I’d have to double check to be sure, but it looked an awful lot like a Cardassian vole.
Heh heh. Yeah, I loved the evil bombastic opening credits montage.
Yeah, that’s always a problem with B-grade sci-fi treatments of “parallel universes”. If there were an alternate universe where the divergence point from our own timeline was that the Nazis won World War II, then the life of, say, Frederick Douglass would presumably have played out unchanged (although I’ll bet the 2005 edition of the Encylopedia Teutonica wouldn’t have much to say about him); there would have been an Alternate Universe Winston Churchill, whose life would have diverged at some point (died in Dachau in 1946 or whatever), but there wouldn’t be an Evil Alternate Universe MEBuckner acting as Forumsführer von Groβe-Debatten: to put it sort of clinically, it’s very unlikely my grandparents would have had sex at exactly the times and places they did to produce my parents. Heck, my paternal grandfather served in the U.S. Army Air Force; he might have been dead, or at least sitting in some Stalag somewhere at the moment when my father should have been conceived. However, that was a problem inherent to the TOS episode, and like many things in the Trek universe (human-Vulcan half-breeds, “dilithium”), it’s just something we’re stuck with.
Well, remember, it’s a 100 years before the time of the TOS episode. Based on everyone else’s reactions to Archer’s plot, and his need to claim “secret orders” from High Command, at this point in the Mirror Universe timeline, it appears that mutiny and assassination aren’t yet accepted as standard methods of advancement. I wonder if the idea isn’t that the Mirror Universe of Kirk’s day has had a century to grow even more barbaric and depraved. At this point, the tiny spark of decency hasn’t been completely snuffed out of everyone yet. Archer’s motivations seem to be genuinely about patriotic concern for the Empire as much as they are about personal advancement.
Yeah, I botched that. The CGI for the Tholian sucked.
I think you’re right.
The intro was the coolest thing I’ve seen on tv for a long long time, even better than that parallel universe Buffy ep where they stuck all those shots of Jonathan in the intro. If only they could have put whoever thought of it in charge of this utterly boring, conventional show, then we might have something interesting. Or perhaps it’s the same people and cancellation has freed them from needing to be conventional. Either way, this is the first Enterprise ep which had me totally mesmerized from beginning to end.
Yes! I read that one. That’s why I had the nagging idea that there was another Mirror Universe story out there.
One thing explained in the novel, and may explain why the Mirror Universe mirrors ours, is that their universe has irregular contact with this one, and the Empire has taken advantage of this by capitalizing on the technology they can find or steal.
I think it’s just lazy scriptwriting, but on the other hand, what were we expecting? This episode worked out along the same lines as the original “Mirror, Mirror.”
The only thing missing is a message from Kirk left on the Defiant- a log entry, a note, or graffiti on the walls.
Didn’t one of those poor critters have a still-beating heart? Vivisection?!
[Phlox]Oh! I’m pretending it’s Mr. Reed! Tickle, tickle! Hmmm.[/Phlox]
Firstly, let me be clear that I did -not- like the MU Porthos!!! laughs Nothing against Rotties, mind you - I just prefer Porthos the loving beagle! 
I thought it was very well done, for a mirror Universe episode and a stand-alone - although we don’t know if the “this Universe” Enterprise crew might get involved in the second part. Good lords at the shockingly low-rise pants on the female crew members!!! A mere quarter inch lower and the show would have been censored for certain … well, imho that is. 
Liked how they had Zefrem Cochrane played by the guy who played him in the movie! (gah, can’t think of that actor’s name right now … blasted memory lapses!) It’s always interesting to see characters that are normally “good” play evil, though.
They didn’t have to get James Cromwell, they just re-used footage from the movie. In the movie, Cochrane can’t make the vulcan sign, so he puts his hand down to offer a handshake instead. In this ep, they cut away just as he is lowering his hand, and show a closeup of his hand pulling a gun out of his coat. You never see his face after they cut away. Clever editing…
I don’t read Star Trek novels, but someone who read Diane Duane’s Mirror books told me she posited some sort of cross-universal rule of physics or probability that keeps the universes balanced and symmetrical with regard to personalities and governments.
