“The Emperor’s New Cloak”
Written by Ira Steven Behr & Hans Beimler
Directed by LeVar Burton
Season 7, Episode 12
Production episode 40510-562
Original air date: February 3, 1999
Stardate: unknown
Station log: Ishka has told Rom that Zek has gone missing. He said he’d be back from a business opportunity in five days, and has been missing for twelve. Turns out he’s gone to the Mirror Universe—but was captured by the Alliance. The Alliance sends Ezri Tigan—whom Quark initially mistakes for this universe’s Dax doing a punk role-play or something—to deliver the ransom note from Zek: bring a cloaking device to the MU.
Quark and Rom sneak off with a cloaking device from the Rotarran. They’re almost caught by Sisko and Martok, but manage to get to Cargo Bay 14, where Tigan is waiting. Quark and Rom insist on accompanying Tigan to the MU—partly to make sure the Regent comes through on his end, partly because Martok has discovered the stolen cloaking device and they need to leg it.
However, before Tigan and her comrade—Fontaine—can get off Terok Nor with the cloak, Bashir and two others capture them, killing Fontaine in the process. Smiley and Bashir put Tigan, Quark, and Rom in a holding cell. Smiley gives the Ferengi two choices: go into Alliance territory on their own to rescue Zek without the cloak, or get sent back to the mainline universe (and into the unhappy arms of Sisko and Martok).
On the Regent’s flagship, Zek and Maihar’du are sharing a cell with the Intendant, who apparently brokered the deal with the Regent for the cloak. She goes from giving Zek oo-mox to almost beating the crap out of him and back again.
Tigan has a third ally: Brunt. He manages to get the cloak, break Tigan, Quark, and Rom out of their cell, and then head off in a ship to rendezvous with the Regent. Privately, Brunt admits to Quark that he sympathizes with the Rebellion, but he goes where Tigan goes. They’re partners, and he’s in love with her, though she doesn’t return the level of affection.
On the flagship, the Regent is discovering the joys of beetle snuff, and also tormenting Gul Garak. The latter wishes to have the Intendant killed now that they’ve finally captured her, but the Regent refuses to commit to that course of action, focused as he is on the Rebellion.
Brunt’s ship arrives, and Quark and Rom turn over the cloak. The Intendant walks freely onto the bridge, to Garak’s dismay, and plants a big kiss on Tigan. The deal the Intendant made was the cloak in exchange for her freedom—as for Tigan, she says she’s loyal to her friends.
The Regent locks Quark and Rom in a cell with Zek and Maihar’du. Turns out that Zek stole the plans for the multidimensional transporter from one of Rom’s padds when he came home to visit once. (O’Brien had given Rom the schematics to study.) He came to the MU to find new business opportunities. Quark and Rom point out how spectacularly stupid this is, and Zek shrugs and says it seemed like a good idea at the time.
Brunt’s conscience is bothering him, as he likes Quark and Rom and thinks they deserve better. When he appeals to the Intendant to let them live, the Intendant responds by killing Brunt right in front of Tigan.
The Alliance engineers are struggling with the installation of the cloak. Tigan mentions that Rom knew how it worked, prompting the Regent to ask, “Then why is he not here?”
Rom installs the cloak under Garak’s eye, and once there’s no use for him anymore, the Regent orders him and the others killed. Garak has a special poison that he was intending to use on the Intendant (ahem), but he’ll settle for Quark, Rom, Zek, and Maihar’du. But then Quark, Rom, and Zek start taunting him until the Regent deactivates the cloak. Rom’s sabotage kicks in then, and main power goes offline. The flagship is a sitting duck for the Defiant, which blows the crap out of the defenseless ship, forcing the Regent to surrender.
Tigan kills Garak before he can kill the Ferengi and Maihar’du. Tigan also lets the Intendant get away in an escape shuttle—“I owe her that much,” she says of the person who killed her best friend and partner.
The Regent is brought to Terok Nor in chains and Quark, Rom, Zek, and Maihar’du are free to go home. Zek makes noises about wanting to come back, but once Rom sees Tigan and Leeta flirt with each other, he says he wants to go home.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? For reasons passing understanding, on a massively huge Klingon ship, the cloaking device is hooked up on the bridge.
Don’t ask my opinion next time: Garak indicates that the Intendant was only recently captured, and she manages her usual survival tricks.
The slug in your belly: Rom is surprised that Tigan is working for the Alliance, but it turns out that she’s a mercenary who will work for whoever pays. She did work for the Terran Rebellion for a while, but they never paid her, so she switched sides.
It’s also established that Jadzia was killed in a firefight.
There is no honor in being pummeled: The Regent is as temperamental as ever, and throws at least two temper tantrums, one of which involves ripping his command chair out of its housing and tossing it across the bridge.
Rules of Acquisition: Continuing with tradition (Quark in “Crossover,” Rom in “Through the Looking-Glass,” and Nog in “Shattered Mirror”), a Ferengi is killed when the MU is visited, in this case Brunt.
Ferengi apparently pray to the Blessed Exchequer, which, naturally, involves placing bribes in an idol. It’s unclear who, precisely, collects those bribes from the altars.
Plain, simple: Gul Garak has no idea how to interrogate or torture anyone, which disappoints the heck out of Quark and Rom.
Tough little ship: The Defiant is able to pound the daylights out of the Regent’s flagship once it’s defenseless.
