Harry Mudd is one of Trek’s most infamous villains. And I say villain because, while he may be amusing in the extreme, he is a truly odious person. His two appearances appearances on Star Trek: The Original Series (and a third on the animated series) prove him to be a narcissist of the highest order, who cares only for his personal survival and comfort. He is liar, a coward, and a rampant misogynist. And in his premiere appearance on Star Trek: Discovery, he does nothing to dispel any reservations one might have about his character—but he does tell a very interesting story to Captain Lorca….
What viewers knew of Mudd for the last fifty years is largely due to two guest appearances on TOS. After introducing himself to the Enterprise crew by getting caught trafficking women (while supplying them with drugs intended to make them more appealing to the husbands he was planning to sell them to), he was incarcerated for illegal activities. After leaving prison—via escape or serving out his sentence, it is never made clear—he ended up in even more trouble, attempting to sell patents he didn’t hold the rights to on a planet where the penalty for fraud was death. He managed to avoid punishment for that particular crime, leading to Captain Kirk and crew running into Harry again, this time on a planet full of controlling androids.
One of the most important aspects to Mudd’s character is how he frames stories about himself. Kirk learns this quickly, and understands that all of Harry’s tales require some manner of “interpretation.” This is how he reacts to the man’s explanation for how he ended up on the android planet, following the patent fraud fiasco:
MUDD: Well, of course, I left.
KIRK: He broke jail.
MUDD: I borrowed transportation.
KIRK: He stole a spaceship.
MUDD: The patrol reacted in a hostile manner.
KIRK: They fired at him!
MUDD: They’ve no respect for private property. They damaged the bloody spaceship!
Kirk knows that he can’t trust a thing that Harry says—and it’s not just because he’s a liar. Harry Mudd likes to rewrite stories about himself to cast his journey in a more heroic light. His moral bankruptcies are moral disagreements, his criminal actions the result of a difference in opinion about what constitutes criminality. Harcourt Fenton Mudd is a fascinating study in the psychological effects of personal narrative. We know that how we tell stories about our own lives is a part of what makes us human, and indeed makes us who we are on an individual basis. And Harry Mudd is spectacular at this particular skill.
One of the interesting (and infuriating) sidenotes to Harry’s time on the android planet is that he asks the androids create a replica of his dear wife, Stella. According to Harry, Stella is one of the reasons for his life of crime out among the stars—because she urged him out there due to her “continual, eternal, confounded nagging.” As Harry tells Kirk and company: “I think of her constantly, and every time I do, I go further out into space.” The android version of Stella does nothing but nag and insult Mudd in a continuous stream of verbal abuse that Harry can silence merely by barking “shut up!” Getting the last word with her is a true pleasure for him… one that Kirk ruins when they abandon Mudd on the planet after apparently populating it with 500 new android versions of Stella that do not power down the instant Harry tell them to. He tells Kirk that this punishment is inhuman to no avail.
These jokes are a product of their time, to be certain. The nagging wife, the cad who can’t seem to pass a day without doing something illegal, the eternity lambasted by the specter of a woman left behind. But the question that no one seemed to ask was simple enough—was Harry telling the truth about Stella at all?
Mudd’s appearance on Star Trek: Discovery chips away at this narrative, or at least offers viewers a different version of his story. When Captain Lorca is imprisoned on a Klingon ship, he is thrown in prison with Mudd and asks the man how he ended up in such dire straits. Harry tells him that he fell in love with a woman beyond his means:
“Sweet Stella. Her family didn’t approve of me, so I had no choice except to try and buy her father’s respect. Scary, scary man. So I borrowed a large sum from some non-traditional lenders, and gifted her with a moon. It worked like a charm… until I fell behind on my payments. The creditors came after me, chased me into enemy territory, right into the Klingon’s arms, who deposited me here where I await my fate.”
There are many possibilities from what we learn here. Perhaps Harry Mudd simply wanted to marry a rich woman, and in doing so, wound up way over his head. His insistence on love could be a ploy to gain sympathy from a friendly ear, to add a layer of tragedy to his ridiculous story. Then again… perhaps Harry did love Stella. Perhaps the beginning of this relationship was indeed a tender one. In which case, what happened for us to arrive at the shrieking android incarnation that we see a decade later? Did it take Harry too long to return to his beloved wife? When he made it back to her, was she (understandably) furious due to his lies and his absence, and took it out on him with insults and jibes? There are countless iterations of this tale that could result in a falling out and subsequent miserable union.
And then there’s another possibility. That Harcourt Fenton Mudd never made it back to Stella after running from those moon creditors. That his travels and his confidence games and the mess of his life dragged him further and further away from someone he genuinely cared about, and that he knows the fault lies with him. What if that android version of Stella is complete lie? What if Harry Mudd has imagined this version of Stella into being so he can avoid his own guilty conscience? It is a lot easier to think yourself the injured party if you’re trying to avoid responsibility for your actions. Which is pretty much Mudd’s M.O. dialed to nine-thousand percent.
This contradiction in Harry’s biography comes in an episode that is all about personal narrative and how we frame our own actions. “Choose Your Pain” sees several characters give accounts that are questionable, or engage in arguments that come down to point of view. When Michael Burnham confronts Lieutenant Stamets about her fears that the spore drive is harming their tardigrade pilot, Stamets points out that it was Burnham who discovered how the tardigrade could be implemented in the drive’s use—it’s her fault that the situation existed in the first place. When Burnham says she’s fighting the impulse to “set the record straight” on that account, Stamets has little time for the argument: “That won’t get us anywhere. Do you want to be right, or do you want to fix this?” He rejects the importance of personal narrative in this case, as it delays actions being taken toward solving the problem.
First Officer Saru spends the episode concerned over how his personal narrative entwines with others; worried that he does not have the making of a commanding officer, Saru asks the ship’s computer to compare his actions to those of Starfleet’s most revered captains. He believes that his validity as an asset to the Federation must be checked by an outside source, but eventually learns to trust his own instincts. He later deletes the protocol designed to compare his performance and chooses to accept his responses on their own merit.
Personal narrative is also at the center of Captain Lorca’s time in the Klingon ship’s prison cell. He learns not to trust Harry Mudd (as everyone eventually does), but he comes to trust an imprisoned Starfleet Lieutenant named Ash Tyler, eventually bringing him aboard his ship and instating him as a crew member. Lorca also has some painful details about his previous command revealed by Harry, and feels the need to set the record straight—he tells them that with his ship, the USS Buran, boarded by the Klingons, he made the decision to self-destruct the ship with his crew on board. He tells Mudd and Tyler that he did it to spare his people the long, torturous deaths that he knew were awaiting him on the Klingon homeworld. That Tyler stands by Lorca despite this tale is a testament to the swift bond they forge by the end of their time in that prison cell.
But, as with Harry Mudd, you have to ask the question—is that the true story? Or all of the story? It seems unlikely that Starfleet would award a captain who had done something so horrific with one of the most important assignments in their war against the Klingons. What else could Lorca be hiding? And what might those secrets mean for everyone aboard the Discovery? In this sense, every element of “Choose Your Pain” has been honed by the concept of personal narrative. Its power as a psychological factor in all people is driving the story forward.
It is hardly surprising that an episode featuring Harry Mudd would incite such a careful look into these particular concepts and questions. As for what that means for the future of Discovery, or Harry Mudd himself? We will surely have to wait and find out….
Emmet Asher-Perrin will always welcome the intrigue that Harcourt Fenton Mudd adds to any story. You can bug her on Twitter and Tumblr, and read more of her work here and elsewhere.
I rewatched Mudd’s Women a couple months ago. Yeah, it could never be made as-is today. Not just the mail-order bride narrative, not just the drug-that-makes-them-prettier… but the twist at the end [apologies for the 50-year-old spoiler] that boils down to “You’re so much prettier when you smile.” Gah.
