#unpopularopinion am I the only one who thinks that "Mirror, Mirror" from the original Star Trek was maybe a disastrous mistake? Like, the episode itself is probably one of the better TOS eps; it's not bad. But boy oh boy did it open the door to a thousand unwanted followups and imitators. Mirror universes are up there with time travel among the worst-abused devices for plot generation. It's not the AU itself that's necessarily the problem...ok, sometimes the AU _is_ the problem, and Trek's AU of itself is to Star Trek what Underfell is to Undertale, almost comically grimdark, or wannabe grimdark.
@er1n oh, yeah, that one's really hard to defend on any level except maybe as a vehicle for Shatner's rich, fruity style of acting (which I genuinely enjoy in small doses)
@kara_dreamer everything around the assault and attempted rape scene was so bad
like
holy shit
so fUCKING BAD
@er1n unfortunately the actor (Grace Lee Whitman) had to endure similar treatment and left the show midway through the first season because of it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Lee_Whitney#Star_Trek_television_show)
@kara_dreamer I don't know if TOS can really be blamed for everything it inspired. Like, a lot of those ideas are simple enough that they would've entered the popular culture some other way.
Though maybe in this case with some signifier of mirror evil other than the goatee.
@listelian perhaps you're right. one reason I think these episodes sit a little poorly with me, in Star Trek, is that they serve a similar purpose to other types of contrived episode like the holodeck episodes, in giving the cast a reason to give completely out-of-character performances. that's not a problem in itself, necessarily, except that then the limitations of some of the Trek shows' actors then get thrown into sharper relief, trying to act villainous and not convincing.
@kara_dreamer unrelatedly:
somehow my friends mistook "The Enemy Within" as the original mirror universe ep (misread?? idk how) and so we ended up watching it instead and hot DAMN the enemy within is a TRASH episode