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet: Quark is annoyed that Bashir is flirting with Dax. Meanwhile, Brunt is in love with Tigan, who’s got the hots for the Intendant. The Intendant continues to use sex as a weapon, with Tigan, with the Regent, and with Zek.
Oh, and Tigan thinks Leeta is hot, according to an embarrassment of a snicker-snicker-tee-hee closing scene that reads as if it was written by a couple of not-too-bright twelve-year-old boys, and is the latest bit of evidence that DS9 really needed a woman or three on the writing staff.
Keep your ears open: “Would you stop looking at me like that? You’re making me feel like an idiot.”
“I hope so.”
Quark being annoyed at Tigan, and Tigan being unrepentant.
Welcome aboard: All the guests are recurring regulars, some in their usual roles—Max Grodénchik as Rom, Wallace Shawn as Zek, J.G. Hertzler as Martok, and Tiny Ron as Maihar’du—and others as their MU counterparts—Andrew J. Robinson as Garak, Chase Masterson as Leeta, Jeffrey Combs as Brunt, and an uncredited James Darren as a non-holographic Fontaine.
Trivial matters: This episode was dedicated to the memory of Jerome Bixby, who died shortly before it was aired. Bixby wrote several episodes of the original series, including “Mirror, Mirror,” which introduced the MU.
This is chronologically the last onscreen MU episode, following “Mirror, Mirror” and the previous DS9 episodes “Crossover,” “Through the Looking-Glass,” “Shattered Mirror,” and “Resurrection.” It’ll be seen again in the 22nd century in Enterprise’s two-parter “In a Mirror, Darkly.”
The 24th-century MU story is continued in the tie-in fiction, both in the post-finale DS9 fiction (particularly Olympus Descending by David R. George III in Worlds of DS9 Volume 3, Warpath by David Mack, and Fearful Symmetry and The Soul Key by Olivia Woods) and in the Mirror Universe books (Saturn’s Children by Mack writing as “Sarah Shaw” in Obsidian Alliances, several stories in the Shards and Shadows anthology, and the novel Rise Like Lions by Mack).
This is the final episode of DS9 directed by LeVar Burton, though he would continue to direct episodes of Voyager and also direct episodes of Enterprise. The previous DS9 episode he helmed was the previous MU episode, “Resurrection.”
The title of the episode is a play on the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale The Emperor’s New Clothes.
This episode has a major continuity error, as Alliance ships are shown to have cloaks in “Through the Looking-Glass,” which pretty much torpedoes the entire plot of this episode…
Walk with the Prophets: “I’m really beginning to hate this universe.” The real problem with the Mirror Universe is that it’s kind of a one-note joke. Hey look, it’s the people we know, except they’re evil! Or, at least, different. Bashir’s a snot, Ezri is a punk mercenary, Brunt is sweet, Garak is a thug, Worf is a lunatic, and O’Brien—well, O’Brien’s still O’Brien.
But at this point, the joke has worn thin, and it’s impossible to care about anything that happens in the episode. Zek’s plan to open up business opportunities in the MU is so spectacularly stupid that the script even cops to it.
And that’s not the only stupidity that draws attention to itself. Apparently, the fact that Gul Garak is less impressive than his mainline counterpart is something that a joke needs to be made out of, one that goes on way too long, and then we have Rom constantly pointing out how absurd the MU is, which doesn’t help the episode’s case.
The other beats are all depressingly predictable. We know Worf is going to rant and rave, we know the Intendant is going to flirt with everyone and slink to an unconvincing last-minute escape, we know that a Ferengi’s going to get killed (though Jeffrey Combs does superbly as Nice Guy Brunt).
Plus, of course, the entire plot is predicated on writers Ira Steven Behr & Hans Beimler forgetting that the Alliance was established as having cloaking technology back in “Through the Looking-Glass.” If only the show-runners had been able to backstop them—oh, wait, Behr is the show-runner!
Yeah. It’s impossible to take this episode at all seriously when it’s done in by its premise, and just in general, the novelty of the MU has worn off and it has outstayed its welcome. We have no emotional investment in the MU versions of any of these characters, mostly because they’re just caricatures, anyhow. And then the cherry on top, we see a real version of Fontaine—which makes no sense on any possible level—because apparently Behr’s lounge-music fetish is worse than we thought.
I will say this much: Quark and Rom carrying the cloaked cloak (and then trying to find it and pick it up again) is a magnificent bit of physical comedy, hilariously and perfectly executed by Armin Shimerman and Max Grodénchik (who apparently spent three days rehearsing their tandem fake-carry).
Warp factor rating: 1
Keith R.A. DeCandido got to write two Mirror Universe stories, the short novel The Mirror-Scaled Serpent in the trade paperback Obsidian Alliances, which focused on the MU versions of the Voyager crew, and “Family Matters” in the Shards and Shadows anthology, which told a story of the Klingon-Cardassian Alliance.
Alternate Dimension and Ferengi’s!! Oh ya, 0 rating from me, I hate the alternate dimension stories and have been less than pleased with most of the Ferengi episodes, although I love how DS9 has given depth to that race, go figure, it’s a bit contradictory, but I don’t care, I bloody hate this episode.
This episode just dragged for me. It seemed like it had been going on forever and should surely be wrapping up, so I checked – nope, 17 minutes left. After another eternity, I thought surely it would finish soon – no luck, still six minutes left.
I don’t hate the mirror universe completely, but this was incredibly contrived. As Keith notes, it’s overdone – but by golly, we’re gonna hammer one more episode out of this sucker!
Two good things about this episode: Rom caressing the wall and calling it a “soothing shade of gray,” and mirror Ezri being even more adorable and pouty than regular Ezri.
This episode is THE WORST.
Like, maybe as bad as Profit and Lace. Uggggh. You pretty much nailed it – at this point it completely shatters any suspension of disbelief (not that it had any in the first place) and taking the whole ‘opposite person’ thing way, way, way too far. I had a hard time with it even in the first place – why would all these people exist and know each other and yet all be total opposites? But at least the first time, it was kind of an interesting change of pace, fun to watch the actors doing something a bit different. Maybe it would be interesting if it was a kind of ‘if things were different, this is how this character could have turned out’ – kind of like that Riker episode with his double – but instead it’s just obviously completely arbitrary.
Honestly, Rom’s lampshade hanging were some of the only good parts of the episode (and the cloaked cloak – actually, based on the episode title, I thought the whole episode would be about them saying they had a cloaked cloak, but not actually having it, but nobody is willing to call them out on it because everybody is buying into the lie).
Do I even need to comment on the sexed up lesbian villain thing?
Anyway, this episode is a waste of time – it really adds nothing to the characters, to the main plot, etc. At least Prodigal Daughter (I thought) has some interesting insights into Ezri’s past and character.
Oh and I also hate this epsiode because it seems to be legitmizing the (in ‘real universe’) Bashir/Ezri relationship. Barf.
Oh, and my husband ranted for about 10 minutes about MU Fontaine, lol.
(I actually thought it was kind of funny, if for no other reason it is so patently absurd…but so is everything else about this whole damn setup).
Here’s the thing about cloaking device continuity: The only thing that makes sense is if there are several completely different cloaking technologies. Think about it. Chronologically:
In Enterprise, the Suliban and Romulans used a form of stealth technology that Starfleet learned how to penetrate with sensors obtained from Daniels. The Xyrillians also had a form of invisibility for their ships. Yet:
In TOS: “Balance of Terror,” the technology to cloak a ship from sensors was considered prohibitively impractical, until it was achieved by the Romulans. Yet a cloaked ship could still be detected by motion sensors. However:
In “The Enterprise Incident,” cloaked ships could no longer be detected by motion sensors. Starfleet stole a cloaking device, presumably with the intent of learning how to reproduce and/or penetrate its effect. Yet:
In TAS: “The Time Trap,” Klingons were known to have cloaking devices, though nothing was established about how they worked. By The Search for Spock, they were still using cloaks, but those cloaks could be detected by a visual distortion effect. However:
In The Undiscovered Country, a new form of Klingon cloak was undetectable by the distortion effect. Spock discovered how to track a cloaked ship using its engine emissions. Nonetheless:
By TNG, Starfleet has no ability to track cloaked ships by engine emissions.
The only explanation that makes sense is that there’s a constant war between stealth and detection. Once a given form of cloaking technology is penetrated by a new detection technology, it becomes obsolete and useless until a new form of cloak is invented that can fool that detection technology. Cloaking devices are not a single invention, they’re a whole string of successive inventions. And an obsolete cloaking technology might as well be no cloaking technology at all.
So there’s really no continuity error here, any more than there is among all the other examples cited above. The explanation is that the cloaking technology used by the Alliance in “Crossover” has been penetrated by Rebellion sensors in the interim, thus requiring the Alliance to obtain a new, more advanced form of cloaking.
As for the episode, it was fun. Sure, it was insubstantial, but that’s what we’d come to expect of the DS9 version of the Mirror Universe, and it was fun to get one last visit and to give Nicole de Boer and Jeffrey Combs a chance to get in on the action.
The biggest misstep was having “Fontaine” randomly, inexplicably appear as a real person. Sure, it was meant to comment on the inherent absurdity and arbitrariness of the premise, I suppose, but for those of us who want the show to make a modicum of in-universe sense, it’s frustrating. But here’s a possibility: I suggested before that maybe Vic Fontaine wasn’t a real 20th-century lounge singer, but a fictional composite created by Bashir’s programmer friend Felix. Maybe Vic was modeled on a contemporary actor that Felix hired, an actor whose surname actually was Fontaine. And maybe that actor’s counterpart was the Alliance loyalist we saw here.
Or if there really was a Vic Fontaine in the 20th century, maybe this is his great-to-the-somethingth grandkid who happens to be a dead ringer. If it could happen with Sela and Worf (and arguably with Shannon O’Donnell, depending on how literally you take the flashbacks in “11:59”), I guess it could happen with this guy.
Cloaking Technology and Sensors are always an arms race, which can easily paper over concerns over who has cloaks at what time. Obviously Imperial sensors made a breakthrough that rendered Alliance cloaks obsolete, worthless trash but that can’t do a thing against cutting-edge main-universe Romulan cloaks…
I agree with the arms race argument. It simplifies the issue of cloaking devices and it actually makes sense in the span of 80 plus years between Balance of Terror and DS9’s final season.
I think the same argument applies to the idea of Transwarp Drive. If the Excelsior could do it back in ST III, why didn’t they adapt it to the Ent-D on TNG, 78 years later? The way I see it, the evolution of this particular technology must have hit some potential barriers and difficulties along the way, not to mention Scotty’s miracle tinkering. It wasn’t until Voyager that the idea was revisited thanks to the Borg’s transwarp coils.
