Secret Hideout’s Trek shows—with the notable exception of Lower Decks—has been surprisingly free of the more cosmic ends of the Star Trek universe. We’ve had the Metrons, the Q, the Organians, the Prophets/wormhole aliens, etc.—but none of those folks, or anyone like their super-powerful selves, have shown up on Discovery, Short Treks, or Picard.
Until now.
I have to admit to being hugely disappointed that Paul Guilfoyle’s character didn’t introduce himself as Q, because he certainly felt like a Q to me. Certainly, Guilfoyle’s delightful, cigar-chomping performance is in the same mode as John deLancie, Corbin Bernsen, and Suzie Plakson. How-some-ever, he just identifies himself as “Carl.”
Another reason why I got Q vibes from him, of course, is because he does for Georgiou what Q did for Picard in “Tapestry“: giving her a chance at a do-over in a critical part of her life.
The primary plot here is finally explaining what’s wrong with Georgiou. Unfortunately, you can see the strings a bit too readily. Kovich informs Culber—and the audience—that the combination of travelling to a parallel timeline and travelling in time has adverse physiological effects. We’re seeing it in Georgiou, and it was also evidenced in a Starfleet officer named Yor who was involved in the Temporal Wars. Kovich says there’s no cure and that their best bet is to euthanize Georgiou.
However, that can’t happen, and here’s where the strings come in. After all, Michelle Yeoh is supposed to star in a Section 31 series. And that’s the real problem with “Terra Firma,” it’s obvious that everything that’s happening here is in service of getting Yeoh into place for her TV show. So we establish that there’s no way for her to survive both in a different quantum reality and in a different time, and then we have to concoct extraordinary circumstances to get her back in time without allowing the same for the rest of Discovery (since you’d think they’d want to go home, right?).
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And so Discovery finds something in the sphere data, which now apparently includes everything from every computer everywhere: there’s a world that has a solution for Georgiou. So Discovery goes there with Vance’s blessing. (Saru actually is willing to stay behind for the greater good of Starfleet, but Vance either (a) doesn’t want to condemn Georgiou to a horrible death or (b) wants to get rid of her, so he authorizes it. Well, okay, Vance also tells Saru that it’s important to help your crew whenever possible, though Georgiou barely qualifies. Whatever, it’s just more strings.)
The planet is covered in ice, probably more filming in the Iceland locations used for “That Hope is You” and “Far from Home,” and it’s an amusing bookend to the first time we saw Georgiou and Burnham in “The Vulcan Hello,” when they were wandering around a desert planet. Eventually they find Carl sitting on a bench reading “tomorrow’s” newspaper, which tells of Georgiou’s death, and he says she can avoid it if she walks through the door that has also appeared in the middle of the snow.
That door leads to the Mirror Universe, specifically the launch of the I.S.S. Charon, Georgiou’s flagship, as first seen in “Vaulting Ambition.” It’s the I.S.S. Discovery under the command of Captain Sylvia Tilly that is bringing Georgiou to her new ship.
For all that this is all manipulative and deus ex machina-ish, this foray back into the MU provides some entertaining insights in Georgiou. Initially she is thrilled at the chance to go all Sam Beckett and put right what once went wrong. She knows going in that Lorca and Burnham are plotting against her, and she knows going in that killing Burnham won’t actually do her any good, since she’ll still be deposed and wind up in the wrong universe. So while she is able to expose Burnham’s coup attempt (which also involves killing Stamets), she doesn’t have Burnham executed, instead sending her to the agony booth.
What’s interesting about this is seeing how Georgiou has changed. For all that she continues to posture and act like the psychopath she truly is, being on Discovery has changed her. (It reminds me of how Garak was changed by exposure to the Federation on Deep Space 9, and how that was brought into sharp relief when he, too, was given the chance to go back to his old life and it proved an awkward fit in “The Die is Cast.”) Georgiou isn’t as comfortable in her role of fascist as she was before. Of particular note is that she can’t help but treat Saru differently, because after spending so much time with Captain Saru, it’s impossible for her to think of slave Saru as anything but a person. Of course, she uses it to her advantage, using her knowledge of the vahar’ai to gain his trust. (Saru, in a nice touch, is shocked that Georgiou would lower herself to be aware of the vahar’ai.)
Then comes the greatest revelation, and the one thing Georgiou didn’t know going in to get her do-over: why Burnham betrayed her. Georgiou loves Burnham like a daughter, a love that is sufficiently powerful that it bleeds over into the Burnham of the mainline universe. But then, after her coup is exposed and Burnham is kneeling before Georgiou waiting to be condemned, she reveals the truth. Yes, Georgiou rescued the orphaned Burnham from what Georgiou describes as “a trash heap.” But Burnham explains that that was no kind of favor: she was the at the top of that trash heap, and she preferred to reign in that particular hell than serve in Georgiou’s heaven.
Despite the manipulations, this is an enjoyable episode, mostly for, as usual, the little touches. There’s Georgiou’s goodbyes to Saru and Tilly, the former a nifty show of respect from both Kelpien to emperor and vice versa, the latter an amusing moment where Tilly hugs Georgiou, which you suspect the acting XO is doing mostly to fuck with Georgiou’s head. (Yeoh’s look of utter bafflement at the hug is priceless.) There’s Guilfoyle’s delightful performance as Carl. There’s mirror Bryce challenging mirror Owosekun for the latter’s place as the head of Georgious imperial guard. There’s the triumphant return of “Captain Killy.” (Well, her debut, really, since prior to this we’d only seen Tilly posing as her.) There’s the presence of Rekha Sharma’s mirror Landry, not to mention mirror Detmer, sans cybernetic implants, sitting with Burnham. (Having said that, it’s weird that nobody ever mentions the I.S.S. Shenzhou, even though Burnham and Detmer are supposed to be that ship’s CO and XO.) And there’s the nifty list of all of Georgiou’s titles.
Best of all, though, are the performances of Yeoh and Sonequa Martin-Green. Yeoh is never not amazing, and she beautifully and subtly plays the seventeen kinds of agony Georgiou goes through in this episode.
However, Martin-Green just owns the episode. For the first half, she’s the mainline Burnham who wants to try to help Georgiou because of the guilt she is still carrying over her role in the mainline Georgiou’s death. And then for the second half, we finally get to see the mirror Burnham (like Tilly, we only saw the mainline version posing as her previously), and Martin-Green just kills it. The psychosis, the resentment, the naked hatred that she kept hidden under the surface until it all just explodes at once all over a stunned Georgiou. Mirror Burnham views Georgiou’s love for her as her greatest weakness.
We’ll see where this all goes next week, of course, as there’s still Part 2 to go. Will they bring Jason Isaacs back to reprise Lorca? Will we see more of Carl? Will we find out just who Kovich is exactly? Tune in next week…
Keith R.A. DeCandido has written two tales that take place in the Mirror Universe, The Mirror-Scaled Serpent, a short novel in the Obsidian Alliances trade paperback that features the MU versions of the Voyager characters, and “Family Matters” in the Shards and Shadows anthology that tells a tale of the Klingon-Cardassian Alliance.
Voyager left the Q in an interesting place. Going less uniform and more individualistic. Time jump. Maybe they have names now.
Definitely fits the feel of all the burn happening all across the universe… in a snap.
Voyager left the Q in an interesting place. Going less uniform and more individualistic. Time jump. Maybe they have names now.
I mean, the time jump is kinda irrelevant considering the Q transcend time and space.
Then again, they do have their own linearity to some extent (Quinn, Q’s demotion, exile, return to grace, etc.).
While I’m sick of the Continuum at this point, yeah, it’d be interesting to see true, long-term consequences of the VOY Q arc play out.
As entertaining as this was, I DON’T GET IT! Lol. What Georgiou experiences when she travels into the past isn’t real, right? Because if she’s changing history in her universe, she’s actually changing the whole history of this show since first, MU Lorca winds up in the mainline universe and rescues mainline Burnham from prison, and then MU Georgiou is brought to the mainline universe too and has her own influence on the events of this series. So this would have to be like a “Tapestry” sort of do-over with an omnipotent entity pulling at the strings to show MU Georgiou she shouldn’t second guess her psychopathic ways! Doesn’t sound very Star Trek though. Even if my interpretation here is incorrect, I still don’t see how events portrayed here in the past track with what we actually know happened. In particular, I’m bothered by the death of MU Stamets. As shown in the first season, both MU Stamets and MU Georgiou are initially alive when the U.S.S. Discovery crew cross over to the MU. So MU Stamets couldn’t have tried to kill MU Georgiou because otherwise he’d be dead in the coup attempt. But here it shows him trying to kill Georgiou before MU Burnham’s treachery is unmasked. So it makes me wonder how the original coup went down. And I thought from what we were told in the first season that MU Burnham was only presumed dead. So I don’t know. I feel like I’m giving this way too much thought!