As I mentioned in another thread, I don’t think it’s accurate to say that Harry “sold” the women in “Mudd’s Women.” As presented in the episode, it seemed that the women — or at least Ruth and Magda — were partners in the scam rather than victims, the stereotype of gold-diggers hoping to snag rich husbands by hook or by crook. And the “wiving settlers” idea was based on a real historical program to encourage single women from the East to voluntarily relocate to Seattle in order to improve the gender balance of the settlement (nominally to work as teachers, but implicitly to increase the number of marriageable women in town). The TV Western Here Come the Brides (which starred Trek guests Mark Lenard, Robert Brown, and David Soul) was based on that program. Harry’s approach was more of a scam version of the practice, but I never got the sense that the women were forced into it.
“Mudd’s Women” may also owe something to another science fiction scam version of the idea, namely Frank M. Robinson’s 1952 story “The Girls from Earth,” adapted in 1957 as an episode of the radio series X Minus One. There, also, the scammers intend to trick the frontiersmen into arranging marriages with wives who are less gorgeous and glamorous than they appear (although they do it by using fake photos of the mail-order brides), but the men turn out to value the plainer women more after all.
Anyway, I agree that Harry’s story about Stella here is an interesting revision and an improvement on the misogynistic original. I would speculate that his relationship with Stella began to fray when he fell behind on his payments and began getting deeper into trouble, and that his later perception of her “nagging” was how he rationalized the arguments they’d had when she confronted him about his misdeeds, before he was forced to flee. After all, he couldn’t admit that he was at fault for their falling out, so he rewrote her in his memory as a harridan.
Actually a lot of people have wondered if Harry was telling the truth. Frankly I was entirely on Stella’s side from the beginning. The Real Stella might very well smile at the thought of a Harry continually harried by Shrewish incarnations of herself.
While Harry is certainly a liar, questionably misogynistic (depending on your definition) he is not a coward. When Ruth runs out into murderous Rigellian sand storm our hero, Kirk of course follows. So does Ben Childress and so does Harry Mudd.
Excellent analysis, Emily.
Harry was a better character before the STD got its hands on him, he was better even in the animated show than this. But then again, Star Trek was better before the STD got it. While he might be odious, and unctuous, Harry is still a more interesting and likeable character than the STD leads, and arguably a better person than them. Or at least no worse. That is the crux of it; Harry is not a great person and he is still no better than our supposed heroes, and that is a problem.
When Kirk and Co faced Harry we were fascinated and somewhat charmed by him, but it was obvious even on the face that Kirk et all were better than him. That he was a definite opponent and counter to them. That they deserved to overcome him. There was none of that with STD. At the end of the episode I didn’t really feel that the STD guys had overcame someone who was an obstacle to THEM (unlike with Kirk) but had more -like him- betrayed a fellow prisoner. They didn’t earn a victory and they certainly did not feel like they deserved just to go on their way. It is bad Trek.
#5
Good point about the lack of contrast. And if it really is the Mirror Universe they’re hinting at in the episode, then I’m scratching my head at the point in it, since our “heroes” are already pretty dark characters. Maybe they’ll use it to show how they’re on the wrong path? A kind of morality wake up call? That’s all I can guess. [shrugs]
@6/Pepe: I don’t get why people are saying the whole cast is “pretty dark.” Lorca is dark. Landry was pretty mean-spirited, but she’s gone now. Tyler was okay with abandoning Mudd, but half the Internet (including me) is already convinced he’s a Klingon spy. But Burnham, Saru, Stamets, and Tilly aren’t intrinsically dark or amoral people. Burnham made a choice that she thought was right and necessary and that turned out very badly. Sure, she mutinied and took unlawful control of her ship, but as a meme on Facebook has been pointing out today, so did Sarek’s other two kids. So she’s no more dark or amoral than Spock. Saru isn’t a dark character either. He initially seemed insensitive to the tardigrade’s suffering, but he felt obligated to rescue his captain, and as soon as that was no longer a consideration, he did the right thing. Stamets may be a bit unfriendly, but he’s otherwise as Starfleet as you can get, a scientist-explorer who geeks out on new discoveries. And Tilly’s as bubbly and well-meaning as you can get.
#7
True, though even with the token annoying bubbly character this is a fairly dour series. Burnham, typical of most Vulcans or Vulcan wannabes, is too bland to leave much of an impression on me. Saru is the only character that seems like he’s from classic Trek, but Lorca and the war with the Orc Klingons are such dominant forces that tonally Discovery feels like something from the BSG universe.
Mirror mirror on the wall, who is the darkest of them all? Not DS9 anymore. Not by a long shot.
Speaking of the Mirror Universe, one has to wonder: what is Mirror!Mudd like? I want to think a heroic Robin Hood-like figure who’s crap at lying and lousy charisma, but people end up following him anyway because he’s a nice guy at heart. Hopefully we see THAT Mudd some day.
#6
Your thought on paths and The Mirror Universe was one that occurred to me as well. I doubt we will have an encounter with that eponymous dimension though, but rather I suspect we will see a multi-dimensional shift more akin to Worf’s tribulations in TNG’s “Parallels“. It strikes me that this ‘spore drive’ is basically a form of multi-dimensional teleporter using the spores of the strange funghi like a roadway. Multi-dimensional teleportation was also touched on in another TNG episode, “High Ground” where the device caused damage to a users DNA. Oh wait, didn’t we hear somebody say the Glenn suffered from some form of helical distortions in Episode 2?
@9/SCMof2814: The Mirror Universe isn’t really a universe where everyone is their opposite; it’s just a universe where Earth history went in a darker direction. Spock wasn’t that different, and many of the DS9 characters such as O’Brien and Garak weren’t that different either. It’s just that it had a history shaped by tyrannical empires and conquest rather than world peace and a Federation, so that more brutal environment shaped people differently. (Indeed, the point of the original episode was that the heroes didn’t have to reach very deep to find their inner savages — that the differences between them and their “Mirror” selves were more slight than they liked to admit.)
So Mudd would probably be much the same, a greedy, lying scoundrel always looking for an angle. He might even be worse, because the society around him would reward and encourage his baser impulses. Instead of just running an arranged-marriage scam and peddling phony love potions, he might be an actual slave trader.
#10
Ah, I hadn’t considered that. I hope they do something along those lines.
This problem with the Mirror Universe dropping by Discovery reminds me of Batman v. Superman. When you make Superman super gloomy and then square him off against Batman, the character who already lives in gloom, it’s not much of a fight. Just one of a myriad of problems that come with trendy grimdark.
@11/Christopher: I don’t think that the point of the original episode was “that the heroes didn’t have to reach very deep to find their inner savages”. The heroes don’t do a single thing that could be considered savage, or morally questionable, in that episode. They aren’t even tempted. They are appalled. There are no “inner savages” there.
IMO the episode has more than one point. It shows that society shapes who people are – that an evil and ruthless society brings out the worst in people, whereas a good society brings out the best. It shows how even decent people like Marlena Moreau must compromise in a world like that. It helps define the Federation by showing us everything it is not – a ruthless empire conquering other worlds. And it gives the audience the hopeful message that ruthless empires do not endure and can be changed. Turning this message on its head was the worst thing DS9 ever did.
@13/Jana: “I don’t think that the point of the original episode was “that the heroes didn’t have to reach very deep to find their inner savages”.”
Remember the final discussion of the episode. “It was far easier for you, as civilized men, to behave like barbarians than it was for them, as barbarians, to behave like civilized men.” I didn’t mean they were tempted to become that, I mean that the potential was a part of them. The point of the episode was never some simplistic inversion where everyone is the diametric opposite of themselves — bad becomes good, weak becomes strong, the Klingons are good guys, Mudd is a saint, whatever. It’s not a literal “mirror universe,” it’s just a darker alternate history, as you say. It’s a path humanity, our humanity, could’ve taken if events had gone differently.
“And it gives the audience the hopeful message that ruthless empires do not endure and can be changed. Turning this message on its head was the worst thing DS9 ever did.”