As for Emperor’s New Cloak, the less said about it the better. Talk about a waste of an episode. With Quark and Rom involved, this should have worked. The same way Little Green Men worked. This one was boring, predictable and unfunny. And I’m still surprised Voyager avoided the MU.
Behr and Beimler really rushed this one out. So did the line producer, for that matter. I can’t think of another reason to blatantly steal VFX shots from Shattered Mirror if not to save money.
It’s not that absurd. It seems you can beam from Ferenginar to Mirror Ferenginar. So it is much easier to get there than to Bajor, Vulcan or any other star system. Ferenginar could easily end up trading far more with Mirror Ferenginar than with the rest of its own universe!
So Zek was foolish to go himself, but right to believe there was a lot to be gained from contact with the universe next door. (Of course, there is a war going on in the Mirror Universe, but there is a war going on in his own universe as well, so I would not see that as a show-stopper.)
I’m willing to go along with the cloaking arms race thing too, except that a cloaked ship under impulse should always be trackable by it’s plasma discharge. Maybe in TNG and DS9 we never have the need to track Romulan or Klingon ships under impulse. Alternatively, maybe the impulse plasma cools fast enough that it can only be tracked by a sniffer device of some kind at close range, and can’t be detected by long range sensors.
Speaking as a former 12-year old boy: didn’t mind that as much at all. But considering the possibilities in tie-in fiction with the MU, sooooo much better could have been done.
I’ll buy that there is an arms race regarding cloaking and detection technology and that previous problems- plasma gas emissions, motion, whatever are technically overcome. What I can’t overcome is that the Defiant (is it the ISS Defiant or just Defiant?) is going one on one against the mightiest ship in the Alliance Fleet and defeats it. I realize that some of that is because of Rom’s sabotage, but it does a lot of damage before that ever happens. I could buy that the Defiant is an overpowered ship and might be faster than anything they’ve ever fought, but realistically it’s hard to imagine that even with its achilles heel of limited target sensors that they should just be able to blanket an area and eventually hit Defiant.
Another question though is why does a cloaking device designed to work on a bird of prey work with a much, much larger ship like the regents flagship, which is several degrees larger. In order for these devices to work, the only logical thing is that they are closely designed for the ship they are installed on. Either Rom is the greatest engineer in any universe or the writers just are assuming that any cloaking device works in any ship, 100% of the time flawlessly.
My biggest complaint about this and just about every other DS9 Mirror Universe episode is that they utterly wrecked the premise of “Mirror Mirror,” in which it was made clear that only a cosmic coincidence in space and time could allow transfer between the universes. By this episode of DS9, they’ve made getting to the MU seem about as hard as catching a crosstown bus, and just about as interesting.
Can’t disagree with anything in this review. I’d have given it a 2 though. The extra point is for one thing, and one thing only. Nicole de Boer looks really hot in leather! (Yes, that’s my 12 year old boy taking over.)
Terrible episode, yes. But unlike KRAD, I actually enjoyed the lampshading and self-mocking, tongue-in-cheek tone. Including the absurdity of Fontaine’s presence.
My problem is that all of the lampshading humor was worth about 10 minutes. And they stretched it into 45 minutes with nothing else to redeem it. (Well, almost nothing. I guess there were bright points like getting to see Combs in a very different role, or the tandem-carry physical humor.)
One last point that doesn’t make sense, a drop in the ocean: why exactly aren’t the Ferengi going to get dismembered by Martok as soon as they arrive back in the normal universe? Consequences, shmonsequences.
Interesting note (according to Memory Alpha): Nana Visitor was quite disappointed in the writers’ decision to make the Intendant bisexual; she hadn’t intended to portray the character that way, saying that the Intendant’s infatuation with Prime-Universe-Kira had been a one-time thing, based on narcissism rather than normal attraction.
FONTAINE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
It’s been a while since I’ve seen “Mirror, Mirror,” but is there a line in there, perhaps when “our” crew is trying to figure out what happened, when they hypothesize that they are in an anti-matter universe?
@16: The word “antimatter” does not appear in “Mirror, Mirror.” You must be thinking of “The Alternative Factor,” which ridiculously interpreted antimatter as something that only existed in another universe, even though “The Naked Time” had already established it as the Enterprise‘s power source.
I must be making it up then. I don’t know that I’m necessarily confusing it with another episode, or just various random theories of the universe that I’ve heard over the years.
The arms race argument doesn’t work except as a way to paper over the blatant mistake. Zek says that the MU doesn’t have cloaking technology, and later the Regent and the Intendant talk about cloaking as if the technology is brand new, and never been seen or heard of befor.
MikeKelm: you’re misremembering the episode. The flagship’s main power crashed within a few seconds of decloaking. They were a sitting duck from jump. At no point did any fighting occur between the two ships when the flagship had power.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@19: Sure, it’s papering over a continuity error, but that’s half of what you and I do for a living. ;)
Besides, it just plain makes sense. Even leaving aside the various inconsistencies in the way cloaking’s been portrayed, it just stands to reason that there would be a race between stealth technologies and detection technologies, just as there has been in real life.
Christopher: It’s what we do when we write tie-in fiction. But it doesn’t change the fact that it’s a flaw in the episode, and this rewatch is primarily concerned with the episode itself. :)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@7:
“And I’m still surprised Voyager avoided the MU.”
