![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
through the looking glass
Apr. 19th, 2007 11:44 pmGene Roddenberry's original pitch for Star Trek included story outlines, one of which proposed that the characters would find themselves in an alternate universe. That eventually turned into Mirror, Mirror and a batch of spinoff episodes in the subsequent Trek series. The mirror universe allows exploring the characters in a deeper way. The writers and production staff openly admitted that they loved any plot device that would offer a chance for the drama to enact another metaphor.
Around the same time, reviewers of 2001: A Space Odyssey noted that Kubrick's sets and special effects contained a lot of pictures within pictures. The remastered Trek series is adding a lot of CGI conceits which insert new pictures within the old pictures. But what a lot of Trekkies have missed is that from the very first pilot, Star Trek's plots were not just metaphors, but metaphors within metaphors. The first level of metaphor in The Cage condemns television as an industry along with Trekkies who watch every episode over and over until they have memorized them. The second level of metaphor ties together with the web spun throughout many other episodes. It condemns aspects of human behavior which are even older but which are hard to see until one has got a life.
The mirror universe is a great metaphor for those times in life when one realizes that, while just going about the daily routine, some ion storm has resulted in a transport to a place where everything seems familiar, but something is very wrong, and the rules are not what they should have been. One of my coworkers calls these ``Spock with a beard universe'' moments.
Around the same time, reviewers of 2001: A Space Odyssey noted that Kubrick's sets and special effects contained a lot of pictures within pictures. The remastered Trek series is adding a lot of CGI conceits which insert new pictures within the old pictures. But what a lot of Trekkies have missed is that from the very first pilot, Star Trek's plots were not just metaphors, but metaphors within metaphors. The first level of metaphor in The Cage condemns television as an industry along with Trekkies who watch every episode over and over until they have memorized them. The second level of metaphor ties together with the web spun throughout many other episodes. It condemns aspects of human behavior which are even older but which are hard to see until one has got a life.
The mirror universe is a great metaphor for those times in life when one realizes that, while just going about the daily routine, some ion storm has resulted in a transport to a place where everything seems familiar, but something is very wrong, and the rules are not what they should have been. One of my coworkers calls these ``Spock with a beard universe'' moments.
