Tholians have somehow managed to capture Defiant, NCC-1764, from the TOS era. How they managed that, since Defiant under Archer's command and a skeleton crew, manages to brush off the Tholian fleet and its base as if they were mosquitoes...
Archer and an assault team go aboard Defiant with orders to download its database and blow it up. T'Pol, meanwhile, has secret orders from Forrest to kill Archer during the mission. Archer, on the other hand, plans to liberate Defiant and use her for his own purposes.
The Tholians find Enterprise and destroy her to end the episode, leaving Archer, T'Pol and a few others onboard the stripped down, non-functioning Defiant.
I watched the two episodes once, then watched them again with the DVD commentary playing. Writer Sussman and some guy from StarTrek.com chatted away all chummily about the episode and about how great it was to be able to give Star Trek fans the chance to return to the days of TOS on a real-live Constitution class starship.
They also manage to make it very clear that this alternative universe is very much to their liking, with the women as scantily clad sex objects and the men filled with testosterone and nastiness. Sussman is particularly annoying in declaring, over and over again, that despite his stated commitment to being true to TOS as much as possible he loves writing in the alternative universe because he can change anything he wanted and no one could complain.
Constitution Class star ships don't have aft phasers or torpedo launchers? Too bad, so sad. Defiant does (even though its from the "real" universe). Enterprise NX-01 doesn't have a tractor beam? Well, it does in the alt universe.
Yes, they do an amazing job of recreating the Constitution Class star ship, both externally and internally. And, yes, we get the same feeling of titillation from seeing Archer and his crew in TOS uniforms as we did when DS9 put their crew in TOS uniforms in "Trials and Tribble-ations".
But the fact that this story line is absolutely meaningless is too big a fact to ignore. These episodes have no dramatic impact. They are fun but silly.
And Sussman and the creative team fail entirely to try, even a little bit, to explain how a social order that rewards insubordination and the assassination of those ahead of one in the chain of command manages to last a generation without destroying itself, not to mention centuries.
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