Given the MU didn’t have a U.S.S. Voyager it’s not so surprising. There is the episode Living Witness however, which I imagine is what a counterpart Voyager would’ve been like had the Empire not been downed by the Alliance and Spock’s reforms.
In the books Kes and Neelix end up in the Alpha Quadrant instead. Much like the DS9 MU adventures though, the books start out good and just become more and more absurd until they’re basically self-parodies by the end. Actually, the dumb parts of The Emperor’s New Cloak pale in comparison to just how outrageously stupid the book series becomes…
Regardless, I think this episode is substantially more interesting and watchable than the epic snoozefest Resurrection.
This episode is really lame. The only fun part are Rom and Quark carrying an invisible object gag. On the upside Erzi seems a bit more compatent in her chosen profession in the MU. I remember watching this episode originally and shouting at the screen why is Vic Fontaine in this episode as a person? HE IS A FREAKING HOLOGRAM?
Yet again Star Trek’s purile and backward attitude to homo/bisexuality rears its head.
Unfortunately it’s still one of the most ‘open’ examples in the franchise, even over 15 years later.
Other than that, I thought the episode was harmless enough. It’s just that this season kinda splits into a ‘season arc or fluff’ divide. This falls firmly in the ‘fluff’ camp.
@24: Granted, the MU episodes were pretty backward/prurient in their treatment of homosexuality. But at least this one managed to avert the “evil lesbian/bisexual” cliche a bit by having the reformed Ezri attracted to the resistance-member Leeta, so it wasn’t just the Intendant.
@24: There was an excellent discussion on queer characters over on TrekBBS not too long ago – I think I remember Christopher participating in it, actually. It was almost universally agreed that the on-screen portrayal was consistently awful, but that much better things have been done in the tie-in works.
That said, I really don’t find this episode so bad in that regard. I have never found the Intendant particularly bisexual; I would say she is far too narcissistic to find anyone else attractive, and anything sexual she does is to manipulate, not from actual attraction. Leeta and Ezri’s scene does make me roll my eyes, but it’s not a negative portrayal, just a juvenile one.
For some reason I was always under the impression that Mirror Fontaine was a Bajoran. Maybe it had something to do with the small TV I had back in the 90s.
Having him terran is easily explainable. He’s just the mirror counterpart of the guy that Vic’s program was modeled after.
Of course, if this episode had perfect continuity and logic is still wouldn’t be any good.
By this point I’d come to dread both the inevitable Mirror Universe episodes and Ferengi episodes, so what did they do? Combine them. And whole new levels of bad were achieved. But (as has been pointed out) Ezri is “adorable and pouty” and dressed in leather. So if you completely ignore everything else in the episode, this one is fantastic!
Yeah this episode was a real drag for me to watch. However, all these excursions to the mirror universe has given us some excellent Post Trek TV novels based in the Mirror Universe. So that’s something at least.
I’ve got nothing to add to the conversation, but I am excited about the timing. You see, we have some friends who had a baby a few days ago. Last night, the missus informed me that the boy’s name is Miles. I don’t know if his middle name is Edward or not (their last name isn’t O’Brien), but I immediately decided that I will refer to him as Smiley.
I know it has nothing to do with the episode, per se, but I love the MU/Smiley/birth timing.
Oh. There is also an elementary school in our district named for a woman named Keiko. I’d hate to see our friends move, but I’m so hoping that they do so that Miles can go to Keiko’s school.
Lastly, we bought a house last summer. There was a place on the market, that we didn’t get, on a street called Botany Bay. I told the missus I was really bummed we didn’t get that house. After she asked, and was told why, I had to warn her that if she rolled her eyes too far they would get stuck that way.
LOL. Jumping franchises, but there’s a ‘Kessel’ street near where we live.
Also, I remember a year or so ago, there was some issue with the air traffic control system going down, and a bunch of flights were delayed. I was on a trip (or maybe at the airport – thankfully not one of the ones affected) and there was some talking head on CNN or a similar station…it was an ‘aviation analyst’ named Miles O’Brien. LOL. I did a double take. Not quite a starship engineer, but it still made me laugh.
I love the nickname ‘Smiley’ for the kid. LOL. Our son’s name is Luke, and as an infant he was very squirmy, so we jokingly called him ‘Squirmy Wormie’ (also kind of an in joke).
@32: Actually, Miles O’Brien was CNN’s main science and aerospace correspondent from 1992 to 2008. Apparently he’s recently been rehired as an aviation analyst.
There is a Pon Farr Court in Leesburg, VA. I passed it driving down Route 15 years ago, had to turn around and go back for a picture!
@31: You don’t want to live on Botany Bay. Everytime someone would visit your house, upon turning down your street, they would have to say, “Botany Bay? Botany Bay! Damn! We’ve got to get out of here now!”
@35: There’s a Wharf Street, in downtown Victoria, BC.
Another swing and a miss, highlighted by the Quark and Rom invisible carry, Nice Guy Brunt, and Ezri Tigan in leather. Rawr. But even I rolled my eyes at that ridiculous closing scene, much as I enjoy any scene with Chase Masterson. I hadn’t actually seen this one before, and it just completely ruined whatever interest I had for the MU.