Huh? How did it do that? After all, the majority of DS9’s Mirror Universe arc was about a rebellion against a ruthless empire, and that rebellion pretty much appeared to succeed at the end, or at least to score a major victory. So if anything, DS9’s version embraced that message more than “Mirror, Mirror” did, because it actually showed the rebellion happening rather than just talking about the possibility. The fact that the first rebellion failed was just a dramatic necessity resulting from the fact that the stories were set a century apart — and the fact that DS9 was centered more on Bajorans and Cardassians than on humans and Vulcans, so the astropolitical focus of the tyranny had to shift so it would be relevant to the series.
Hope is not a guarantee of success. Hope is the refusal to give up no matter how often you fail. So no, the failure of Spock’s reform didn’t take away hope, because the will to keep fighting for freedom was still reawakened even after it appeared to be crushed forever. There are always setbacks in the fight to build a better world. The United States is experiencing a rather massive setback right now, and so is much of Europe, I gather. But those setbacks are just rallying people to strive harder to make things better. Because that’s how hope works. It doesn’t go away when things get bad, because that’s when it’s needed most.
@14/Christopher: Oh, I fully agree with your main point, concerning what the Mirror universe is and isn’t. As for DS9, I would like to agree with you, but I can’t. The problem isn’t that the first rebellion failed. It didn’t. The problem is that it was successful, but resulted in an Empire that, according to Mirror Kira, “was no longer in any position to defend itself against us.” In other words, disarmament and peace caused the Empire’s downfall, and that’s a terrible message.
@15/Jana: I despise blaming the victim. Peace didn’t cause the Empire’s downfall, Klingon and Cardassian aggression caused the Empire’s downfall. The blame always lies with those who choose to victimize others, never with the people they victimize. Intendant Kira interpreted it the way she did because she sides with the victimizers and thus it’s self-serving for her to blame the victim. That doesn’t make her right.
@16/Christopher: I didn’t mean it like that. What I meant is: The events in “Crossover” seem to suggest that peacefulness implies weakness or at least an inability to defend oneself. Why couldn’t Spock reform the Empire in such a manner that it could still defend itself against outside forces? That’s a problematic storytelling choice.
@17/Jana: Again, Intendant Kira’s lines in “Crossover” only indicate that she believes peacefulness implies weakness. Fictional characters are as fallible and biased as real people. The things they say reflect their beliefs, opinions, and assumptions, which can be distorted, erroneous, or deliberately dishonest.
And Intendant Kira in particular is not a particularly trustworthy source. Even if she were a decent, honest, well-meaning person, she wasn’t a witness to the events she describes, nor is she a historian. She’s merely repeating what she was taught about those events, and the Alliance’s version of those events is undoubtedly skewed in its favor. It makes no sense at all to trust her account to be accurate.
@18/Christopher: I guess I wish the writers had somehow indicated that they don’t agree with Kira’s interpretation of those events.
@19/Jana: Again, what other option was there? If Spock’s rebellion had succeeded and everything was all hunky-dory in the MU, they couldn’t have done a sequel at all. Having the rebellion lead to further oppression wasn’t making some nihilistic moral statement, it was just the necessary setup for continuing the story. Since the show was set a century later at Bajor, the fight for freedom had to be delayed and re-centered around Bajor. The failure of Spock’s reforms wasn’t the point, because the story wasn’t about that place and time; that was just the setup for a new story about the fight for freedom against an oppressive regime. And again, as I said, this fight for freedom actually appeared to succeed. I don’t see how that isn’t optimistic. I mean, “Space Seed” and “Encounter at Farpoint” and First Contact showed us that Earth had to go through further oppression and tyranny and nuclear war before it finally succeeded in building a better future. Does that mean Star Trek is inherently pessimistic? No, because it focuses on the better world that was built after those dark times. And DS9’s Mirror arc, by the same token, focuses on the fight to overthrow tyranny, which makes it more optimistic than “Mirror, Mirror,” which only showed the tyranny itself. The Terran Empire’s downfall is not the focus of the story, any more than the Eugenics Wars and the Post-Atomic Horror are the focus of Star Trek as a whole.
The difference between an optimistic story and a pessimistic one is often down to what part of the story you choose to focus on. As Orson Welles said, “If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.” By the same token, where you start your story makes a difference too. Lots of optimistic stories are about the successful overthrow of tyrannies that have been in place for centuries. Imagine all the pessimistic stories that must have happened before the optimistic one. (Look how much more pessimistic Revenge of the Sith is than A New Hope.) But that pessimistic past is just the setup for the optimistic story that’s actually being told.
So, yes, a story that had actually been about Spock’s reform leading to the former Terran Empire’s conquest and enslavement would’ve been pessimistic, but that wasn’t the story we got. That was just the background for a story about the enslaved Terrans fighting back against their enslavers and at least partially winning.
Of course DS9 could not have done a mirror universe story at all rather than give the TOS episode an unhappy ending. However being an AU there is undoubtedly a MU where Spock’s reforms worked.
@21/roxana: As for happy endings, see the Orson Welles quote above. If nobody ever undid a happy ending, there’d be no sequels at all. It doesn’t mean the writers are nihilists who want to tear down the moral principles of the work — it just means they want to tell another story, and stories are about solving problems.
Seeing as Mirror Spock had no problem putting Chekov in the agony booth, I’d say that there were a few differences between the universes.
Why can’t the Mirror Universe simply be what it was presented as, a place that leans more towards the darkness than the light? To use a DC comics analogy, TOS is Earth 1, Mirror Universe is Earth 3. It’s simply part of the fabric of that universe that it tends more towards what we call “evil”. Why must the TOS characters be, as David Gerrold calls them, “cosmic Mary Worths”, solving everyone’s problems for them? Can’t they just take a trip to the Mirror Universe as a cautionary tale and be done with it?
@22, upon reflection I think I could live without sequels, and prequels too.
Don’t watch them. The rest of us will. :)
@20/Christopher: “Again, what other option was there?”
Off the top of my head, I can think of two. Option 1: At least have some other character doubt Intendant Kira’s version of events. It’s a good thought that she isn’t trustworthy, but the thing is, background information in SF stories is very often introduced by characters talking to each other. It’s a common storytelling device. Therefore information presented in this manner will look like fact to many viewers unless another character doubts it. And “peace equals weakness” just shouldn’t look like fact.
Option 2: Don’t make it a sequel. Invent a different parallel universe.
@23/kkozoriz: The Mirror universe was not presented as “a place that leans more towards the darkness than the light”. It was simply an alternate history. One of the things I like about Star Trek is that it doesn’t have metaphysical notions of light and darkness.
@25, I don’t.
@26/Jana: “Therefore information presented in this manner will look like fact to many viewers unless another character doubts it.”
And that’s what I don’t get — that kneejerk acceptance of hearsay and opinion as fact. A lot of fans have this bizarre tendency to assume that every character is infallible, that they have complete and accurate knowledge about everything they say. Why would anyone think that about anyone, other than maybe Spock or Data? People are fallible. People get things wrong or misspeak twist things to fit their beliefs and agendas. That’s part of everyday experience in real life, so why wouldn’t people expect it to be true in fiction? It shouldn’t be necessary for some character to explicitly express doubt — it should be just common sense on the audience’s part to know that not every spoken word is accurate. Intendant Kira isn’t a historian and isn’t old enough to be an eyewitness to the events she described, so it should be a given that what she’s saying is just what she’s heard, what she’s been raised to believe. And she’s a member of the conquering nation, so it shouldn’t be hard to conceive that she’s blaming the victims to avoid admitting her own side’s culpability. She’s like the NRA saying that the deaths in a mass shooting are the fault of the victims for not being armed rather than the fault of the shooter for choosing to shoot them. The fact that the event happened is not in dispute, but her choice of which side to blame is clearly biased and self-serving.
“Option 2: Don’t make it a sequel. Invent a different parallel universe.”
