Although its sophomore season did a much better job of balancing self-interrogation with nostalgia for Star Trek‘s past, the debut season of Discovery creatively flatlined with its full-on retreat into the Mirror Universe. Even before original series architect Bryan Fuller left the show, there were plans to go to Trek‘s iconic alt-reality…but they sound so much more fascinating than MAGA Captains.
Speaking on the 400th episode of Robert Meyer Burnett’s Robservations series, Fuller briefly touched upon his more abstracted approach to Star Trek that was in the works when he was first developing what would become Discovery. In particular, he went into a detailed examination of how he had intended to approach our heroes visiting the crueller, harsher, yet still eerily familiar world of the Mirror Universe, in ways that felt both reflective of our current climate and honouring what made the Mirror Universe such a fearsome and compelling concept in the first place.
“The thing that really fascinated me in sitting down and crafting the story for Discovery was the human condition,” Fuller began. “I thought that there are elements in the Mirror Universe that we have seen that have sort of boiled to the broadest ends of the spectrum and everything felt really binary. And what I really wanted to do in setting out was looking at the minutiae of simple decisions that have a cascade effect on our lives. So, it’s not about gold lamé sashes and goatees versus no sash and clean-shaven. It is more about we are at forks in the road every moment of our lives and we either go left or right.”
For Fuller, what that meant was less a simplistic story of the Discovery crew facing off against their Terran Empire counterparts (as we ultimately got in the final show), but instead something that felt more reflective about the emotional questions that come from being faced with a literal representation of the alternative to every moral choice they’ve ever made.
“It makes me think of Joe Menosky’s speech in [the the kind of guy who runs around paraphrasing Donald Trump quotes, at least.
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[H/T TrekMovie]