The “MU ships don’t have cloaks” thing did confuse me, as I specifically remember a Klingon and Cardassian ship decloaking over the tiny rebel ship piloted by Smiley and Sisko. And Zek’s plan for commerce with the MU highlighted that it was time for Zek to handover the reigns to his unlikely successor.
I missed this one on first run, and didn’t miss a damn thing.
The stupidity of the Grand Negus thinking profit could be made in the Mirror Universe made me come up with a Rule of Acquisition. “Just because you’ll die rich is no good reason to turn yourself in for the reward money.” Variant- “Never turn yourself in for the reward money unless you’re dying anyway.” Meaning, it’s one thing to be greedy, but to be greedy and stupid with it is going to cost you!
One thing I did like about this episode is that it gave Nicole de Boer a chance to play a somewhat interesting character. I think AU Ezri is far more compelling than regular Ezri.
The only reason I liked Intendant Kira escaping in this was I really wanted to kill her myself (in the various Mary Sue-lite fan fictions I…um, still write), so I’m grateful to the show for giving me that opportunity. I’d been waiting for years…
The fact that Vic is a human in the MU answers Rom’s question in “Its Only a Paper Moon”- you mean he has free will?
Yes, Vic is a self aware hologram and a few of those apparently are “alive” and they have free will. That is the only explanation for them having actual living counterparts in the MU. I bet Professor Moriarty is a superhero in the MU.
DS9 had some the best episodes of any in the franchise, but it also had some of the worst. I’m sure these MU episodes were fun for the cast, but they are dreadful to watch. And seeing Vic show up out of nowhere made me realize he is the Cousin Oliver of DS9. If I ever do another rewatch, I think I can trim it down to about 3 or 4 seasons worth of episodes by eliminating episodes like this. After I rewatched Enterprise, I was sad that it only lasted 4 seasons. But if 3 more seasons would have made it drag out the way this rewatch has it was probably for the best.
Now this is a rating I agree with. I think the whole idea of the MU is stupid to begin with and it never really came anything good out of it.
First thing I didn’t understand, where the hell did MU-Ezri turn up all of a sudden? It doesn’t even make sense. She’s on DS9 because she happened to be the only available trill when Dax needed a new host. Why should she be on DS9 in the other universe?
Second, what exactly was the purpose MU-Kira in this episode other than trying to seduce every other character on screen? And OF COURSE every female character in the MU is bi-sexual because ” teh lesbian seks is hawt!!!11111″, right????
@43/waka: Why should anyone in the Mirror Universe end up in the same posting as their Prime counterparts? Why should the Mirror Enterprise have had the same seven people in its senior staff (well, eight, counting Pike)? Why should Mirror Sisko and O’Brien have been on Terok Nor in the first place? Ezri being there is no more improbable. It’s just an established conceit of the MU episodes. Of most alternate-reality episodes in Trek and other fiction, really.
@44 I suppose it is only possible by the nature of infinity. If something is physically possibly, and the nature of the multiverse and number of alternate dimensions is infinite, then not only can it happen that everybody is present in similar roles and locations, but it actively must happen. And in one universe they must end up getting zapped back into the same “mirror” dimension again and again because of the infinite. And this can only occur because Arthur Dent left an unrewound copy of Star Trek in the Heart of Gold’s VHS tape library.
@45/random22: No, the “infinity” explanation doesn’t work, because if there’s an infinite number of universes, then the probability of characters from “our” universe ever reaching a specific one even once, let alone repeatedly, is the reciprocal of infinity, i.e. zero. The set of universes that a given person, organization, or civilization can visit within their lifetime is finite, therefore arguments that resort to infinity are inapplicable.
@46 No, it does, because while the odds are long that one Mirror verse could fill that roll, the infinite vastness of infinity means one of them simply must because it is (in Star Trek) apparently physically possible so it must occur at least once. We just lucked out on that one being the one our cast locked onto, maybe there is some other ship, possibly even in a different universe altogether, full of less interesting characters who discovered other mirror verse universes, maybe a one even darker than this. But we don’t concern ourselves with the offbrand version, we stick with the Canon Trek crews.
@47/random22: No, that’s not how it works. People often trot out that argument to justify nonsense, but it’s abusing the concept of infinity and misunderstanding probability. If there’s an infinite number of possibilities, the probability of experiencing any single one is zero. The only way you have a nonzero probability of experiencing anything is if there’s a finite number of possibilities. You may be thinking of it as analogous to winning the lottery, but the number of possible lottery combinations is still finite. 10 billion or 100 trillion is just as far from infinity as 1 is.
Once more: even if the multiverse is infinite, the number of parallel universes that the Prime Trek universe can interact with is finite. So when talking specifically about the probability of people from one universe encountering their duplicates from another, when talking about actual interaction between two different universes, you can’t use infinity to justify it. It’s just not mathematically or logically applicable in that context.
@48 I disagree, but if that is the case then it is because of quantum instead. Or a Q did it. It is your choice, really.
Mathematics is not a matter of opinion. If you “disagree” with the facts, that just means you’re wrong.
I’ve always thought of it like the MU is the one we can visit because it is the one that is right next door. There could still be infinite universes, but we can’t get to them because we aren’t right next to them.