Anyway, it would be cool if we also saw in the next episode Danby Connor who we saw the mainline and MU versions of his character killed in the first season, but even better if we saw Lorca reappear, not to mention cameos by Spock, Pike, and Una since the I.S.S. Enterprise should be there at Georgiou’s christening ceremony of the Charon as well.
Q by way of Doctor Who (Sylvester McCoy’s Seventh most closely, bowler hat included) and 1/4 of a TARDIS (the door).
@3:
Anyway, it would be cool if we also saw in the next episode Danby Connor who we saw the mainline and MU versions of his character killed in the first season, but even better if we saw Lorca reappear, not to mention cameos by Spock, Pike, and Una since the I.S.S. Enterprise should be there at Georgiou’s christening ceremony of the Charon as well.
Lorca reappearing is contingent on Jason Isaacs’ availability when they were shooting Season Three.
If he does pop up, though, I’d be more interested in seeing DSC tie up the big loose end of the Prime Reality Lorca. Everyone assumed Lorca was killed once he arrived in the MU, but the show never explicitly confirmed it (and I doubt Dayton Ward would’ve ended his novel Drastic Measures the way he did if Beyer hadn’t signed off on it).
I’d love to see Mirror Spock and Pike appear, though. Mirror Spock would allow some nice foreshadowing of “Mirror Mirror”.
I’m not sure if this has been addressed previously but Discovery’s portrayal of the MU depicts only Terrans serving in the Terran Empire and yet the TOS and ENT iterations obviously show aliens like Spock and T’Pol and Phlox serving in the Empire. One could say that post-ENT that aliens were banned from serving as officers and that with Discovery, we see a new era with a young Spock becoming one of the first exceptions to the previous rule.
And dopey me forgot to mention the throwaway reference to the 2009 movie, as Kovich mentions a Romulan mining ship travelling through time……
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Couple comments from io9 seem sure that Carl is an avatar of the Guardian of Forever:
“Carl is reading the Star Dispatch, a Trek universe newspaper last seen in City on the Edge of Forever, so is this just a little nod to that episode or is Carl somehow related to the Guardian of Forever?”
And:
“It’s absolutely the Guardian of Forever. The newspaper, besides being the Star Dispatch, has headlines that reference “Let Me Help” and the 21st Street Mission.”
Maybe the TOS uncharted planet has a name in the 32nd century. And to continue the Who association, there’s a Time vortex to echo Who’s Time Vortex
I would have sworn I’d run across an actual newspaper called the “Star-Dispatch” many moons ago, but I’d thought it was a larger metropolitan paper, and Google-fu only produces a single reference to a paper by that name in the real world, that being based in Leadville, Colorado some time in the 19th century.
Then again, Google-fu also produces this image of a film-prop copy of a Star-Dispatch front page, whose origins the then-seller didn’t know. If that’s the paper produced for “City on the Edge of Forever” (and that ought to be easy enough to figure out by comparing images), whoever bought it at the time may have a much niftier collectible than they realized was the case.
I think the stuff on the newspaper that eagle-eyed viewers have picked up on may just be fun easter eggs for the diehard fans and not substantive proof of events in this episode tying into the Guardian of Forever. But I guess we’ll see.
#3/6/10: It occurs to me that whether or not the Guardian is involved, one thing the writers might possibly be doing is setting matters up so that the forthcoming Section 31 series will happen in an alternate timeline spun off the events of this two-parter.
I don’t say that this is a likely prospect, but it strikes me as a possible approach. The Abrams movies have set the precedent for the existence of alternate timelines, and the fact that Section 31 itself has been a subject of considerable controversy in the fan community might prompt the producers and/or network to put that particular project in its own dedicated niche. That would also give the writers of the new show a degree of creative freedom from having to wrap Section 31’s interventions around the immense existing body of Trek continuity.
@7:
And dopey me forgot to mention the throwaway reference to the 2009 movie, as Kovich mentions a Romulan mining ship travelling through time……
That was an interesting Easter egg, but I guess it makes sense. It was a temporal incident and I’m sure DTI and other agencies investigated.
Still, I don’t know how I feel about the prospect of potential crossovers between the Prime and Alternate Realities — and I mean canonical crossovers, not stuff like The Q Gambit comics storyline. It’d be fun, but Spock Prime was the crossover. I just feel it makes more sense to keep it separate to allow it to develop on its own — though I don’t know if it even has a future at this point between the CBS-era renaissance and Trek 4 DOA.
@11: Are you referring to a spin-off that’s Section 31 within the MU? If so, why would the Terran Empire even need a Section 31? If you’re saying it’s just another alternate timeline of the mainline universe, I think that just makes things even more convoluted because the events of this timeline won’t have any bearing on other current Trek productions like Picard or Discovery or have any crossover potential with Strange New Worlds of which era I had imagined the new Section 31 spin-off would be contemporary with.
We’ll have to wait till next week for the payoff, or even later, but the more we see of Terrans, the more campy and cartoonish they seem. They wouldn’t be out of place in an old serial like Flash Gordon, with Georgiou standing in for Ming the Merciless.
The entire societal structure is stupid. With all the challenging and murdering, you’d think they’d simply wipe themselves out. It’s an even cruder reflection of warrior Klingon culture, where competence doesn’t matter, only force of will and not showing any signs of weakness.
One line of Georgiou’s lines stuck out: “In my universe, we were Prime and you were Mirror,” which is an obvious reversal. So what if the Section 31 show is going to be set in the Mirror U and Georgiou becomes a stealth force for good?
I do feel it’s pretty ridiculous how the Discovery crew bends over backwards to be nice to Georgiou. It’s like if Jeffrey Dahmer were aboard ship because he’s of some practical use and Tilly sees him sitting alone at lunch and feels bad for him so she sits next to him. Hello? Humanize him and make him sympathetic all you want but it’s still Jeffrey Dahmer! And yet somehow the lead character of a forthcoming Star Trek spin off will be an “evil” sociopath.
Ugh, this whole 2-parter is in the Mirror Universe? I’m so done with the Mirror Universe. I want to see the 32nd century. This feels like an interruption of the story arc I’m actually interested in, and it’s frustrating that it’s a double-length interruption.
I also agree with Keith that it’s really annoying how Georgiou’s entire character arc this season is exclusively about contriving her departure from the show so she can star in her own show. What a complete waste of time. If they didn’t have a role for her to play in the future, then they should’ve just left her the hell behind in the season 2 finale.
And throwing in a super-advanced cosmic being just as a deus ex machina to advance a plot unrelated to the cosmic being is a lazy story cheat. Also, why did Carl adopt a 20th-century persona to interact with two 23rd-century humans?
I’m annoyed that they had the characters use both “Prime” and “Mirror” titles in-story. Those are supposed to be real-world, extradiegetic labels, not in-story ones. It undermines the narrative when terminology from our side of the fourth wall is allowed to leak through.
@3/garreth: As we’ve seen with Kelvin, creating an alternate timeline doesn’t necessarily erase the original one. (Indeed, scientifically speaking, it never should, because the very concept is logically and physically impossible.)
@12/Mr. Magic: I don’t think they threw in the Kelvin nod to set up a crossover, just to try to shut up those people who insist that DSC is set in the Kelvin timeline, by explicitly establishing it as an alternate one. Of course, I doubt it will work.
No one gonna mention that Yor is definitely an alternate reality Yar?
@16,
Ugh, this whole 2-parter is in the Mirror Universe? I’m so done with the Mirror Universe. I want to see the 32nd century. This feels like an interruption of the story arc I’m actually interested in, and it’s frustrating that it’s a double-length interruption.
Yeah, this is one of those times where I really, really wish DS9 had never done “Crossover”.
I get the Mirror Universe is part and parcel of classic Trek and the idea of following up on the consequences of Kirk’s actions a century later wasn’t an inherently bad idea.
But at this point, between DS9, ENT, and now DSC, I think Trek has more than gotten all the mileage it can out of the Mirror Universe. I’m just as sick of it as you.
@16:
I don’t think they threw in the Kelvin nod to set up a crossover, just to try to shut up those people who insist that DSC is set in the Kelvin timeline, by explicitly establishing it as an alternate one. Of course, I doubt it will work.
Actually, I could’ve worded that better.
I wasn’t trying to suggest DSC would do a crossover with the Kelvin timeline (nor would I want it to). What I mean was that by showing Starfleet eventually becomes aware of the Kelvin-verse, it seems like it’s opening the door for a future Prime project to cross over.
Then again, if Starfleet is aware of the Kelvin-timeline, are they aware of Spock’s final fate? And would Burnham react?
@18/Mr. Magic: “Yeah, this is one of those times where I really, really wish DS9 had never done “Crossover”.”
I suspect the producers of Enterprise‘s final season would’ve done a Mirror Universe story at some point even if DS9 hadn’t. After all, the staff included a number of hardcore TOS fans who put in as many continuity homages as they could. And “In a Mirror, Darkly” doesn’t really draw on anything from DS9 except for the use of the name “Terran,” since it’s set two centuries earlier.
As for the possibility of a Prime/Kelvin crossover, I don’t object to the idea in principle. Naturally, it’s just a question of whether you can get a good story out of it. And I’m in favor of anything that clarifies that Discovery is not set in Kelvin.
@20
And “In a Mirror, Darkly” doesn’t really draw on anything from DS9 except for the use of the name “Terran,” since it’s set two centuries earlier..
I just remembered being burned on the Mirror Universe after DS9 and it’s unsatisfactory resolution of that particular storyline. I was not being enthused Trek was going back to it — though it was admittedly nice to finally see the point of divergence between the Prime Reality and the Mirror Universe.
@21/Mr. Magic: “though it was admittedly nice to finally see the point of divergence between the Prime Reality and the Mirror Universe.”
That’s not what that was. IAMD made it clear, in both the opening titles and in Phlox and T’Pol’s dialogue in part 2, that Mirror Earth had a darker, crueler history much, much earlier than the alternate First Contact shown in the teaser of part 1. The implication was that it had always been a darker timeline, with no single moment of divergence. Personally I doubt that — I suspect the Terran Empire version of history that Phlox read was rewritten to suit the Empire’s ideology — but the makers of the episode definitely didn’t intend the Cochrane scene to be the actual moment of divergence, just a shock beat for the audience when a scene we expected to play out in a familiar way turned out very differently.
With all of the various recurring references to the temporal wars, I think that is fertile ground for writers to use in creating an entirely new spin-off series. It would be interesting and no doubt, fun. Think about it, in this one series it wouldn’t be unexpected to see appearances of characters and familiar aliens and worlds spanning TOS to DSC (32nd century), and even the possibility of a Kelvin-timeline crossover.
@22,
My bad. It’s been a while since I rewatched ENT and I’d forgotten about the opening credits.
@garreth: unless very well written, I suspect those stories would be headache inducing. I agree with you in principle: it sounds like it could be interesting, but…
On the other hand, as someone mentioned on reddit, they could do a Crisis on Infinite Earths type story at some point.
Also on reddit and elsewhere, some commenters are referring to Carl as Qarl. Or possibly an anagram based on Clarence and “Georgiou’s Wonderful Life.”
I’m calling it now, Carl is the bum who accidentally phasered himself in City on the Edge of Forever. Oh but he didn’t really die, the Guardian pulled him out of the quantum mushroom entanglement realm of death and gave him a job as a doorman.
Is this theory a load of hooey? Yes, yes it is. But it fits Discovery perfectly.
@26/Jimbo: I’m wondering if the character was originally scripted as “Harlan” but they chickened out and looped it over as “Carl.” :D
Anyway, back to the 32nd-century stuff and the signal subplot, this episode debunked a fan theory that seemed disturbingly credible, that the signal in the nebula would be sent by the alternate version of Discovery from Short Treks: “Calypso.” That would’ve made quite a mess of things. Instead, it’s from a Kelpien science vessel. That was very unexpected. And they were investigating a “dilithium nursery,” whatever that means. (Maybe a stellar nursery with the specific conditions that form dilithium-rich planets?) This nebula is the origin point for the Burn, right? Maybe the science vessel did something that inadvertently triggered it.
I read a fan fiction story many months before the 2016 election (back when we believed that Trump had NO chance of winning) that said that the point of divergence between the Prime and Mirror universes was that Trump won the 2016 American election in the Mirror universe. Which means that we’re now all living in the Mirror universe.
2020 has sure seemed like it…
My only problem with the Guardian of Forever theory is that a planet near the Gamma Quadrant is way far out for Kirk’s Enterprise to have reached.
Yes, I know, same series also saw the extreme end and beginning of the galaxy, but still.
I’m leaning towards Qarl myself, perhaps in the same way Enterprise showed a couple future alien races without explicitly naming them.
@29/Jason: “My only problem with the Guardian of Forever theory is that a planet near the Gamma Quadrant is way far out for Kirk’s Enterprise to have reached.”
I agree. But just to play devil’s advocate, Carl could be one of the Guardian’s makers, and a race that advanced could go anywhere it wanted. Or, alternatively, for something that exists in all times simultaneously, existing in any place it desired wouldn’t be that hard.
At 1:00, when Culber and Kovich (David Cronenberg) are discussing Georgiou’s medical scan, her holo-image renders starting from the eyeballs and cranial vasculature. That’s (a) icky and (b) a gratuitous use of VFX, IMHO — but maybe it’s a subtle nod to Cronenberg’s biologically icky style as a director. Also, they’re discussing in the middle of Sickbay, because unlike prior shows, there’s no separate office set.
At 1:30, Lt. Cdr. Yor looks something like a Yridian. As a “time soldier,” that Starfleet uniform c.2363 implies he was inserted into that era, like “Crewman Daniels” on ENT.
At 5:20, Culber – “according to the computer’s metadata analysis of probabilities” which is word salad. IMHO, “the computer gives a five percent chance” would be concise and suffice. (Usually even “the computer” would be superfluous — how else would a non-Vulcan Trek character compute a probability, with an abacus and book of logarithms? — but it’s now operating outside norms.)
At 12:30, Georgiou selects a 32cen-phaser from an armory-case and it transforms into a bangle on her right wrist. I think we’ve seen this case before — it’s oddly located in the middle of a corridor intersection. This aligns with DSC’s habit of staging a lot of action in the corridors (most commonly, a half-dozen extras fiddling with numerous control panels) that prior shows would stage using a specific room (armory, lab, etc.), usually a generic set that’s easily redressed.
At 14:50, Adira is able to finish decoding the Starfleet distress signal when Stamets points out that the process is paused (gee, if your GUIs weren’t so overcomplicated, maybe you’d notice). I’m unconvinced by the whole “we need to write an algorithm to extract the message” — shouldn’t there be a standard decoding key which is known to 32cen Starfleet? She They is still wearing a generic dark jumpsuit, which makes sense since she was a member of the UEDF, but neither Starfleet 23cen nor 32cen. (And although several prior hosts of the Tal symbiont were Starfleet, that doesn’t transfer, I guess?) I suppose it’s impossible for anybody on this show to wear a cheerful color.
At 21:20, we see the distress message initiated a century-plus earlier, by one Dr. Issa of the KSF Khi’eth — presumably that’s “K” as in “Kelpien.” Kelpien Space Force or Kelpien Science Fleet, maybe? “Registry 971014” — is that the ship’s number, or the doctor’s?
At 22:45, Tilly says she will “debrief” Admiral Vance about the message. In this context the correct verb is “brief,” and this is hardly the first time a wildly incorrect usage in a DSC episode. Is the flaw in the script, the script editor, the actor’s line reading, or double-check? A small mistake like that can be overdubbed.
During this scene in Saru’s ready room, the sky outside is black (yes!) not furnace-bright (boo!).
One thing that really bothered me about this episode is the obvious looping job they had to do during the final scene in the episode, when Georgiou was approaching Michael. The dialogue Georgiou was speaking was nowhere near Yeoh’s lip movements, and they quickly took the camera off her. Yeoh is the only cast member for whom the looping is so obvious, in almost every episode she’s in. Which doesn’t take away from her awesomeness, but just breaks the illusion a bit… Or cracks the mirror.