So that, while you can kill a Kirk in one universe while he survives to become an admiral in the other, in the long run there’s a “regression to the mean” that by and large keeps both Quarks alive and both Tuvoks in the Delta Quadrant (for example).
Obviously they never made that rule canon (certainly not on DS9), but they should have.
I have to agree with previous opinions on the opening. The opening credits was great! It’s a shame they’re cancelling it - this should be the new opening credits! This should have been the opening credits all along.
The characterization of the alternate universe crewmen seemed uneven. I think it really helped the TOS episode that the Star Trek crew from the normal universe were right there to contrast with the ones in the alternate universe - the contrasts were right there, and it probably forced the writers and actors to show more extreme changes.
The characters here, on the other hand, seem to revert to their normal selves as soon as they aren’t actively involved in Being Evil ™ for plot reasons.
I liked the teaser with the 15 seconds of changed stuff from First Contact.
The title sequence was awesome!
I enjoyed the panda simply for panda’s sake.
As for the MU characters, antiTrip and antiMalcolm are great, but overall the acting was over the top. Some characters by a little, some a lot. But the story was good and the action and dialog flowed well.
AnT’Pol looked pretty neat with the long hair and low risers. She has a great ass.
The Tholian’s being insectoid (?) looking doesn’t seem right. (Exoskeleton?)
Next week’s previews bugged me a little. Self referencing out the wazoo is what it looks like they’re feeding us. Manny Coto’s one weakness. According to the credits, this looks like all three of them had major input into the arc. (B & B & Coto).
I really liked antiTrip.
It must have something to do with those webs.
RE: corner case’s comment on the incredibly fast web-spinning, as opposed to TOS slow webs, I figure this: Tholians are either Fast or Slow, kinda like smooth-head or bumpy-head Klingons.
Well, either that or it’s an Incredible Inconsistency. Which is more likely? Hmm?
The slow webbing in TOS was idiotic. I approve of the change and will apply it retroactively to the future past episodes of TOS.
Okay, for those of us who want to come up with plausible sounding explanations for the webbing speeds:
In TOS, weren’t there only two Tholian ships, and they had to create all the webs?
In Enterprise, it seemed that there were many Tholian ships working on it, so perhaps it didn’t take as long as a result.
My gripe is that, due to the speed in TOS, it looked like a physical web (like an energized cable being strung out in space), because the ships had to touch, and slowly played it out between them.
In enterprise, it seemed more like energy beams - the ships were separated and beamed the web strands to each other at speeds much faster than physical cables would move (yet somehow much slower than energy should move :smack: ). The technology seems to be moving from energy to physical items, which seems to be in an unrealistic direction.
But of course the real truth is that the webs were strung at the same speeds both times; they moved at The Speed of Plot ™.
Am I the only one who wishes they kept the original music with the new title sequence?
Good observation. It was the Infernal Device of the TOS episode, a menacing plot device and something to not waste time on in Enterprise.
Now, wait just a cotton-pickin’ minute here!
According to the ST:TOS episode “The Tholian Web”, the Defiant was thrown out of the universe by a combination of (A) being in an interspatial rift between universes in the first place, and (B) Spock firing the NCC-1701’s phasers.
But according to this episode of ST:Ent, the Defiant was lured out of our universe by a phony distress signal sent by the Tholians in the 22nd Century mirror universe. A signal which, I should add, the NCC-1701 never noticed in “The Tholian Web”.
I call foul!
Want some Mirror Memorabilia? Here you go:
http://www.cafepress.com/startrek
But tracer, you need to start with how the Defiant got to the interspatial rift. Suppose that the AU Tholians created the rift, and generated a distress signal that could be picked up in the regular universe (RU). So RU Defiant goes to investigate, and is in the rift. AU Tholians shut off the distress signal then; they have one ship, and don’t want to attract others. AU Tholians either can’t get it through to AU all the way, or are working on it. RU Enterprise NCC-1701 shows up. By the end of “The Tholian Web”, the RU Defiant is kicked through either by what the AU Tholians are doing, or by the NCC-1701’s phasers, or a combination of either with the rift.
It lands in AU in the NX-01 timeframe. And, it’s all consistent with what we see in both episodes (which is more that we can say about the episodes with respect to each other).