@51/IndianaJoe: The problem is, the idea of the Mirror Universe being “close” to ours doesn’t really work, because there are some things in the MU that are essentially identical and other things that are massively different, creating an improbable scenario. Logically, if the history were that different, then the same people wouldn’t be born and end up on the same ships or stations, nor would the ship designs and uniforms be so much the same. The reason people invoke the “infinite universes” idea is to try to handwave away that absurdly improbable scenario by saying that in an infinite multiverse, any unlikely combination of factors will crop up somewhere purely due to random chance. But if it’s just the random luck of the draw being invoked as an explanation, then that’s not consistent with the idea of it being a directly adjacent reality, because on the one hand, it means there’s no causal relationship due to the proximity, and on the other hand, if it’s just random chance, then the odds of that specific random universe happening to be the adjacent one are infinitesimal, which is essentially my point. The “random infinity” handwave doesn’t work as a justification for having an adjacent or accessible parallel universe being different in arbitrary or nonsensical ways, because with an infinite number of possibilities, the probability of that specific one happening is effectively zero.
Besides, it feels like a cheat to invent an explanation that permits any kind of random nonsense to exist in a story. I prefer it when things that happen in stories are not random and nonsensical.
I see your point, but I mean it’s not like Star Trek is known for plausible plots. It’s pretty much fantasy with a SciFi coating. For example, compare it to The Expanse. Both shows take place approximately the same amount of time in the future, but one has FTL travel across multiple interstellar civilizations, and the other has one species struggling to get out of the solar system. Myself, I hold them to different standards. I like them both, but it’s like comparing To Kill A Mockingbird with Aesop’s Fables.
@53/IndianaJoe: It’s sad that people today see ST as “fantasy.” Back in its day — really, up through the ’80s or even the early ’90s — Star Trek was just about the only SFTV show that made any attempt at scientific credibility. Of course there’s a whole spectrum of approaches between “soft” and “hard” science fiction, and of course ST has always been “softer” than something like Clarke or Niven or my own original SF or The Expanse, but it was still considerably “harder” SF than any of its utterly inane contemporaries. Heck, just knowing that the speed of light was a thing and understanding what the word “galaxy” meant put it head and shoulders above pretty much everything else in ’60s-’80s SFTV. I’m glad there’s so much more credible SF in TV and film these days, but it’s a shame that ST has fallen so far behind the curve, when it used to be the only refuge of borderline credibility in a sea of utter nonsense.
Besides, the people who trot out the “infinite multiverse” bromide are claiming that it does make the premise plausible, that it’s logically necessary that any imaginable thing would be true somewhere in an infinite multiverse. So they’re trying to say it’s more than just fantasy, that it actually makes sense. And I’m pointing out that it just doesn’t work that way, that the infinite-probability argument is just as nonsensical as the thing it’s trying to justify. My point is that if you want to come up with some way to rationalize the fantasy of the Mirror Universe, that argument doesn’t work. Something else is required.
Don’t use me to sample the cultural zeitgeist; I’ve always been an outlier and a pop-cultural snob. I grew up on Benford and Brin, so even classic Trek was never very “hard” to me. I’m a big believer in Sturgeon’s Law. At least Star Trek and Expanse are both in the 10% of decent stuff.
Lockdown Rewatch
Yeah its rubbish, but at least unlike the previous episode Prodigal Daughter I didn’t struggle to stay awake during this. I kind of thought at the time the writers and the show runners had realised the whole MU premise had got silly by this point and decided to send it up by just going full on bat shit crazy and then throwing Rom in to the mix to provide the commentary of how ridiculous it was.. but perhaps I am giving them too much credit.
Besides I cannot help but enjoy Michael Dorn as the Regent.
A Watchable but rubbish episode.
Belated response @55/Indiana Joe: “I grew up on Benford and Brin, so even classic Trek was never very “hard” to me.”
Of course not, compared to prose SF. But compared to its contemporaries in science fiction television and film, Star Trek was, for a long time, the only show that had any shred of scientific literacy whatsoever, and that actually made an effort to do the research and consult with experts, even if it prioritized dramatic license over scientific accuracy. It wasn’t just an interchangeable part of the mass of SFTV; it stood head and shoulders above the rest in quality, took its premise more seriously, and had more respect for the intelligence of its audience. That’s why it became such a huge, enduring hit that we still talk about today — because it wasn’t just like all the others. Because it was smarter and more believable and more worth buying into and caring about than Lost in Space or Space: 1999 or Battlestar Galactica. So that’s why I find it sad when people today talk about it as if it were no different from any other sci-fantasy show.
ChristopherLBennett:
iSTR being told one of the ST novelists had theorized some sort of “probability linkage” between the Prime and Mirror universes, such that the same characters appear and wind up in complementary situations, and when one dies or marries in one universe, their counterpart tends to do the same. That would help suspension of disbelief somewhat, although obviously DS9 never got that memo, since so many of “our” regulars were killed off in the Mirror universe.
And writing this in 2021, I’m happy to observe that the current Trek series, especially Discovery, are much better about LGBT characters and situations than it was in the time of this dreadful episode.
I’m afraid that augment doesn’t really work.
You can make the same argument about throwing a dart at a dart board. The probability of hitting any exact point is zero, yet if you throw the dart you do hit a point on the board.
The solution is to integrate the probability density over a small area to determine the probability of hitting some point within that area, giving a finite probability.
For Many Worlds style mirror universes, there would be alternative universes branching off constantly. So while you may be unable to hit a precise branch, if you could somehow target a small “area” of nearby branches it wouldn’t really matter which one you ended up in (as they’d differ by a few radioactive decay timings, or other hopefully trivial changes). Not that “targeting” other universes makes any sense at all scientifically, of course.