Re: Carl’s newspaper the Star Dispatch, is anyone else wondering if this is a wink to a similar joke from Trek‘s Sci-Fi TV competition, as it were?
At 30:26 there is a long tracking shot zoom-in on Georgiou and Burnham and the camera is noticeably bumped. But something rather clever is done to account for the bump: a CGI worker bot or whatever they’re called zooms right by the camera to make it feel like the viewer is thrown off center by colliding with the bot. I imagine the tracking shot couldn’t be redone and the CGI robot was a creative solution.
Random thought. Is there any requirement that Yeoh’s Section 31 be set in original discovery timeline? What if, for example, Korvis is part of a new sans-control Section 31 is Discovery’s current timeline? Offshoot of DTI perhaps?
Full disclosure – I have intentionally not followed any discussion of the new show, so this may be moot based on known information,
@35: Really nothing is known about the Section 31 show other than that Michelle Yeoh is the star of it. So you haven’t missed any spoilers on it because there are none. Some people even doubt it will happen because it was first announced awhile ago and more recently announced Star Trek spin-offs have gone into production (and been released) faster.
@31/Philip: Memory Alpha says that Yor, the Hunter from the Alternate Future is a Betelgeusian, a background species from TMP (which I’ve featured heavily in my tie-in novels).
“I’m unconvinced by the whole “we need to write an algorithm to extract the message” — shouldn’t there be a standard decoding key which is known to 32cen Starfleet?”
I think they need to decode it because it’s distorted in some way.
And no, previous hosts’ Starfleet status does not transfer, because two different hosts are two different individuals, even if they have part of themselves in common. The whole point of joining is to let the symbiont experience different lives and realms of knowledge, so a joined Trill tends to retain the prior status of the unjoined host.
@34/garreth: I wouldn’t be surprised if the camera bump by the CGI bot was planned from the start. It would be far from the first time that a visual effect has been designed to “interact” with the camera as a nudge against the fourth wall. Heck, that’s what lens flares are.
Meh. It was not a BAD episode, but it was completely inconsequential, and I did not want to spend almost a whole episode in the mirror universe at this point, much less a two parter. I did like Carl (is he a Q? Guardian of Forever?) and seeing Culber in his red uniform.
But I feel like the episode was a waste of time, and I fear next one will be too. We didn’t even get enough of the nice character moments we usually get in every episode. And I can see Michael being emotional about Georgiou because it reminds her of the original and she feels guilty about her death; and even Saru being reminded of his captain. But Saru saying he’s learned as much from the Emperor as from his Georgiou was ridiculous, and Tilly being emotional and HUGGING her was absolutely stupid (no, I don’t buy she’s doing it to fuck with Georgiou’s mind).
Ultimately, everything is in service of getting Yeoh ready for the S31 show, and we’re wasting two whole episodes on it. Meh.
@krad: I just don’t buy Georgiou changing thanks to her time on Discovery.
@11 – John: I highly doubt they’ll spin off a show into a parallel universe.
@18 – Mr. Magic: I think the occassional MU episode in a show can be fun, particularly after a couple of seasons. But in Disco’s case, we already had them in season one, so please, not again.
Personally, I wish they’d let Mary Wiseman wear Tilly’s hair straight like her MU counterpart does, it does nothing but make her look even more gorgeous than she already is!
@38/MaGnUs: I do buy Georgiou changing under Federation influence, to an extent. After all, the whole idea of the Mirror Universe is that nurture outweighs nature, that the same person who turns out to be a champion of peace and justice when raised in an ethical, benevolent society can turn out to be a brutal mass murderer when raised in a cruel, fascist society. It stands to reason, then, that Mirror Georgiou turned out so cruel because she was never taught to be anything else. Now that she’s been exposed to another way of living, now that she’s had the opportunity to get to know Kelpiens and other nonhumans as people rather than blindly accepting her culture’s prejudices, I can buy that it might alter her perspective.
A true psychopath couldn’t learn from that kind of experience, but if she were a psychopath, if it were the result of her nature rather than her nurture, then both versions of her would be psychopaths, and we know that’s not true. So her sociopathic behavior is learned, conditioned by her environment, and thus it’s logical that a different environment could counteract it to some degree.
@40,
Agreed. As Keith pointed out, Mirror Georgiou’s development is akin to Garak and the influence the Feds had on him during his exile on DS9.
@40 – Chris: I’m all for nurture vs. nature, and Georgiou might have been a victim of her circumstances originally, but that was a long time ago. She’s not a racist or homophobic aunt we forgive because “she was raised in another time”, she’s not a poor creature forced to violence, she’s a genocidal tyrant who ate sentient beings.
@42/MaGnUs: I never said anything about forgiveness. I’m merely discussing the plausibility of a story point. If you’d said you found it implausible that the other characters would forgive her so easily, then I’d agree. But what you said was “I just don’t buy Georgiou changing thanks to her time on Discovery,” so that’s the point I’m addressing — whether it’s objectively credible that she could have changed due to that.
Understood. I just don’t think she’d change either, she’s far too gone in my opinion. One thing I could buy is that she’d grown accustomed to being able to not worry all the time about being stabbed in the back.
Martin-Green was terrible in this. Whispering lines doesn’t stand in for acting, and frankly she out-cartooned the dastardly Batman villains of the 60s camp series when she was playing Mirror-Burnham. It was utterly cringe-worthy. The Mirror universe has always been ridiculous, but this lead-in tells me I want nothing to do with the Section 31 series.
Was it not Rhys who challenged Owo? I get Bryce and Rhys mixed up all the time, so maybe I’m wrong.
“Execute me, Mother!” taken out of context is such a hilarious line. It’s like something I can imagine a bratty teen screaming at her mom for taking away her cell phone privileges so she can’t TikTok and Snapchat her boyfriend Brad.
Speaking of brats, MU Michael wants to kill the Emperor from plucking her from a trash heap as a child because she was the top of the food chain of said trash heap. I had originally pictured this as Michael as literally a baby abandoned and placed on top of a heap of trash. But if she cares so much about being taken away she must have been at least a grown kid and the head bully of a bunch of other bratty Terran kids.
#various: I agree (and said so up front) that setting the Section 31 series in an alt. timeline is unlikely – but no one’s really addressed the point that made me make the suggestion in the first place, namely the issue garreth raised way back in #3. that what’s shown in this episode appears to rewrite history in a way that essentially negates much of Discovery‘s first season as we saw it unfold. If garreth’s perceptions are accurate, then I don’t see how we can escape this arc without establishing at least one brand new timeline, even if the Guardian is involved. And we got sidetracked on other matters quickly enough that no one has stepped up to offer an alternative to garreth’s perception of what this episode does to early DSC continuity.
What we’ve seen from the early episodes of this season is that the current writers have a really deep awareness of existing Trek continuity, ranging from official to outright fannish sources, and that they’re not afraid to make use of that knowledge. Broadly, that gives the various theories regarding the Guardian of Forever a degree of credibility, not least because the Guardian’s capabilities specifically include timeline repair (see TAS: “Yesteryear”). But I distrust those theories a bit precisely because the foreshadowing seems so pointed.
My main observation here is that whatever the resolution is next week, I think it will be one that does in fact tie up most of the loose-looking plot threads scattered through the current arc. These writers are sharp enough to have known going in what they needed to accomplish for Mirror!Georgiou’s character evolution, and that they were going to need a means of getting her back to Section 31 once they’d laid that groundwork. However Part 2 sorts itself out, I think we’ll be able to tell afterward that whatever time-rewinding method they adopt, they didn’t pull it out of thin air at the last minute.
@48/JCB: If this isn’t a separate/new timeline being created, I think of it as a “Tapestry”-type scenario where Carl is showing the Empress that trying to change her behavior and events in her past will only lead her to becoming something she detests and is unfulfilling. In her case: anything less than a megalomaniacal, genocidal ruler of an empire with biting wit and snappy comebacks.
Definitely not Iceland, especially given the number of trees on the periphery. It actually looks like the same Toronto-area quarry they used a few times before (fun fact: snow happens in Canada too!)
Not sure it’s been mentioned, but the two credited writers of this episode (and likely the next) are the showrunners of the Section 31 series. So they’re getting to set up whatever ground they need to get up and running.