If they’d invented a different dystopian parallel with darker versions of the familiar characters, people would’ve called it a ripoff and asked, “Why not just use the Mirror Universe?”
Why write a dystopia story at all?
#29
Why dystopia? Aside from the obvious dramatic reasons, I suppose it’s the same reason people are fascinated by ruins. Things falling apart and going to hell are interesting.
@30/Pepe: Also, actors like the chance to play variations on their characters sometimes, and playing “evil twin” versions can be a lot of fun for them and the audience.
That’s the thing about writing for a dramatic/performed medium as opposed to writing for prose. Sometimes it’s not just about the ideas, it’s about letting someone other than the writers have fun too. Lots of Trek episodes are about giving the actors or others in the creative team a chance to stretch. DS9: “Dramatis Personae” was kind of pointless as a story, since the characters were acting under alien influence and so nothing they did had anything to do with their real personalities, but it gave the actors a chance to take a break from their usual characters and show their range. Ditto with “Our Man Bashir.” And TNG: “Genesis” was pretty much nothing more than “Let’s give Michael Westmore a chance to go crazy with monster makeups for a week.”
I’ve thought for a while that a number of things in Shakespeare’s plays that don’t really seem to serve much story purpose were probably put in just to allow members of the Globe company to perform their usual schticks.
I’ve always looked at the DS9 Mirror Universe as being similar to but separate for the TOS one. Why? Because I much prefer the TOS presentation and wan’t a fan of seeing the humans reduced to the underdogs like they were on DS9. After all, the only reason we had the Klingons, Cardassians and Bajorans playing such major roles in the future MU was because those were the major roles on DS9. If TOS had done a sequel we pprobably would have seen the Romulans, Andorians and Tellarites instead.
Besides, the DS9 MU gave us the oddity of Vic Fontaine as a real person, instead of someone who was created by a programmer. It’s just odd.
One of the best “evil/mirror” universe stories was JLA: Earth 2 by Grant Morrison. In that story, the Justice League and their evil counterparts, The Crime Syndicate, find that no matter what they do, they cannot win in their counterparts universe due to an intrinsic property of the universes. As it says on the Wikipedia page for the story – “Meanwhile, the JLA’s attempts to reform the antimatter Earth unravel quickly; the “opposite” nature of this world means that evil and corruption are the natural order of things and any attempt to improve the society is doomed to failure.”
JLA: Earth 2
Just as we know that Kirk (and the rest) are going to prevail in the “prime” universe, similarly “evil” is always going to win in the MU.
And TNG: “Genesis” was pretty much nothing more than “Let’s give Michael Westmore a chance to go crazy with monster makeups for a week.”
Haha, indeed, must admit that one is a guilty pleasure of mine. I may have to give it a rewatch on Halloween.
It could’ve been interesting had DS9 made the Terran Empire a reformed power internally but still doing evil in different ways. Like what if Goatee Spock had misinterpreted Kirk and gone WAY overboard with the new do-gooder mantra? Like having the Terran Federation take over the Klingon and Cardassian Empires and begin suppressing their culture, transforming them into pacifists, maybe even tinkering with their DNA. Then Sisko would have to explain to them why that’s bad too.
Wait a second, have I just described Demolition Man? I think I have.
@28/Christopher: I guess we’re not going to agree on this. If story A ends with the hope that a bad society will be transformed into something better, and story B tells us that the transformation has left the society vulnerable to outside forces, I find that a problematic storytelling choice. From an in-universe point of view, Spock could have transformed the Empire into a peaceful society that could still defend itself. He didn’t because the result wouldn’t have been the dystopia the writers wanted.
@29/Roxana: Concerning “Mirror, Mirror”, I think that was a great episode and worth writing (see comment #13 for details). Concerning “Crossover”, I tend to agree with you.
@30/Pepe: I’m fascinated by ruins because I like history. And I don’t agree that things falling apart is more interesting than things being built up.
@32/kkozoriz: I like your idea that the DS9 Mirror universe is a different place from the TOS one. But “This universe is intrinsically evil, so it can’t be changed” would be very anti-Star Trek, both because of the hopelessness and because in Star Trek, universes are just places and don’t have metaphysical properties.
Given that DS9 was written in the late nineties, MU Spock is perhaps meant as an analogue of Gorbachev. Someone who, for pragmatic reasons, attempts to reduce the authoritarian excesses of a government driven by a morally perverse ideology but ends up bringing down the system because terror was the only thing that was truly holding it together. In this MU case, the Terran Empire was surrounded by nations that were just as ruthless as they were when given the opportunity.
I meant why write a dystopian DS9 episode when the prime universe is so dark already? And such an episode would be imitative anyway? Not why ever write dystopian fiction
@35/Jana: What I will never agree with is that the blame lies with the Empire for choosing to reform. I will never, ever accept that blaming the victim is valid. When I was a child, I was constantly bullied in school, and since this was before schools learned how to cope with bullying, I was constantly told that I was to blame for “letting them get to me.” Nobody ever told me that the bullies were the ones in the wrong. The system didn’t try to help or comfort me, didn’t try to stop the bullies — it just shifted the blame onto me and made my emotional distress even worse. Victim-blaming is the same as condoning and abetting victimizers. It’s saying that predators have a right to hurt people and that the only responsible party is the victim for somehow not being immune to victimization. It’s an evil, obscene, abusive way to think and I will never, ever agree with it.
Yes, the Empire disarmed and that left it vulnerable to conquest. Does that mean they were conquered because they disarmed? Does that mean they were wrong to disarm? Of course not. That’s a reprehensible notion. It’s a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy and just a really crappy way of looking at things. If a doctor performs a miracle cure that lets someone walk again, and that person is then hit by a reckless driver while crossing the street, is the doctor responsible for their death? Was the doctor wrong to cure them? Of course not. That’s an obviously idiotic notion. The reckless driver is the one to blame. The doctor did the right thing for the right reasons, and cannot be blamed for the wrongdoing of others. By the same token, the blame for the Empire’s conquest falls on the Klingons and Cardassians for choosing to do the wrong thing, not on Spock for trying to do the right thing.
@36/Crusader75: Interesting aspect.
@37/Roxana: Okay!
@38/Christopher: You misunderstand me. I’m not blaming the victim. I’m sorry that this happened to you, I hate bullies, and I’m not saying what you think I’m saying. I’m sorry if that’s how it came across.
Actually the Terran Empire was wrong, in the practical rather than moral sense, to disarm as proven by events. Peaceful doesn’t have to equal vulnerable. Logically Spock should have known that.
@40/roxana: Again, just because Intendant Kira (who was not there and is not a historian and is obviously biased as hell) described it that way, that doesn’t mean it actually happened that way. Maybe they didn’t disarm, they just got overwhelmed by the combined forces of the Klingons and Cardassians. If anything, the real fault lies with the pre-reform Empire for being so aggressive toward its neighbors that they were driven to retaliate as soon as they got the chance.
You’re falling into the same trap of blaming the victim for being “vulnerable.” That’s ignoring the fact that it’s the victimizer who chooses to attack them. It’s putting the blame on absolutely the wrong side.
As I said, it’s not a moral judgement, but a practical one. Saying that unilateral disarmament proved to be a poor move doesn’t justify the aggressors.
35. JanaJansen – But to the people of the MU, our situation would be intolerable. People would always be fighting back against them. It would be like trying to turn the Klingons into a human society. When do they stop being Klingons then?
Remember what Phlox said in IAMD 2
PHLOX: I was merely researching classical literature. I wanted to compare our major works with their counterparts in the other universe. I skimmed a few of the more celebrated narratives. The stories were similar in some respects, but their characters were weak and compassionate. With the exception of Shakespeare, of course. From what I could tell, his plays were equally grim in both universes.
This is why I don’t believe that the MU is something that just branched off due to some difference to the “Prime” universe. The “evil” qualities are found in all aspects of life. It didn’t start when MU Cochrane shot the Vulcan. It’s been that way for a long, long time. And by an intrinsic value of the universe, I don’t mean something there that turns people “evil”. If it were, then our intrepid crew would have turned evil while their counterparts would have turned good. Obviously, that didn’t happen.
I like to imagine that somewhere, MUSpock undertook his “reforms” and made the Empire stronger and move cohesive while also maintaining it’s “evil” nature. He realized that by treating other races as equals, he could make the Empire stronger and without the stress of internal discord, more able to stand up to the other empires of the MU. Spock wouldn’t have been so stupid as to miss what would happen if the Empire left a power vacuum in the MU. A later trip across the dimensional barrier would have found an Empire with more equality, less (not none) assassination but still using agaonizers and such. If anything, Kirk would have made things worse for the Federation since a cross dimensional threat would have been much greater from a stronger Empire. See the novel Dark Mirror for an example.
@42/roxana: The problem is that you’re assuming it’s true to begin with. Intendant Kira is not a primary source or an expert on the subject. Her version of events is not necessarily accurate. Her use of the word “disarmament” may have simply referred to reducing the Imperial military from a huge force of conquest to merely a reasonable-sized defense force. For a real-world parallel, there have been efforts underway for decades to reduce the American and Russian nuclear arsenals, but nuclear disarmament would not mean leaving the countries defenseless, just going onto a less aggressive footing. So there’s no logic in assuming that the Empire left itself completely helpless.
I get it, Kira is a bad guy, why wouldn’t she lie? Makes more sense than Spock doing something outright irrational.
@45/roxana: It’s more that Kira has a bias in favor of her own civilization, and that she probably learned her history from them and thus only got their biased, self-serving version of events. Like the way I was raised to believe that Christopher Columbus was a heroic pioneer who discovered a new continent, rather than a slave-trading imbecile who stumbled upon the Americas by dumb luck.
#35
I didn’t say things falling apart are more interesting than things being built. Destruction and ruin simply holds interest for some people, regardless of history.
@46, columbus was a man of his time which means he’d win no Human rights awards. He was also an egotist with abysmal people skills who ended up being shipped back to Spain in chains. But he was one heck of a sailing man and while his calculations about the size of the Earth were dead wrong he was absolutely right in believing there was land within sailing distance of Europe across the Atlantic. His mistake lay in assuming that land had to be Asia.
@48/roxana: The point is, what gets taught in history classes tends to reflect the biases and ideology of their culture. Intendant Kira would’ve learned about the fall of the Terran Empire from Alliance history classes, so she’d only know the Alliance’s approved version. There’s always another side to the story.
By the way, David Mack’s novel Mirror Universe: The Sorrows of Empire depicts Mirror Spock’s rebellion and reforms and the eventual fall of the Empire, and a large part of what it does is to refute the idea that Spock foolishly left it unprotected, and to explain how what happened was part of Spock’s master plan all along.
I thought books didn’t count as Canon? While I reject with scorn the revisionist dictum that the winners write the histories I agree that most history is written with a bias, even vy scholars trying to be objective.
@43/kkozoriz: I haven’t watched the ENT episode you refer to, and if it portrays the universes as intrinsically different watching it would only make me angry. So thanks for the warning.
@50/roxana: Whether the books “count” is beside the point. All Star Trek is fictional, so it’s pretty silly to split hairs over which made-up stories are more made-up. Dave’s novel offers one possible answer to the question of how the Terran Empire fell. I cite it as an example of the principle that the truth behind an event is not necessarily what the official histories teach.
@51/Jana: I don’t take Phlox’s speech in “In a Mirror, Darkly” to be proof of intrinsic difference between the universes. It could just mean that the timelines diverged at an earlier point in history — although I tend to think it means that the Empire went back and rewrote pre-Empire works of literature to make them more ideologically acceptable. Dictatorial regimes do have a tendency to censor ideas they don’t like.
Although Diane Duane’s TNG Mirror Universe novel Dark Mirror from 1993 (predating the DS9 version, and thus depicting an intact Terran Empire where Spock was overthrown from within rather than without) did the same thing as the later ENT episode, having Picard search through Mirror literature and history and finding that the darkness went back throughout history. Although she addressed Shakespeare in the opposite way, focusing on how much less humane the Mirror version was (and even quoting some lines from Evil Shakespeare). I’ve always thought it could be revision after the fact there too, but Duane’s evident intent was to suggest an intrinsically more corrupt universe. Duane would develop a similar idea later in her original fantasy novel Stealing the Elf-King’s Roses, involving parallel universes that have different “ethical constants,” essentially physical laws that make them more or less prone to order and justice depending on how high the constant is.
@52 I like to think that the point of divergence was that in “evil” mirror universe, Edison was the driving force of technological innovation in the late 19th and early 20thC instead of Tesla in the universes which led to a more optimistic future as shown in ENT, TOS, TAS, OriginalMovieSequence, TNG, DS9 and VOY. And probably ORV too. Because any universe where Edison wins is a crapsack universe.
@52/Christopher: Good thought about the Empire rewriting works of literature! I can totally see them doing that. It would be like Stalinist retouching of photographs or Ceausescu’s doctored weather reports.
@53/random22: You mean, alternating current is good and direct current is evil?
54. JanaJansen – You mean like Kirk & company perpetuating the myth that Cochrane died 150 years ago when, in fact, he was still alive in the 2260s?
Just because a culture is willing to lie about it’s history doesn’t mean that they’re evil. “Good” cultures do it all the time too.
The reason for the lie makes all the difference. Kirk’s lies were to protect Cochranes privacy at his request.
@55/kkozoriz: I meant that rewriting history, art and plain reality to the point of absurdity is typical of totalitarian dictatorships, and thus it feels plausible that the Terran Empire would do it too. It’s more than just lying, I didn’t say that only totalitarian dictatorships lie, and I also agree with Roxana.
A lie is still a lie, regardless of the reasons for it. What about Nancy Hedfords family, believing she died way off in space and they don’t even get her body back. They don’t know that part of her is still alive. Is Cochrane’s privacy worth their pain?
The novel Federation follows up on the events of Metamorphosis and, once again, we see that keeping secrets leads to the deaths of innocent people. Not “canon” of course but one possible outcome.
The point is that those in power, any power, have a responsibility to the truth. Because a lie has a way of coming to the surface at the most inopportune times. I’m sure that Spock thought he was being kind at the end of Requiem for Methuselah but Kirk is now walking around with part of his life excised from his mind. Who knows how often Spock has done this. It’s not hard to imagine that he did the same after the death of Edith Keeler and George Kirk. After all, those deaths would have affected him to a much greater degree that someone that he’d just met that afternoon. Does it mean that Spock was right to do it because he thought it was for the best without even getting permission from JTK?
And what about Kirk’s decision to keep the existence of Khan and his followers secret? That decision led to the deaths of many people. A lie of omission is still a lie.
And I’m sure that the MU folks think that they’re lying for all the “right” reasons as well.
@58/kkozoriz: Kirk never decided to keep Khan’s existence secret. He recorded log entries, remember? There could be any number of reasons why the crew of the Reliant didn’t know about Khan twenty years later. My favourite theory is that it was a computer fault.
@59/Jana: You’re right — there is no way Kirk didn’t report about Khan. The assumption that he didn’t is one of the many, many stupid things about TWOK’s premise. I tend to suspect that maybe Section 31 erased the data trail, possibly because they didn’t want the Federation’s enemies finding out about a planet of awakened Augments and seeking them out. Or, in the Pocket novel continuity, specifically Vanguard, there’s a secret behind the destruction of Ceti Alpha VI that some higher-ups in Starfleet didn’t want investigated. I generally don’t like to invent excuses to invoke Section 31 — the more active a conspiracy is, the less probable it is that it can remain secret — but given the Kelvin-universe connection between S31 and Khan, it’s possible that the Prime version or equivalent of Admiral Marcus took an interest as well.
Ah yes, every time there’s something the least bit shady, out comes Section 31 did this or that. Whatever happened to Occam’s Razor? Chekov didn’t recognize the name of the system when they were on approach so it’s likely that only Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Scott and Uhura were the only ones who knew the name of the system. Even the helm could be handled by Kirk in order to keep it secret from as many people as possible. Why bring up some super secret organization when it’s most likely that Kirk simply kept it out of his logs? When Kirk found out what had happened, he didn’t express shock that the system was unmonitored after all.
And regardless of all the people that are convinced that Section 31 is unsanctioned, I look at it as being the Federation equivalent of the Impossible Mission Force. A group that takes care of the dirty missions that the Federation can disavow if something goes wrong. I’d imagine that the CinC of Starfleet and the President of the Federation are the only ones who know the real story. As you say, the fewer people that know, the easier it is to keep secret.
@61/kkozoriz: Occam’s Razor is the exact reason why I prefer the computer fault theory to the theory that Kirk kept Khan’s existence secret. He had no reason to do so, it would be out of character, he would have to swear his crew to secrecy, and he would have to erase his log entries. That’s a very unlikely scenario.
In contrast, I find it easy to believe that crucial data could be lost due to a computer fault, or perhaps human error. Starfleet generally has lousy security.
The data might have been lost on purpose by higher authorities but Kirk had neither reason nor the ability to do so. How many systems has Chekov visited by this point in his career? I’d it any wonder one occasionally slipped his memory?
@54 I can prove DC is evil, and I don’t just mean because of the Nu52…sorry/notsorry…but when the success of your preferred system requires a public ceremonial animal sacrifice to achieve it, well then you’re probably doing something Evil. Pour one out for Topsy the Elephant, y’all.
For the Khan thing, and the Nancy Hedford logs, I favour the idea that Starfleet Command just filed them under “Classified” when they got them (perhaps not wanting to open the can of worms either represented) and decided to let them be their successors problem when they retired. Then when the guys responsible moved on, up, or out, those successors took the same approach of kicking it into the tall grass themselves. It is not as if plenty of real organisations have not done the same thing with less potentially explosive information.The easiest decision a bureaucrat will ever make is to choose to take no decision and hope when the thing goes all pearshaped that it is someone else in the hot seat to take the flack.
With Hedford it could even be interpreted as being her last will and testament that her body be left alone on whatever the frick the planet’s name was and in the care of Cochrane and the multicoloured cloud. Or even just passing on her resignation and her decision to be left alone and not tell anyone The police today, in my country at least, are forbidden to tell anyone -even immediate family- of your location if you tell them not to. The most they can do is say that “[you are] no longer considered a missing person”, and that is it. Providing what you are doing is lawful, of course. If Cochrane and Cloudford want to be left alone and their whereabouts/status not disclosed then I can’t see there being much Starfleet should be able to do about it. Maybe schedule a welfare check-in by a different vessel, but that is about it.
I’ve never had a problem with the premise of TWOK. Kirk didn’t check on Khan, and Starfleet is incompetent with record keeping and notifying ships of potential dangers. Sounds plausible to me. If people are fallible, then the systems they operate are fallible as well. You don’t need Section 31 for that.
As a Brit once famously said, “Cock-up before conspiracy.”
@65/Pepe: That’s a fair point. Still, it seems that, at some point after the 5-year mission, Kirk would’ve had occasion to bring up those events to someone. I’d expect that, once the mission ended, there’d be performance reviews and evaluations of everything the crew had done during the mission, and an incident where the captain allowed someone to hijack his ship — let alone one where he discovered 70-odd lost historical figures and solved a major mystery of the Eugenics Wars — would logically have come up. Heck, it should’ve been Federation-wide news! And Kirk and his crew wouldn’t have just forgotten it had happened, so if the records had been lost, they would’ve brought it up at some point, discovered the discrepancy, and investigated it. So if it had just been misfiled by accident, that would’ve been found and corrected. It seems slightly less implausible, though still quite silly, if some group were systematically covering it up.
I don’t know if it was intentional, but there seems to be an overriding theme with the so-called Genesis Trilogy: how mistakes in the past come back to haunt you. Kirk and Starfleet were negligent with Khan and his people. David cheated with protomatter. Humans doomed the future of Earth by hunting humpback whales to extinction. This may have been, and probably was, accidental. Nevertheless it’s a nice tying together of a trilogy that was thrown together one movie at a time.
No one could’ve guessed in 1982 that story line would end in San Francisco Bay with a sinking Klingon ship and whales doing a happy dance. Wonderfully bizarre.
You don’t need to send a ship to check up on Khan and company. Put a satellite in synchronous over their settlement and have it take regular readings on lifeforms, progress, etc. Once a day, it sends a report to the nearest starbase. It can also raise an alarm if it detects a ship in the system. When Ceti Alpha VI explodes, even it it destroys the satellite, the lack of a report would let Starfleet know that something had happened.
Since none of that happened, we can assume that Kirk really didn’t intend on keeping tabs on Khan. He did express a grudging admiration for him and he did promise him a world to conquer. It sure sounded like he was planning on just leaving him there. And Spock did say ” It would be interesting, Captain, to return to that world in a hundred years and to learn what crop has sprung from the seed you planted today. “. That doesn’t sound like they were planning on keeping regular tabs on him, does it?
Hmm, what about this theory: The records were never lost, the information was simply missing from the Reliant’s database.
@68/kkozoriz: I don’t think that the admiration had anything to with it, though. It didn’t prevent Kirk from keeping Khan under guard while he was on the Enterprise.
It seems to me that nobody ever uses satellites in the way you suggest in TOS. With space being large and unexplored and dangerous on the one hand and Earth being safe, with no hunger and much less crime than in our days, on the other hand, perhaps security standards have gone down instead of up.
@69/Jana: The Reliant wasn’t acting alone. It was investigating candidate planets for the Marcuses’ Genesis experiment, so presumably they and the others at Regula 1 were involved in selecting the candidates.
@70/Christopher: Yes, I know. But we don’t know how the cooperation worked. Perhaps the Reliant sent suggestions, and the science team only reacted to those and didn’t have star charts of their own.
@71/Jana: How could a Federation science lab not have access to star charts? That’s like a present-day research lab not having access to Google Maps or a world atlas.
@72/Christopher: But surely there are different kinds of star charts? I imagine that information about the Guardian of Forever or the android building facility on Exo 3 is available only to a selected few. The same could be true for Khan’s whereabouts. I also imagine that the Genesis research team and the Reliant command staff had a few meetings to determine which part of space to search, what kind of planet to look for, etc., and after that it was up to the Reliant to conduct the search, while the scientists were busy doing their experimental terraforming stuff.
@73/Jana: Project Genesis was working with Starfleet, which is why they had the Reliant at their disposal in the first place. Thus, Starfleet would’ve been in the loop about what they were doing, and so if the information about Ceti Alpha V were anywhere in Starfleet’s records, it should’ve sent up a red flag somewhere.
Just because the show’s set in space, that doesn’t mean the characters are operating in a vacuum.
@74/Christopher: But we don’t know how often they talked to Starfleet. With starships frequently out of touch for prolonged periods of time, and research groups on distant planets that are visited only occasionally, I can imagine that Starfleet projects are traditionally highly autonomous.
@75/Jana: The point is, there were fifteen years for the knowledge of who was on Ceti Alpha V to be established and spread through Starfleet and the Federation. As I said, it makes no sense to think it never came up again. This was a huge, huge historical discovery. It should’ve been gigantic news. It’s like the equivalent of finding Captain America frozen in the ice, only times 70 and less heroic. There should’ve been dozens of books written about the rediscovery of the Botany Bay by the time TWOK came along. There should’ve been legions of historians heading to the Ceti Alpha system to observe and interview Khan and his people. This should’ve been one of the most famous things that ever happened during the 5-year mission.
