The Mirror Universe Star Trek podcast

This podcast about Star Trek takes a break from Star Trek to talk about...Star Wars? Yes, we have our reasons! Whereas Star Wars used to be primarily a movie series and Star Trek a TV series, the two have blurred the lines heavily, especially in the last few years, with the launch of a bunch of live-action Star Wars shows. The best of these is Andor, the show about the early days of the Rebellion, and the most sophisticated and political Star Wars has ever gotten. In this way, it's surprisingly close to a Star Trek show, so it seemed worthy of examination as a lens to talk about the two biggest pop culture Sci-Fi franchises, their similarities ad differences, and what they say about the world in 2024. It's the Andor episode of Mirror Universe!

Paramount recently announced they'd be making a special TV movie starring Michelle Yeoh. The subject? Section 31, the secret organization within the Federation that operates in the shadows, doing the dirty work that, they claim, needs to be done to maintain the utopian society of Star Trek. Since its introduction in the Deep Space Nine episode "Inquisition", Section 31 has been one of the most intriguing later addition to the Trek mythos, and one of the most controversial. Does their existence undermine the whole premise and themes of Star Trek? Are they a necessary examination and counterbalance to some of Trek's underlying assumptions? And can a movie about them be any good? We delve into the possibilities on this special new episode of Mirror Universe--catch it now before it's mysteriously erased from the timeline...

Hey all! We apologize for the delay in subspace transmission, Adam's been busy with other projects, and we've had a couple of episodes sitting in the can waiting to be edited. But with the spare time over the holidays we're now ready to publish, so enjoy the first new episode here on Acast, where we're joined once again by Dylan Roth to share our thoughts on Strange New Worlds' excellent second season!More episodes are available right now for early listening on Adam's Patreon!

One of the precepts of Star Trek was always that it was going to get worse before it got better. In Trek's imaginary future history, the near future is supposed to be very bleak indeed, with nuclear war, genetically engineered overlords, and near-complete societal collapse on its way before we finally get our act together and build the Federation. That progression has been sketched out in a number of ways over the years, and makes for an intriguing, complex, and seemingly--but perhaps not actually--self-contradictory timeline. For this episode, Adam and Douglas, joined once again by guest Dylan Roth of the Are You Afraid Of The Dark Universe?  podcast, boldly take it upon themselves to imagine what a Star Trek show set during this tumultuous, very un-Trek like time period would look like.

One of the biggest appeals of Star Trek is the advanced technology to which the characters have access--some of which has, famously, influenced inventors and engineers in the real world. It seems like there's rarely a problem that a Starfleet engineer can't solve with a bit of technobabble and some time puttering around in the Jeffries tubes. But Trek's fetishization of technology raises a lot of issues...in particular, does the franchise promote the idea that technology can let us skip over more awkward and complicated social and cultural issues and "cheat" our way to utopia? On this episode, we're joined by Dylan Roth of the Are You Afraid Of The Dark Universe? Podcast for a deep dive on Trek's answer to the question, "Will Tech Save Us?"

This podcast was born partly out Douglas and Adam both commenting on Carl Garcia (@carlinspace)'s twitter livetweets of Star Trek, and as he moved into the late Rick Berman era we made a bet to see which of the two "bad" Star Trek shows Carl would like more: Voyager or Enterprise? This blew up into a larger discussion, with Douglas defending Voyager and Adam defending Enterprise. While we don't think either show is particularly great, figuring out which is the least bad makes for an interesting peek into what makes Trek work and what doesn't....

Appropriately enough, this 13th episode turned out to be fairly cursed, with technical and scheduling issues delaying it until 2023. Nevertheless, we enjoyed taking this look at one of the most well-regarded Star Trek spinoff novels, A Stitch in Time, which tells the story of one of Trek's most well-realized characters, Elim Garak. For an extra layer of veracity, it was written by the actor who played him, Andy Robinson, and as well as (somewhat controversially) expanding on Garak's backstory, it offers us a glimpse of the post-DS9 order. Is it canon? Is it even meant to be? Garak wouldn't want us to know!

The latest Trek series boldly goes where many of them have gone before. Is that a bad thing? Douglas and Adam dissect their thoughts on Strange New Worlds in this episode.