@50: I assumed it was Toronto as well (I’ve never been there myself but I can imagine there is plenty of snowy terrain and plenty of trees outside the city) and that the Iceland stuff was confined to the first two episodes of the season.
So not counting next episode since that’s part II of this MU sojourn, that leaves 3 episodes left for the season in which we’ll get the requisite battle between the Federation and the Iron Chain and get more firm answers, if not the resolution, regarding the Burn. We know from experience that the very last moments of the season finale like to set up a cliffhanger to lure us into the next season so I wonder what that will be this time around? I still think we’re going to tie into the events of “Calypso” and that the crew of Discovery will have to abandon ship in the nebula. Therefore, the events of “Calypso” are another 1000 years later, so the 42nd century. Oh my!
My basic problem with the MU is that it’s clearly a philosophical fantasy which cannot stand up to a moment’s thought. “What if there were Evil versions of us?” is a fine question for consequence-free debate, but if you change the history of the universe far enough back, you just can’t get the same genetic recombination. How does M-Spock exist without Sarek and Amanda falling in love? Why would they have any contact in a universe featuring the Terran Empire? With all those duels, how do centuries of divergence produce exactly the same crewmembers on the ISS Enterprise, only with goatees? It’s amazingly egocentric.
The only consistent explanation is that all examples of the MU are the work of Q, and take place in a Q-grade holodeck. MU people that cross over to the PU are created biosynthetics or clones with implanted memories that believe in their backstories.
I find myself feeling rather sorry for Emperor Georgiou. Is there anything worse than finding out somebody you love doesn’t love you back? In fact actively hates you?
I enjoyed this episode as a chance to see the DSC crowd do their MU stuff.
The divergence point that sets up the MU seems to be something to do with the Roman Empire – perhaps the Western Empire never fell – with the salutes and iirc there was a reference to Ancient Rome in the dialogue at one point.
A nice little easter egg for us classical history buffs: Mirror Michael’s story about being top of the trash heap seems to be a conscious reference to an anecdote about Julius Caesar when he and a friend were passing through a desperately poor and miserable looking village. The friend made some comment about how awful it was and Caesar agreed, but added that he would rather be the first man of this village than the second man of Rome.
@13: I was wondering if the idea was to do an opposite. So Georgiou would set up a “Mirror 31” in the MU which is basically designed to be good, just, honourable etc. Then after the events of the original MU universe, they can work with Mirror Spock to help bring down the Empire. The only problem is that we know how that story ends (in the DS9 MU episodes) so there’s no tension.
@22: I’d go further and say that there really shouldn’t be any real “point of divergence” between the universes. They’ve always been different. Even the “Kelvin Timeline” showed ships (like the Kelvin) at wild variance in capability and technological advancement compared to what we saw in TOS, let alone 40 years earlier. I always preferred the idea that the Kelvin Timeline was always a pre-existing, different universe which just happened to be the one that Spock and Nero accessed (technobabble technobabble red matter yadda yadda yadda).
@53: There’s some very good alt-SF which does deal with that question. Harry Turtledove’s novels generally start with the point of divergence and loads of familiar historical characters are around but by several generations later it’s mostly new characters because the Butterfly Effect has become so pronounced there’s no guarantee later, famous figures would be born or conceived or become relevant if they had, in radically different circumstances.
@56:
I was wondering if the idea was to do an opposite. So Georgiou would set up a “Mirror 31” in the MU which is basically designed to be good, just, honourable etc. Then after the events of the original MU universe, they can work with Mirror Spock to help bring down the Empire. The only problem is that we know how that story ends (in the DS9 MU episodes) so there’s no tension.
Hmm…there’s potential in that idea.
I agree about the tension, but if could take a page from David Mack’s MU novel Sorrows of Empire and deliver a twist that changes everything we know about the Terran Empire’s downfall (I won’t spoil it for those who’ve never read the novel).
@55/a-j: “The divergence point that sets up the MU seems to be something to do with the Roman Empire – perhaps the Western Empire never fell – with the salutes and iirc there was a reference to Ancient Rome in the dialogue at one point.”
I doubt it. Most subsequent Western empires have tried to paint themselves as the inheritors of Rome whether there was any connection or not; there’s no reason to doubt the Terran Empire would do the same, and thus no reason to take the claim any more seriously than in any of the other cases.
Anyway, it’s ethnocentric to assume that Rome was the only empire that mattered. The Han Dynasty in China was just as big, or bigger, at the same time that Rome thrived. And though many dynasties have risen and fallen since then, the case can be made that Chinese imperial culture persisted pretty much continuously up until the Communist revolution (and arguably the Chinese Communist Party is just the next imperial dynasty, for all its pretensions otherwise). And until modern times, I daresay Chinese civilization had a more widespread influence on human history than European civilization did. Indeed, much of modern European history is a response to Chinese civilization. The whole reason the Industrial Revolution happened was because Europe envied China’s wealth and was motivated to devise new manufacturing methods to compete with Chinese goods and faster transportation methods to facilitate trade with the East. And the Enlightenment-era thinkers of Europe who invented modern democracy were motivated in part by Confucian teachings about how the responsibility of a ruler was to the well-being of the governed.
Besides, would it really have made that much difference to world history if the Roman Empire as a political entity had continued? If the premise is that it would have gone on expanding until it conquered the world, that’s ludicrous, because any empire that expands too far is doomed to collapse (a point “Mirror, Mirror” made explicitly), and of course there were empires in China, India, and elsewhere that would’ve had their own well-armed objections to the idea. So it probably couldn’t have grown much more, just entrenched and stabilized while other empires and states developed much as before. Besides, by the time the Western Roman Empire fell, it had been thoroughly Christianized, and Christendom continued to be a dominant force in Europe for centuries thereafter, as well as an imperial force in its conflicts with the Islamic world such as the Reconquista and the Crusades. Heck, most European rulers painted themselves as successors to Rome, and Rome still had considerable political influence through the Pope. So I’m not sure the persistence of the literal imperial state would’ve had that much of a practical difference on the way history unfolded, either in Europe or certainly where the rest of the world was concerned.
@56/Werthead: “I always preferred the idea that the Kelvin Timeline was always a pre-existing, different universe which just happened to be the one that Spock and Nero accessed”
That idea has never made sense to me. The whole reason for including Leonard Nimoy was to tie Kelvin directly into the Prime continuity, to have its creation be a consequence of the original Spock’s actions. If it were just meant to be an unrelated universe, there would have been no need for the overly convoluted time-travel storyline in the first film. It could’ve just been a straightforward alternate origin story, and would’ve probably been a far better story for it, or at least a less messy one.
I’m almost certainly in a tiny minority, but the all-powerful cosmic characters bugged me as far back as TOS. It’s fantasy, not science fiction, and I wanted science fiction. That, plus too many Planet of Hats episodes, is why I bailed on TOS in its 3rd season. Consequently, TNG started off on the wrong foot with Q, despite the fact that John de Lancie pulled it off really well. I am not thrilled at the news you bring above.
@60. Bill: ” plus too many Planet of Hats episodes, is why I bailed on TOS in its 3rd season”
Speaking of hats: it wasn’t from season 3, but an item I read recently was from Tarantino’s co-writer on the supposed Trek movie saying it was going to be based on “A Piece of the Action.” The screenwriter sounded like a hyperactive 8-year old, saying over and over how “much fun” and “lots of fun” it was to work with Tarantino. (Hyperactive 12-year old may describe Tarantino…)
Maybe they’ll call it “Star Trek: The Dawn of Fizzbin.” Just… “Ugh.”
Oh no, Evil Mom caught the dreaded empathy cooties during her time in Regular Universe and now she doesn’t feel so good about eating her slaves. Did she know all this time that in her universe she had given Saru to Michael as a slave? It actually seems more likely that she had no idea and is only finding out about it now, because why would she have had any reason to know one Kelpien from another before?
I’m honestly really enjoying Georgiou’s plotline this season. The past few episodes have revealed how much of her evil swagger is a defense mechanism. She’s like an animal that instinctively hides all signs of illness or vulnerability that would attract predators even though she’s been domesticated and living indoors for 100,000 years. All this time, she’s been acting like she’s the same old evil emperor, unchanged and in control no matter what new universe or timeline she finds herself in. But now, back in her “natural” environment, she can’t escape the fact that she has changed and that maybe she kind of likes living in a non-evil universe.
Also, prior to this she most likely thought of herself as the wronged party with regards to Evil Michael’s betrayal. This was her big epiphany that whoops, she was actually a pretty bad parent! Michael’s “Why, because you plucked me from a trash heap??” made me realize just how often she must have heard that line from Evil Mom.
@62/kurozukin: “The past few episodes have revealed how much of her evil swagger is a defense mechanism.”
That’s been irritatingly obvious to me the whole season. Her hostility has been so forced and over-the-top that it was obvious that she was covering for something, and it’s part of why her arc hasn’t worked for me at all. She just doesn’t belong in this season, doesn’t contribute anything meaningful to the story. Okay, she did somewhat in “Far from Home,” but since then she’s just been a dead weight and a distraction, taking up space until they could finally spin her off.
Just didn’t care for this episode. I didn’t hate it, I just couldn’t care. For me it failed on three levels. First, as krad, noted it’s so clearly just set-up for the Section 31 show. Then there’s the fact I was done with this version of the MU after season 1. I don’t hate MU episodes, I just feel that Discovery had already done enough with what’s basically the same material. Lastly, there’s the fact that Season 3 is basically a new show. I feel that they should be introducing us more to the 32nd century universe the crews now in, not jumping out of it. The fact that it’s a two-parter just exacerbates everything.
Rant over.
Personally, I read this as a ‘Tapestry’-type deal, rather than actual time and inter-universal travel. It’s a little too neatly done otherwise and what with her keeping the fitbit of death it reads more on that side of things. This makes my major issue for this pair of episodes that I’m hoping they’ve got a better plan than just ‘redeeming’ her because she’s way too big a bad guy for a handwave.
#52 garreth: One problem with your idea is that the Calypso ship is NCC-1031 and Discovery is now NCC-1031A. Also, the context seems to link pretty directly to the current situation (the rescued soldier has been fighting the V’draysh, the Federation), for 10 years I think? Hard to see how that would be exactly the same in another millennium. Ever since the upgrade to 1031A, I’ve been trying to figure out how Zora fits in. Any thoughts on your part?
@65/The Queen: My suspicion is that they’re treating “Calypso” the way Marvel’s Agent Carter TV series treated the earlier cinematic short of the same name — borrowing ideas from it but putting them together in the context of a new story that superseded it in canon, so that the short ended up being essentially a trial run for the final version.
David Cronenberg revealed that he’ll be returning in the 4th season so one can presume from that that the Discovery crew is staying put in their current place in time and not doing any more time traveling for the time being.
Really? I’ve been thinking that her plotline fits in surprisingly well with the themes of this season. We had whole episodes focusing on the Discovery crew healing and finding strength as a community, characters like Detmer and Adira learning to reach out to the people around them instead of shouldering their struggles alone. And then for contrast they give us a character who to her very marrow is incapable of asking for help or accepting compassion because of the way she’s lived most of her life.
And the recurring motif of this season has been the Discovery crew putting themselves out there to help people and being initially met with cynicism or suspicion until they manage to resolve the conflict with compassion and understanding and communication and then people are like “Maybe there’s something to this Starfleet stuff after all.”
And of course Georgiou has been right there sneering and rolling her eyes at it all. But she’s seen how it works. And now, in spite of herself, she wants to be able to do that too. When confronted with one of the biggest regrets of her life, she wants to be able to spare her daughter’s life instead of killing a traitor, to be able to show compassion and empathy and have it all work out in the end. Of course, it probably won’t work out in this case; the baggage of her past acts and the whole Evil Universe thing is too great. But the point is that she’s seen a different way of living and she can’t just go back to the way she was. That also ties in with one of the season’s major threads of Michael being changed by her time living in the future with Book and apart from the Discovery crew.
@63/CLB: I’ve enjoyed Georgiou this season (and in general) for her snark and for Michelle Yeoh’s real-life fighting skills. But I also agree that the character hasn’t contributed much to the plot lines this season and I still find it ridiculous how the Discovery crew treats her as the misunderstood cranky aunt instead of the mass-murdering tyrant she is. I also think the showrunners have kept Yeoh around as much as they have for her sheer star power: its grown exponentially in the relatively short time she’s been on the series and undoubtedly brings it more attention and eyeballs.
I still wish we could have seen more of the prime universe Georgiou when she was captain of the Shenzhou and especially of the period in which Michael had just joined the crew. We only saw a brief flashback of that in the series pilot.
@55 = *cough* British Empire *cough* (24% of the world population at its peak)
@68/kurozukin: You make an interesting case, but the problem is, it’s a case for why the 32nd-century narrative is relevant to Georgiou’s arc. What I’m saying is that Georgiou’s arc doesn’t feel relevant to the 32nd-century narrative. It’s all about setting up her spinoff to a different series altogether. It doesn’t advance Discovery‘s overall story, it just distracts from it.
@70/Philippa: I suspect you meant to reply to me in comment #58. The British Empire was, of course, part of modern history (traditionally defined as post-1500), and I said that China was probably the most influential empire before modern times. I also said that European imperialism was partially a reaction to China’s longtime dominance, a direct pushback against it, which eventually succeeded. So the British Empire is itself a consequence of China’s historical influence. Everything’s interconnected.
@71: I don’t get how it’s “not relevant” or a “distraction from the overall story”. What is Discovery’s overall story if not the story of its characters? Georgiou has been a prominent character since season 1 (back when the “overall story” was about a Klingon war). She’s finally having a major character development arc beyond being Micheal’s Embarrassing Evil Mom. Her development makes sense within the current timeline of the show and fits with some of the recurring themes of the season. Does the fact that it’s not directly related to finding out about the Burn make it a “distraction”? If so then most of the character threads this season are the same.
@72/kurozukin: The story is about Discovery and its crew in the 32nd century, learning about and assimilating into the post-Burn galaxy. Yes, a story is about its characters, but if one character’s arc is unconnected to everyone else’s and just distracts from their arcs, then it’s working against the whole. Georgiou just has no place in this overall narrative. Her storyline has been solely about herself and her own problems, and is designed with an eye toward removing her from the current narrative. So she just doesn’t feel like part of everything else that’s going on.
“Does the fact that it’s not directly related to finding out about the Burn make it a “distraction”? If so then most of the character threads this season are the same.”
Not just the Burn, the entire new setting of the series and all the arcs that come with it. Burnham’s search for answers is part of that, as is her relationship with Book, her changed priorities after a year in the future, Saru’s adjustment to captaincy and serving under Admiral Vance, Tilly’s promotion to XO as a result of Burnham’s unsuitability for that role, Adira’s journey and Stamets’s developing bond with them, Detmer’s PTSD in the wake of Discovery‘s turbulent journey and crash landing, etc. That’s all about the current setting and the characters’ engagement with it. Georgiou is contributing little to that, because the writers’ entire intent for her is to remove her from this setting.
And as others have remarked, devoting two whole episodes almost exclusively to the sidebar of Georgiou and her past feels like a major intrusion into a season that’s only 10 episodes long. The Mirror Universe arc in season 1 was more integral to the overall story (even though it could’ve been an episode or two shorter), because it tied into the main narrative and involved all the main characters, not just one of them (evil doppelgangers don’t count).
@73/CLB: This season has 13 episodes, not 10.
Re: story diversions. In other words, the Georgiou character is on assignment — Assignment: Earth!
@74/garreth: Thanks — I knew I should’ve double-checked. So it’s 15% of the season instead of 20% — still a sizeable chunk to devote to such a side swerve.
I’m not a fan of the Mirror universe as presented on screen so far. As with other instances, STO handles their intrusion into the main/current timeline better. That’s a provisional statement in that, besides getting a couple missions with Captain Killy, where Mary Wiseman’s characterization is actually superior to what we’ve seen in this episode, we also get T’Kuvma’s sister crossing over and she’s a huge PITA.
Also, without mentioning any names: wouldn’t complaining and protesting too much about disliking the handling of characters, like Georgiou, rule one out for consideration of writing any potential novels, or from involvement with the current coordinating creative team?
I’m not an agent, but if I played one on TV, my advice would be to tone down one’s vociferous antipathy to the efforts of the current writers and producers to create a backdoor pilot. Such antipathy (perhaps conflicted if said individual finds the performer involved sexy) can be viewed as attempted sabotage.
There’s such a thing as complaining too incessantly. Old Bill, as always, had something to say about this: “”The lady doth protest too much, methinks”
The point (about the current state of Georgiou’s character) has already been made, methinks.