And, again, even if Kirk’s report at the time had somehow been lost, he and his crew wouldn’t have forgotten that it happened. They would’ve expected to be asked about it when they got home and had their performance reviews. They would’ve been surprised when they never saw any mention of it on the Federation News Service. Surely they would’ve thought to look into it or mention it to somebody sometime during the decade-plus between the end of the 5YM and the events of TWOK. It just makes no sense that this wasn’t widely known.
@76/Christopher: I can’t say that you’re wrong, but doesn’t your conspiracy theory (sorry) run into the same problem? Wouldn’t Kirk and crew wonder why they never heard about Khan again?
Easy. When they started asking, someone (possibly affiliated with S31, but from Starfleet Command) would tell them “it’s been classified, but we’re still keeping tabs on them”. Why would they suspect it wasn’t the truth?
@78/MaGnUS: Or it could really be classified, without conspiracy attached.
@77/Jana: You’re right, the coverup theory doesn’t make much sense. But the idea that this information was lost is so utterly absurd that the only way it could even conceivably make sense is if somebody deliberately hid it somehow. So it’s not that the coverup is a good theory, it’s just the lesser of two absurdities.
So the most likely explanation is that Kirk simply never reported it to Starfleet for whatever reason. Nobody else knew about it because nobody except for a handful on the Enterprise knew exactly where Khan was abandoned. Amd the 4 others who knew were fiercly loyal to Kirk so they’d never spill the beans. All the rest of the crew would know was that Khan had been left on a remote planet somewhere. They wouldn’t know where. Thus, Chekov wouldn’t recognize Ceti Alpha V but he’d know Botany Bay.
Covers the facts that we know without the need for Section 31 or a massive coverup or a failure of all back-ups of the computers that would have had copies of Kirk’s logs and reports. There was nothing lost because Starfleet never had the information in the first place.
Kirk recorded logs about it.
Which, as we found out in Court Martial, can be altered by the Captain, First Officer or the Records officer. (Computer, delete all logs that mention Khan, his followers or the Botany bay. Authorization Kirk Alpha Omega 2 6) Also, Kirk’s logs don’t necessarily provide an accurate record of what’s going on. They’re there more to provide information to the viewers.
@83/kkozoriz: “Kirk’s logs [are] there more to provide information to the viewers.”
Oh no, you can’t do that. You’re the one person around here who always argues from a strictly in-universe point of view, demanding that it all make sense. Otherwise, I could just say: Gene Coon obviously did not intend for Kirk to keep Khan’s existence secret. He just didn’t think about the repercussions such an important historical discovery would have. TWOK, on the other hand, has so many plot holes that one more doesn’t make a difference. Therefore, Kirk didn’t keep Khan’s existence secret.
In many cases, Kirk”s logs have him providing information that the character couldn”t know. Acknowledging that isn”t ignoring what”s shown on screen. Besides, I”be already given precedent as to how he could have the log records deleted.
Either way, the logs aren’t a reason why my theory couldn’’t work. It’s the simplest, most straightforward reason offered that doesn’t require ignoring any of the evidence
@85/kkozoriz: None of the theories work. Yours requires a conspiracy too: It requires the four hundred Enterprise crewmembers to keep Khan’s existence secret, for no apparent reason. It also requires Kirk to act out of character, irresponsibly and unprofessionally, again for no apparent reason. That’s a dealbreaker for me.
And everybody thinks their theory is the best. I still like mine. It doesn’t require OOC behaviour or conspiracies, it merely ignores the fact that Khan would have been famous. Let’s say Starfleet decided to keep his whereabouts classified because he was considered too dangerous. It’s an imperfect explanation, but I can live with it.
@86/Jana: I can live with Starfleet classifying his location because he’s too dangerous, but that’s exactly why it should’ve sent up a red flag when the Genesis team and the Reliant crew decided to put Ceti Alpha VI on their candidate list. There should’ve been some “SYSTEM INTERDICTED” alert telling them not to go there.
@87/Christopher: I know! That’s why I also need the computer glitch. Or a technician who crashed the Reliant’s database and then tried to cover it up.
In that respect, your theory is better. It needs only one assumption, and mine needs two. But I’m really fine with any theory that doesn‘t make the Enterprise command staff look negligent.
@88/Jana: Of course, there are far, far bigger logic flaws with the premise of TWOK. Like, any explosion big enough to destroy a planet would’ve briefly outshone the system’s star. Any FTL sensors would’ve picked it up when it happened, 6 months after “Space Seed.” At worst, the Reliant would’ve seen the event as soon as they came within 15 light-years of the system, and would’ve known something cataclysmic had happened.
Or like the fact that it’s impossible to mistake one planet for another, because it’s not just about counting outward from the star. Any planet has six different parameters that define its orbit — how far it is from the star, how eccentric it is, how tilted it is, where its point of closest approach is, etc. — and there’s no way the destruction of the sixth planet would somehow pull the fifth planet outward into an exact duplication of its orbit. Not to mention that different planets would have different masses, compositions, etc. The only way it could remotely make sense is if Ceti Alpha V & VI had been equal-sized binary planets sharing an orbit, but then it’s unlikely that only one would’ve been habitable, and the Reliant crew would’ve noticed that half of the pair was missing.
Basically, TWOK is just a stupid movie. I know, I know, people praise the character work and stuff, but conceptually, it’s utter nonsense.
We’re dealing with a Starfleet that didn’t see fit to punish Spock for falsifying orders, assaulting a technician, kidnapping Pike, stealing the Enterprise and taking the ship to Talos IV. And shortly afterwards Spock is promoted to full commander so he didn’t even get a black mark on his record. Deleting a few log entries and declaring the subject classified is hardly something that they’d care about. Kirk swearing his crew to secrecy could be seen as declaring Khan is too dangerous and that the fewer people that know about him, the better. And, as I said, only the people in the briefing room at the end of the hearing would actually know where Khan was dumped. As Uhura says in Mmetamorphosis “It’s a big galaxy, Mr. Scott”.
And 89. ChristopherLBennett – TWOK is no more stupid conceptually than most of the episodes and movies, regardless of series. Let’s face it, characters make all sorts of stupid decisions and we know that it’ll all work out OK because they’re the heroes. Realistically, Spock should have been demoted at the lest or more likely drummed out of the service after The Menagerie. But his intentions were good so he’s back at his station the next week like noting ever happened. And let’s not get into the dodgy science of pretty much any episode.
@87 Why would they need to block the entire Ceti Alpha system? Khan was confined to a planet, with no way off that planet. There is no need to mark the whole system down, just the planet. And it was not the planet the Reliant was going to. Classic GIGO at work, they didn’t ask the computer the right question in the right way so the computer didn’t tell them. It happens.
@91/random22: But if the Augments’ presence there is classified, then the people who classified it wouldn’t want people to go to that system because then their sensors would probably detect that there was a human colony on its fifth planet. It would blow the secret.
@90/kkozoriz: I think Kirk is too diligent to falsify reports. And it would be irresponsible to keep knowledge about Khan from Starfleet. Surely Starfleet has some register of planets where he has to make an entry when he gives out a planet to a group of people. If nobody knew about Khan, it could happen that some other group started a colony on the same planet.
I don’t like TWOK either, although that’s mostly because of the character changes to Kirk and Khan, the violence, the un-startrekky ending, and the fact that it makes the ending of “Space Seed” look like a mistake. Stupid science I could live with. However, the reason why I literally can’t watch it is the bad dialogue. Last time I tried, I turned it off in the middle of Khan’s mustache-twirling speech to Chekov and Terrell on Ceti Alpha V.
@89/ChristopherLBennett: A stupid premise doesn’t have to make the entire movie stupid. Any number of episodes have a premise that is stupid in context of the series, but it’s still possible to enjoy watching the characters meet the challenge. TOS “The Enemy Within”, TNG “Brothers”, etc.
But this is an especially bad flaw for TWOK since it collides directly with the theme of past mistakes coming back to haunt you; it’s *supposed* to be in context of the past.