While I basically agree, this response disappointed me. It’s not really mathematics we’re discussing here, but the application of mathematics to some very tricky (and partly fictional) physical questions. There are inevitably differences of interpretation and philosophical leanings. Arguing (or proving) that your mathematics is faultless does not show that the mathematics is actually relevant to answering the question at hand.
@59/David Taylor: “For Many Worlds style mirror universes, there would be alternative universes branching off constantly. So while you may be unable to hit a precise branch, if you could somehow target a small “area” of nearby branches it wouldn’t really matter which one you ended up in (as they’d differ by a few radioactive decay timings, or other hopefully trivial changes).”
You seem to think you’re disagreeing with me, but this is exactly what I’m saying — that any accessible branches would have some logical connection to your home branch, that they’d be divergent timelines from your own. My whole point is that the set of accessible alternate timelines would have to be finite.
The model I’m arguing against is the assumption that parallel universes are completely disconnected, that there’s an infinite number of random universes where every imaginable thing happens, so you can find a parallel universe with any kind of nonsensical random change, e.g. a world where all the characters are gender-flipped or where they’re all cute talking animals or where there are no shrimp. The premise there is that the reason any given alternate universe has anything in common with our own is not because it branched off from our own, but because it just coincidentally resembles ours through random happenstance. It’s the monkeys-writing-Shakespeare argument, that in an infinite number of possibilities, any given order will be randomly recreated. And a lot of fiction uses that as a handwave to justify any random, nonsensical change it wants to make. (This is the model used by the IDW Kelvin-timeline comics written by Mike Johnson, even though it fundamentally misunderstands the intent of the Kelvin movies that they’re a branched-off timeline from the Prime one.)
That model is dependent on having an infinite sample size to choose from, so that even the most improbable random outcome will inevitably happen. The problem is arguing both that you have an infinite set to choose from and that you have a nonzero probability of accessing any given item within it. It’s positing a dartboard of infinite size with a single bullseye you need to hit. I’m saying that’s never going to happen — that if you need to search through an infinite number of completely random universes to find one that’s coincidentally similar to your own with one minor change, then the probability of finding it on your first try, or even in your lifetime, is literally infinitesimal.
I too detest MU episodes and had no need for yet another one. It did occur to me that the Prime universe might seem like a nightmare to a character from a third MU, what with the war on and all the death and morally questionable decision-making. Perhaps it would have been interesting for one or more analogue characters from a more peaceful MU to stumble into the Prime universe and explore the idea from that perspective. Though, really, they probably should have just dropped the whole concept.
I enjoyed Ezri as Han Solo. I would watch that spinoff.
They even gave her the same arc – she’s in it for the money until her conscience wakes up and she’s willing to risk it all because now she cares. And you just know that she’s going to be a valuable force (sorry) for good after this. (I dunno what the books say, but that’s where it left me anyway.)
Personally, I’m disappointed that she didn’t kill the Intendant in cold blood; that would have made a good final MU episode.
I would give this a 2 or a 3. I think it was intended (again, sorry) as a comic romp that didn’t take itself seriously. I don’t know whether LeVar Burton was uninspired by this script or whether he’s partly responsible, but it isn’t quite as wacky and fun as it wanted to be.
To my mind, the MU idea could have been fun if it weren’t for the reality problems. If it had been a series of dreams, visions, holodeck programs, etc – something that made it into a silly romp with potential dangers but nothing too serious – that could have freed us up to have a better time.
Having Vic show up might have been not just acceptable but awesome, if he had burst in to save the day at the end. Our characters would have been like “But isn’t he a hologram? WHAT I CAN’T I JUST CAN’T” and Vic could still have said “A whatagram?” and it would have just been the icing on a fun silly cake.
Just as I can believe in transwarp drive, I can easily believe that in a multiverse of infinite possibilities, there might be a magnetic force between mirror selves that draws uncannily similar, yet oppositely poled, universes to each other. If indeed the observer spawns the reality itself on a quantum level, then of course the power of a positively polarized me and a negatively polarized me would draw two variant universes together so well you could beam between them.
But like, it would have been cool to have that be said in the show at some point.
“I can easily believe that in a multiverse of infinite possibilities, there might be a magnetic force between mirror selves that draws uncannily similar, yet oppositely poled, universes to each other.”
But that has the same problem I pointed out before. With an infinite number of targets to choose from, the probability that any two given universes would connect or interact in any way, including some “magnetic force,” would be 1/infinity = zero. Effectively, they’d just be too far apart to feel any such attraction in the first place. Even if that weren’t the case, then the tiny fraction of the infinite number of universes that would be similar enough for such an attraction would still be an infinite number of universes, because infinity divided by any nonzero number is still infinity. So the problem would remain exactly the same — the probability of being drawn to any specific single one of those infinite options is zero.
Basically, in physics, if your model produces an infinite result, then it means you’ve done the math wrong in some way, because that result isn’t physically or practically meaningful.
The inclusion of Vic was really a sticking point for me. When I initially saw him, I assumed it was all a fake somehow, to trick Quark and Rom, and Vic was the Minuet mistake that would blow up the whole thing. And then I decided that couldn’t be it; that would be silly since they’d already done that. So I waited very patiently for all explanation. I’m still waiting.