@77/Sunspear: “Also, without mentioning any names: wouldn’t complaining and protesting too much about disliking the handling of characters, like Georgiou, rule one out for consideration of writing any potential novels, or from involvement with the current coordinating creative team?”
Not necessarily. Heck, I’ve been saying for a long time that I hate Section 31, but I still got hired to write five Enterprise novels in which Trip Tucker had faked his death to become a Section 31 agent (and then they stopped hiring me for ENT novels just after I finally got him out of S31). Our Humble Reviewer hated Andromeda‘s Trance Gemini, but Keith still wrote the first Andromeda tie-in novel.
It can be a worthy challenge to write about a subject or character you dislike. It’s good to push yourself out of your comfort zone and explore points of view very different from your own. Writing is like method acting in a way — you try to become someone else, think the way they would think, even if it’s very different from your own beliefs or preferences. Ideally you give the characters free rein to be themselves rather than letting your own perspective dominate. So an author’s own opinions or preferences don’t have to preclude them from telling a story.
Besides, if someone asked me “Do you want to write a Georgiou/Section 31 novel?” I’d just say “No, I’m not interested in that, what else you got?” It’s not like that’s the only possible subject matter for a Discovery or modern-Trek novel. And that’s happened before — I get offered a certain project, I say I’m not interested, and the editor just says “okay, noted” and finds something else for me to do.
“my advice would be to tone down one’s vociferous antipathy to the efforts of the current writers and producers to create a backdoor pilot.”
Oh, don’t be so melodramatic. Despite my above examples, I don’t hate what’s going on in the show, I just find this part of it less satisfying or interesting than others, and I don’t feel that Georgiou’s presence in the story has been integrated into the arc as well as one would hope. I don’t blame the current staff for that, since they’re inheriting the story elements set in place by season 1 & 2’s showrunners, including the decision to bring Georgiou into the future despite the evident intention of removing her from it again for her own show. It can be difficult to make a character work in a narrative that they’re not conceived as a real part of. There have been cases in my own writing where I realized a character just didn’t belong in the story I was telling and was getting in the way. Writing is a process of trial and error, and not everything you try is going to work.
Plus, of course, the reason I’m dissatisfied with the Georgiou stuff is because I am enjoying the rest of the season, more than I enjoyed seasons 1-2, and I’d rather see the focus stay with the stuff that intrigues and engages me than with the stuff I’m meh about.
@CLB: fair enough, but can we move on now? I suppose that this will get rehashed again next week, since it’s a part 2.
I said this to a friend:
“I agree with you that the Mirror universe doesn’t work as currently defined. It’s just a matter of time before it implodes. All its mechanisms of violence are literally self-destructive. Perhaps the only sustainability it has is if it went expansionist across dimensions. That’s partly Georgiou’s motivation in working for S31 in the Jackson Miller novel. She wants to find weapons of mass destruction so she can start conquering the Prime galaxy. Now that they established the Kelvin universe in the series, maybe they will build to a cross-dimensional war. But other than being an action story, all political or allegorical commentary would be lost.”
The Mirror universe is an example of poor worldbuilding so far, I think we can all agree. What comes next and whether it works remains to be seen.
The most interesting approach to the Mirror Universe’s “point of divergence” is in Diane Duane’s Dark Mirror. Picard reads The Merchant of Venice in the Mirror Universe and all the characters behave just as viciously as present-day people. Maybe it was rewritten at some point, but it suggests that the entire history of Mirror Earth is “evil”.
@80/gareth: I never cared for the idea that the MU was “just evil.” I mean, that doesn’t make sense if you look beyond Earth to the rest of the galaxy. It’s only humanity that’s different; every other species is the same, except in the ways they’ve had to change in response to the human Empire. The Halkans are exactly the same, still pacifists. Spock has adopted ruthlessness in order to survive, but is still a logical and ultimately redeemable person. Klingons and Cardassians are the same, but they banded together against the Empire. Bajorans are the same, but they were oppressed by humans and liberated by Cardassians instead of the reverse. And so forth.
So it’s explicitly not an “evil universe” — just one where humanity became tyrannical instead of enlightened. And the whole point of “Mirror, Mirror” was that there was a thin line between the civilized person and the savage, that humanity could have easily gone the other way. Our intrinsic nature is the same in both universes, but in the MU, the coin flips came up on the bad side a few more times.
Anyway, “In a Mirror, Darkly” asserted the same “always evil” idea as Dark Mirror, but there, they said that Shakespeare was the only literature that was exactly the same in both universes, since it had so much violence and venality in it already. Though in both cases, I prefer the view that it was rewritten to fit Imperial ideology.
I’ve read “Dark Mirror” – the “Mirror version” of “Merchant of Venice” was different, and more violent – as I recall, Portia argues against the quality of mercy, and the pound of flesh is taken.
Checking… here’s an extract https://books.google.com/books?id=QTWgm45Jxs4C&printsec=frontcover&dq=%22dark+mirror%22+picard&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiw6_ywzM3tAhUxwlkKHWyhCWsQ6AEwAHoECAIQAg#v=onepage&q=venice&f=false – Picard finds that Shakespeare has changed for the worse. All the horrible parts from our universe are there – but anything not horrible in our world is missing in the Mirrorverse. Picard notes that this does not make much difference for Titus Andronicus. Even as far back as the Illiad, things are subtly worse in the MU.
See also https://memory-beta.fandom.com/wiki/The_Merchant_of_Venice_(mirror)
@82/AndyLove: Yes, that’s what gareth and I are saying — Dark Mirror says that Mirror Shakespeare is darker and crueler than Prime Shakespeare, while Enterprise: “In a Mirror, Darkly” conversely says that Prime and Mirror Shakespeare are exactly the same. Which suggests that the writers of IaMD had a more jaundiced view of Shakespeare.
@83: Sorry about that; I misread what you had written. Gareth did seem to be saying that Shakespeare was the same in Dark Mirror’s MU, but you were talking about “In a Mirror, Darkly” not Dark Mirror (my mistake).
Like others in the comments, I didn’t think of Carl being a Q either. The minute I saw the portal, I immediately said to myself: “Guardian of Forever”. It makes more sense. They’re more linked to notions of timelines, parallel universes and overall matters of history and the spacetime continuum. Plus, why would a Q take an interest in Georgiou, let alone an interest in the Mirror Universe? Farpoint established that the Q felt humanity in the Prime Universe was itself doomed for being a savage child race.
I liked this one. Count me as one who always enjoys digressions to the Mirror Universe. I liked seeing Killy in flesh and blood, as well as seeing Georgiou having an actual arc, rethinking her course of action (and Mirror Stamets brutally killed; definitely fun).
But what absolutely floored me was seeing Martin-Green’s first-time appearance as Mirror Burnham. That raw performance blew me away (needless to say, I never would have thought that an actress previously mainly known as secondary Walking Dead character would have this much energy and intensity within her). The way she lashes out at Georgiou. She was the devil, but I felt truly sorry for her. It takes top tier acting talent and great writing to make a fascist killer this sympathetic.
@16/Christopher: I don’t think keeping Mirror Georgiou back in the 23rd century would have been the better solution. Sure, she wasn’t being given a lot to do this season, and you can definitely see the strings being pulled, but her eventual exit has to address her complicated relationship with Michael Burnham. Season 2 didn’t have enough time to address that. Burnham’s entire character arc dates back to her failed attempt at saving her captain from T’Kuvma’s dagger. This story still needs to be resolved, which is why we need this final mission to provide that resolution. To patch things between Georgiou and Burnham, and have Burnham finally shed her guilt over the past.
It’s funny, it never occurred to me that Carl had anything to do with the Guardian of Forever, and I’m still not seeing it. Carl’s behavior is far more Q-like: playing dress-up, obnoxiousness, theatricality. The Guardian was an ancient artifact that spoke in riddles and metaphors that has nothing in common with Carl at all.
I guess I just pay more attention to characterization than physical details. (This is why I’ve never given a crap about ship design…..)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@84/AndyLove: Gareth meant that Dark Mirror Shakespeare’s characters were the same as Empire characters centuries later, not the same as Prime Shakespeare.
@85/Eduardo: “Plus, why would a Q take an interest in Georgiou, let alone an interest in the Mirror Universe?”