I’m cutting off my further musings on TWOK, but hey, I can bring this back around to personal narrative! Kirk’s personal narrative of his past (all my choices worked out for the best, no such thing as a no-win scenario) is challenged by Khan’s and Carol’s personal narratives. That’s a strength of the movie, imho.
@94/perihelion: TWOK Kirk is more smug than TOS Kirk, which is one of the reasons why I don’t like that film. But if I remember correctly, even he didn’t claim that all his choices worked out for the best. “I don’t believe in a no-win scenario” doesn’t mean that he never made mistakes, it means that he doesn’t give up. In addition, it could also mean that he doesn’t think much of the Kobayashi Maru test.
@95/Jana: There are several versions of Kirk’s Kobayashi Maru out there. The version used in Julia Ecklar’s 1989 novel The Kobayashi Maru, and later adapted almost word-for-word by Howard Weinstein in a DC Comics story, was that he reprogrammed the Klingons so that they reacted in awe and fear to his name — “The Captain Kirk?” — and backed down and timidly cooperated with his instructions, lest they bring down his wrath. The Kelvin Timeline version is pretty similar, but simpler and less funny — he just reprograms it so the Klingons’ shields fail. But the one I like best is the one in Kevin Lauderdale’s short story “A Test of Character” in Strange New Worlds VII. There, Kirk didn’t program the simulator to guarantee his victory — he just took out the programming cheats that guaranteed failure and made it a fair fight, still difficult but surmountable with sufficient skill. He argued that programming it to guarantee failure wasn’t a legitimate test or a valid reflection of a real-world situation. I think that’s the version that captures Kirk’s character the best.
Two things…
going back to Kira being an unreliable narrator, it would have been nice if one of the humans gave an alternative narrative. Something like “really?! I guess that’s true from a certain point of view. We had the same number of ships, but they were in the midst of being refitted for science and exploration. Military drills had fallen into disuse. And the Vulcans had started a campaign of civil disobedience to gain independence [i guess like Catalonia from Spain currently?]. We were off-balance, not weak. We were to busy looking inwards to see the threats allying on our borders. And they knew just where to push to make the empire fall…”
So we’d be left with the choice of who to believe.
Then the Genesis Project having the data of where Khan is – it depends on how the data is catalogued. It might even have been in both the Defiant’s and Genesis Project’s memory banks, but if it wasn’t catalogued correctly or the researcher didn’t use the correct search terms, it isn’t going to be flagged. I can’t help but think of all the times I’ve searched the Internet for something I *know* is there, only for my Google-Fu to fail me..
And on Diane’s version of the Mirror Universe:
I liked the touch about how Picard (having to go undercover as his Mirror Universe counterpart) appreciated their tailoring, as he found he had no need to perform “the Picard Manoeuvre”.
I also liked how it was essentially the dedication of the Prime Universe’s Star Fleet to IDIC, and therefore diversity in Star Fleet’s roster (even if it was just for a “guest star” in the novel) that meant they triumphed over their evil counterparts.
What I didn’t like was the “intrinsically evil” nature of the Mirror Universe. That works well for DC’s fantasy Multiverse, but not the “harder” science fiction aspirations of Star Trek.
Far better (for me, YMMV) was the novel where the Mirror Universe was revealed to be an offshoot of the Prime timeline, caused by the events of First Contact
The main lesson of the DS9 Mirror Universe along with many other episodes of Star Trek such as the one where McCoy causes the Nazis to win World War Two by saving the life of an idealistic 1930’s pacifist is that knee jerk pacifism and unilateral disarmament are idiotic regardless of whom you choose to blame for it’s failures which I fail to see the relevance of. It’s an indisputable fact that anti-war Democrats in Congress after Watergate cutting off military aid we promised South Vietnam and Cambodia in the Paris Peace Treaty resulted in more human beings dying in Communist Killing Fields during the 1970’s than everybody killed on both sides in the 1960’s when we were fighting a war there. “The only thing necessary for the total triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing.” That is very clearly what Gene believed when he created Star Trek and reflected in every single Star Trek film and television series. As Robert Heinlein said, “Stupidity is the only universal capital offense.” You were bullied in high school? So was I. I recall getting beat up on the playground by somebody bigger than me once when a guy name Frank Genovese jumped in and pulled him off me. His sister Kitty had been stabbed to death on her doorstep because her neighbors who heard her screams “Didn’t want to get involved.” The death of his sister could have been prevented if she’d had a gun or a can of mace or learned martial arts possibly. It could have also been prevented by her murderer choosing to get psychiatric help instead of murdering her. Gene’s view was that it’s admirable and courageous for people to be trusting and peace loving but its also admirable to be prepared for when that doesn’t work as history teaches us is often the case. Paranoids can have real enemies after all.
@99/James Scribner: “The main lesson of the DS9 Mirror Universe along with many other episodes of Star Trek such as the one where McCoy causes the Nazis to win World War Two by saving the life of an idealistic 1930’s pacifist is that knee jerk pacifism and unilateral disarmament are idiotic […].”
That isn’t the main lesson of “The City on the Edge of Forever”. It’s much more nuanced than that. For starters, they never say that Edith Keeler was wrong. Kirk says: “But she was right. Peace was the way” (obviously speaking about the history between the 1960s and the 2260s), and Spock answers: “She was right, but at the wrong time”. Then, there isn’t any talk of unilateral disarmament – the problem is that the US didn’t come into the war soon enough to stop Germany from developing an atomic bomb. So, the lesson here isn’t about unilateral disarmament, the lesson is that it you can’t always stay out of a war, even if you love peace. I guess you could call it a rejection of “knee jerk pacifism”.
But that’s only part of the lesson. Another part is that under different circumstances, the decision for peace is the right one, even necessary to make the world a better place (“Peace was the way”).
Then there’s the whole aspect of poverty and improving people’s lives, which is addressed in Edith Keeler’s speeches and also in the following exchange between her and Kirk: “One day they’ll take all the money they spend now on war and death” – “And make them spend it on life?” – “Yes. You see the same things that I do.” We, the audience, know that Kirk, unlike Keeler, doesn’t “feel” these things – he knows them, because he comes from a world like that. Even if the Enterprise is heavily armed, this episode tells us that his society does not spend the bulk of its money on arms. There is a lot of utopianism in “The City on the Edge of Forever” to counterbalance its rejection of peace at all costs.
As for the DS9 Mirror Universe episodes – if they were really supposed to teach a lesson about pacifism and unilateral disarmament, they make a bad job of it. They mix up three things that shouldn’t be mixed up, namely repression, aggression, and defence. There isn’t any reason why Spock shouldn’t be able to reform the Empire in such a manner that it remains able to defend itself. The fact that the villain delivers the tale, without any independent corroboration, muddles the waters even more.
“His sister Kitty had been stabbed to death on her doorstep because her neighbors who heard her screams “Didn’t want to get involved.” The death of his sister could have been prevented if she’d had a gun or a can of mace or learned martial arts possibly. It could have also been prevented by her murderer choosing to get psychiatric help instead of murdering her.”
That’s terrible. I don’t know what to say – it all seems inadequate. But I can’t help thinking – it could also have been prevented if the neighbours had been willing to help. In your bullying story, you didn’t learn martial arts; you were helped. Let me add a bullying story of my own:
When one of my daughters started school, she was threatened on her way home by a couple of kids from her class. I asked our neighbours’ son, who was in fourth grade, if he would protect her, and he agreed. When he left school at the end of the year (basic school is four years here), her best friend’s older brother took over. One year later, he also left, and my daughter asked me: “Who is going to protect me now?” I told her: “You no longer need protection. Now it’s your turn to protect the little ones, if need be.” She soon found that another neighbourhood boy, who had just started school, was being bullied, and teamed up with a boy from her class to protect him.
By the way, that’s also a theme from “The City on the Edge of Forever”: “Let me help. A hundred years or so from now […] a famous novelist will write a classic using that theme. He’ll recommend those three words even over I love you.”