Put on your crop tops and keep a knife handy because we’re going to the Mirror Universe. We’ll discuss the costumes, characters, and messages about race, gender and sexuality.
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Hosts: Grace, Jarrah, Andi
Guest: Rumman – rummanchowdhury.com, @ruchowdh
Editor: Jarrah
Transcription: Grace
Download Transcript: PDF or Word
Notes and References:
- Star Trek Costumes: Five Decades of Fashion from the Final Frontier by Paula M. Block and Terry J. Erdmann
- “The Evil Aesthetic of the Mirror Universe” by Elly Frances on our blog
- Dark Mirror by Diane Duane
- IDW’s Mirror Broken comic
I doubt ENT was going for shock value with their women’s uniforms. Yes I know the blog post already mentioned it but all the writers really thought of was the tie-in was TOS. I wonder what Elly Frances’ alternative to crop tops would have been.
I have to admit as a women, the catfight between Hoshi and T’Pol was a guilty pleasure because of the cheesy dialogue. I still laugh at those. I don’t remember the specific podcast but something on Trek FM mentioned that the MU episodes of ENT were deliberately campy. The catfight is a piece of evidence for that (aside from Bakula and Park’s over-the-top performances).
Am listening to the Mirror Universe episode know and the part where you discuss Sisko sleeping with Mirror Dax got me thinking, besides the obvious ick factor, isn’t it also playing right into the long standing myth of the hypersexual “negro” who has an uncontrollable lust for teh White womenz. For Sisko to make this choice for no good reason (while still perhaps icky if say sleeping with Dax had been somehow essential to completing the mission it would at least make sense in a hand wavey way) frankly in some ways almost completely erases, or at least calls into question everything that has been established about the character’s basic decency. It would be like if Prime Picard had decided to sleep with Troi, cause, hey why not.
Ultimately as is often the case I think the books, both Dark Mirror and the Post DS9 finale books, do more to make the MU viable than any of the tv episodes, including to an extent the TOS episode.