“Shattered Mirror” (season four, episode 19; originally aired 4/22/1996)
In which Jake loses his other mother…
It must be something of a blessing and a curse to get a regular role in a long-running TV series. On the one hand, you’ve got job stability (which would be difficult to undervalue, especially in the creative arts), and there’s something to be said for having time to develop a part and settle into a world. On the other hand, even if you’re blessed with the most talented and ambitious writing staff in the industry, it is still just one role; I imagine even James Gandolfini had moments in the last year or two when he wished Tony Soprano would go far, far away. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine often has great scripts, and its main ensemble has been given the opportunity to enrich the characters they were hired to play, enough so that I doubt they could have too many complaints here in the mid-point of the run. But still, there are only so many ways Kira or Bashir or Dax can behave and still be consistent, and sometimes, the restrictions that define them must start to chafe on the actors who bring them to life.
Not that the actors’ comfort should be our primary criteria for judging their work, but it’s the best reason I can think of for why the show insists on returning the Mirror Universe again and again, long after any dramatic potential lift in the concept had been wrung dry. The very first mirror episode, back on the original Star Trek, was a fun, campy, and somewhat unsettling excuse to see the goody-two shoes Federation rendered in the worst light possible, combined with the creep-factor of familiar faces going balls-to-the-wall evil. (Plus the revelation that, in any universe, Spock is basically Spock.) The first trip back on DS9 wasn’t nearly as memorable, but it did at least provide a sick punchline to the one brief hope raised at the end of the TOS episode. And it was fun to see Nana Visitor doing her weird Joker sex-kitten riff, while all the ensemble we’d already come to care deeply about hunted around for the backs most vulnerable to knives. As a one-off, it was a cute way to pay homage to the franchise’s roots, and, I’m sure, a fun writing exercise for the staff.
But it doesn’t work as an ongoing saga, in part because every successive visit just reminds us how weird the idea is in the first place. Kirk, Spock, and McCoy were always bumping into ludicrous, blatant symbolic bullshit in the original series, and it worked because that was just how that show was designed; everything was more vital, more immediate, and nobody gave a damn about continuity or science fact. But DS9 is a more rigorous show, and so the folks on the other side of the mirror have to start developing long-term personalities, and it just doesn’t play. Everyone is so cartoony here, from sneering Bashir to pouty, sneering Dax; O’Brien comes across relatively unscathed thanks to his essential O’Brien-ness, and Kira and Worf are both clearly enjoying the chance to let loose, but as entertaining as they are, there’s no real dramatic frisson to anything that happens. We don’t care about most of these people because their only reason to exist is to remind us of the characters we’re actually invested in, and because the show’s version of the Mirror Universe resolutely refuses any serious connection between the parallel selves, this teaches us next to nothing about the “real world” ensemble. So there’s a version of Bashir who’s a dick. He’s not developed enough to stand on his own, and he’s not really a reflection on Julian, because the Mirror-verse Bashir is too generically dickish to be connected to anyone. If it weren’t Alexander Siddig in the role, he would be immediately and completely forgettable. As is, there’s momentary “Oh right, that guy’s different from our doctor,” and once that fades, nothing is left.
What’s even worse is that the contrast between the universes, the fact which made the original episode so potent, is almost meaningless in this context. There wasn’t any question who the good guys were on TOS; while that’s basically true on DS9, the universe of the show is more complex, less interested in good versus bad than in us versus them, when they might also be us, and we might not be who we thought we were. There’s really not much charge in seeing an already morally gray setting turned morally gray but slightly meaner. Take Mirror Garak: He seems to be pretty much Garak, although far more obsequious and pathetic than the non-mirror version. (Gosh, it’s been too damn long since we’ve had a good Garak episode.) I suppose the argument could be made that without his exile to Deep Space Nine, Garak would never have grown into the moderately trustworthy, though still deeply conflicted, character we know and love, but there’s no real effort made to make that connection land. Really, the only way this would have any meaningful dramatic impact is if the contrasts were underlined, and if some of the regular-world characters came into contact with their mirror-world selves. But since Sisko and Jake are the only ones who cross over to the other side, and since Mirror Sisko is dead, and Mirror Jake never existed, it’s a wash.
So, Mirror O’Brien has Jennifer “kidnap” Jake, to force Sisko to help him fix the Defiant so they’ll be able to defend themselves when the Alliance attacks. And so on. It’s passable for what it is, and the episode keeps moving along well enough that it never becomes painful to watch. As for surprises, well, Mirror Nog turns out to be an irredeemable dick who yells at Jake before helping to free Mirror Kira from her jail cell; since Mirror Kira killed Mirror Quark and Mirror Rom, she left Mirror Nog in charge of the bar, which puts him firmly on her side. Not that this is enough to stop her from killing him, mind you. So that’s fun. Michael Dorn clearly relishes the opportunity to go full-Klingon, so that’s also fun. And the space battle that closes out the episode is one of the better I’ve seen on the series; if we’re going to have hollow conflicts, at least they can look pretty.
Otherwise, the only hook for the episode is the return of Jennifer, who gets to meet Jake this time, before she dies (again). It’s an okay idea, I guess, but apart from underlining the obvious fact that Jake still misses his mom (which, duh), there’s no real payoff. Mirror Universe Jennifer isn’t an interesting character, and the actress who plays her still isn’t great. Jake gets to hang out with a replacement Mom for a while, which gets sort of weird and Oedipal because he keeps calling her by her first name, and then she dies in front of him when Kira tries to shoot Jake. Which, come to think, is a bit of a bummer, and the last scene, with Jake and Sisko embracing next to Jennifer’s saintly corpse, doesn’t really strike me as earned. Punishing a character for the sake of drama is a time-honored tradition, but letting Jake briefly reconnect with a presence he’d thought lost forever (even if that presence isn’t his real mom) before forcing him to relive the most traumatic experience of his life, is a cheap shot, used mostly to give “Shattered Mirror” the illusion of depth. Cirroc Lofton and Avery Brooks give it their best, but it still plays as manipulative and shallow, and best forgotten quickly.
Stray observations: