Favorite Episodes of Star Trek: In a Mirror Darkly

And so, we come to our final look at a Star Trek show outside of DS9, at least for the purposes of this countdown. I’m not going to sugar coat it, Enterprise was a pretty bad show. Conceived as a prequel series to the original show, Enterprise was constantly hindered by unlikeable characters, bad writing, pointless ret-cons, the most non-Star Trek opening sequence in the history of the franchise, and just all around poor story telling. All I can say is thank goodness for the 2009 reboot film, because if Enterprise truly was the last bit of Star Trek we’d ever get, it would have left a horrible taste in the fandom’s collective mouths. But, I digress, despite its numerous flaws, Enterprise was still able to turn their lemons into lemonade and give us some memorable episodes, which brings us to today’s topic.

Ordinarily, this is where I’d introduce the premise and characters of Enterprise, but that won’t be necessary here because none of our main characters appear in this episode, or at least, not the versions of them that we know. You see, this episode takes place in the mirror universe. What’s the mirror universe? Well, effectively, it’s a parallel reality in which all of the good guys are now bad guys. That’s not strictly the case, but for our purposes it’s as good an explanation as any. Introduced in the original series, the mirror universe saw a world where the united federation of planets is now the Terran Empire, in which the human race is a race of brutes and conquerors. The mirror universe would actually be revisited several times on DS9 and even though none of those episodes merited a spot on the countdown, I’d still highly recommend giving them a watch.

Right off the bat, this episode shows us we’re in for something unique, which the ending scene of the film Star Trek: First Contact in which the human race encounters the Vulcans for the first time is played, only this time, the Vulcan ambassador is shot and the humans loot the ship, leading into the intro, that changes the theme song to something more suited to Star Trek and shows how history played out differently in the mirror universe.

In the episode itself, the Enterprise of the mirror universe, lead by mirror Jonathan Archer, encounters an advanced ship, and much to their surprise, it’s of Terran design. This ship, is not only from the regular universe, but also, from the future, the original series era to be exact. Using this ship, mirror Archer thinks he can overthrow the Empire, but must work to quell a mutiny first.

Here’s the thing about this episode, the plot, isn’t all that important. What this episode is really about is fan service. This entire episode is basically an excuse to throw out a ton of original series nostalgia, and to the episode’s credit, it works. We get to see the Enterprise regulars wearing the classic uniforms and hanging around on the classic sets. Hell, you even get to see Archer fight a Gorn. This episode is far from perfect, but what’s nice about it is the fact that it exists in a vacuum from the rest of the series. If you absolutely must watch one episode of Enterprise, make it this one. Next time, we return to DS9 when Major Kira comes face to face with one of the monsters behind the subjugation of her people.