Why would a Q take an interest in Picard or Janeway or Beckett Mariner? Also, he didn’t come to Georgiou; she and Burnham sought him out, using a tip the Sphere/Zora gave them. He probably just hangs around there and gives enigmatic advice to whoever comes his way.
Not that I think he is a Q. The Trek universe is littered with godlike cosmic beings, so there’s no reason to assume they’re all Q. He could be a Douwd, an Organian, a Thasian, a Traveler… heck, he could be the ascended koala guy from Lower Decks.
“Farpoint established that the Q felt humanity in the Prime Universe was itself doomed for being a savage child race.”
That’s wrong. “Farpoint” established that the Q were testing humanity to find out whether they were doomed or not. If they’d felt the outcome was already a given, they wouldn’t have bothered to test us.
I disagree with you and Keith about Martin-Green’s performance as Mirror Burnham. I always find her acting a bit artificial and exaggerated, and here I found it far more so, very hammy and caricatured.
You have a point about the need to resolve the Burnham/Mirror Georgiou relationship, but my problem is that I never liked the decision to bring Emperor Georgiou into the Prime reality to begin with. I understand the appeal of keeping Michelle Yeoh around, but the emperor was the wrong version of Georgiou to bring back.
@86/krad: Good point about the differences between the Guardian and Carl. Then again, “Errand of Mercy” said Organians found the presence of corporeal beings agonizing and wanted nothing to do with us, but “Observer Effect” gave us Organian scientists possessing corporeal beings’ bodies and studying us.
Not that I assume it’s the correct answer, but it’s conceivable that Carl is a representative of the beings that built the Guardian. In which case I really hope he’s not a Q, since that would be way too small-universe.
@krad: “This is why I’ve never given a crap about ship design…..)”
Scotty, Geordi, O’Brien and the Corps of Engineers are crestfallen…
@87: Ah. Thanks.
@87/Christopher: I stand corrected. But the point was going for was that if the Q felt the need to test humanity’s integrity on account of their history of violence and ambitions – traits common to young, unprepared races – then it stands to reason that the Q wouldn’t even bother trying to make contact with their Mirror Universe counterparts due to their proven violent, destructive ways (unless they felt their presence was enough of a threat to existence as a whole, in which case they’d just snap their fingers and be done with them).
It was not THE Q, it was just Q de Lancie.
@91/MaGnUs: No, that particular Q was operating on behalf of the Q Continuum, according to “Hide and Q.” “We the Q have studied our recent contact with you and are impressed.” He was the member of the Q assigned to test humanity on his people’s behalf, although his methods were probably more extreme than they intended.
To keep them guessing, of course! (Well, either that or “… because that’s what I felt like wearing” and/or “Well it made ME laugh” seems to be the traditional answer). (-;
On a more serious note, I’m absolutely delighted that someone else took one look at dear old Qarl and thought “Well we’re going to be spelling your name with a Q, my dear fellow” – honestly, the only thing that could have made his tweaking of ‘The Empress’ more delightful would have been his munching a carrot throughout (it’s always delightful to see a trickster tweak a bully’s nose).
Also, while I’m not especially keen on the Mirror Universe and reluctant to spend more time there, this struck me as a fundamentally sound episode nonetheless (one especially liked that Court … what’s the term, tableau? The little homage to the Empress staged at the dedication ceremony for ISS Charon, which struck exactly the right balance between the blatantly sycophantic & something you’d actually enjoy watching that one expects to see in an entertainment laid on for the edification of the Court and the gratification of an ‘enlightened’ despot).
One would still be far, far more interested in seeing more of the late, Great Captain Philippa Georgiou than yet more of her Imperial Nastiness – one can only hope that line of autobiographies for Star Trek Captains is cunning enough to fill the gap left by the show, allowing us a glimpse of the Prime Timeline’s native daughter (and her formative influence on Captain Saru & Commander Burnham).
Oh, and I was also fascinated by the brief mention (& appearance) of Lieutenant Commander Yor; it was interesting to see the original NEXT GENERATION uniform look surprisingly good alongside more High Def-friendly Starfleet outfits and quite intriguing to wonder which timeline/dimension he originally hailed from (though tragic to contemplate his final fate).
I wonder if the differences between Yor, Cosmo Traitt and those Betelgeusians previously seen in the franchise represent an example of sexual dimorphism or divergences between ethnic groups within the species? (I understand that secondary canon describes the species as a nomadic, star-wandering types so it’s far from impossible that different populations might have distinct physical features).
Oh, and @39. leandar: HUSH YOU! How dare you sully the eyes of all sensible beings with such manifest heresy? How dare you threaten to deprive us of those delightfully OTT curls? A big personality like XO Tilly needs Big Hair to match the brain beneath the bounce! (-;
Tilly is one of the few SF characters who is much less attractive in her “evil” version.
It’ll be interesting if mirror Georgiou trades places with prime Georgiou, later dying in her place aboard the Shenzhou, while prime Georgiou is escorted from the past, through the mirror universe and then taken back to the future by prime Burnham via Carl’s door. They’ve brought other characters back through more implausible means than that. I had assumed that mirror Georgiou’s ailment was due to an echo of prime Georgiou overwriting the personality of her displaced counterpart, but that seems less likely now. I for one am enjoying this entire season far more than I did season 2.
@53: It seems quite common in alternate histories to think of historical figures as if they were the cast of a repertory company — the same people are going to show up even if they play different roles. For example, in Kingsley Amis’s The Alteration, a divergence in the 1500s doesn’t stop Mozart making his entrance on cue a couple of centuries later.
There’s an obvious synergy there when it comes to media where there’s an actual cast of actors.
So no, the Mirror Universe doesn’t make any sense, but it’s in a fairly established tradition.
@92 – Chris: I stand corrected.
@94 – garethwilson: Agreed, her natural hair is much more beautiful.
@95 – Transceiver: One can only hope.
@Transceiver: How would you fit a Captain Georgiou in a S31 show?
She was dead, now she’s not, she’s got a second chance in life and will try to use it to harness S31’s strengths for good.
Or Captain Georgiou will become Trek’s Boba Fett. Some viewers will spend the next couple decades pining for her return. At least we saw her for a couple episodes, instead of a scant few minutes.
@Sunspear: You made comment #100!
The obvious solution is a Captain Georgiou show that takes place ten years prior to DSC. As a storyline I suggest the Tholian War.
@101/Jana: “The obvious solution is a Captain Georgiou show that takes place ten years prior to DSC.”
That could work. Although then we’d have two 23rd-century shows centering on captains whose dark futures we already know.
“As a storyline I suggest the Tholian War.”
No, enough with the space wars, please. That’s the other franchise. Star Trek has had too many war stories already. Heck, the Discovery war story was just a rehash of the DS9 war story — how badly will the Federation compromise its values to survive? — only much more hamfisted. So what more is there to say about war in a Trek context? There are better things to tell stories about.
Not to mention that the lines in “The Infinite Vulcan” and The Wrath of Khan about Starfleet keeping the peace for a hundred years are already very hard to reconcile with the new canon of a Klingon war in 2256-7. Having two interstellar wars just a decade apart makes it even more impossible.
@CLB: Dude. Seriouly… I can’t even… She’s following in the spirit of my comment and making a satirical one.
You know Jana’s posting history very well. You’ve chided her enough times on her dislike of the Klingon War and the general direction new Trek is taking. She doesn’t like war stories and wants more traditional exploration ones.
I got to thinking the other day, as I was rewatching the DSC season one MU episodes, how it makes little sense that the Terran Empire would even have a starship named Discovery. That name is appropriate for a space faring vessel with the objective of exploration but for a warship representing the evil and dastardly Empire? Me thinks not. It’s just another point in how nonsensical the MU is. It should just be one of many alternate universes, as demonstrated in TNG’s “Parallels,” and not the silly (but admittedly fun) idea where everyone and everything is the funhouse mirror opposite.
They Discover things to then conquer them.
Even a conquering empire needs research ships to map out new territories, experiment with new drives, weapons, and power sources, etc. A military can’t be made up exclusively of fighters; it needs other kinds of specialists to support and guide them.
Granted, this Discovery seems to be more an imperial flagship than a research ship, but ships can be reassigned to new roles. One of the Royal Navy ships named HMS Discovery, the one launched in 1789, was originally an explorer but was eventually converted into a bomb vessel, i.e. one used to bombard fixed land positions with cannon fire, and then became a hospital ship and later a convict transport ship.