The Writers of Star Trek Discovery cleverly connect events from other Star Trek shows

Star Trek: From the Holodeck is a fan broadcast dedicated to breaking down, analyzing and discussing Star Trek Discovery. 

During the last broadcast, hosts Mike and David discuss and breakdown the episode ‘Despite Yourself’. In this episode, the writers of Star Trek Discovery manage to seamlessly connect various other Star Trek iterations without confusing the audience.  

Below is a copy of the show notes utilized during the last show: 

***Forgive the typos, the outline below simply serves as a platform for the show's discussion and analysis. 

As just a reminder— the writers had left us with quite the cliffhanger. At the end of midseason finale ‘Into the Forest I Go’ the crew had a major victory against the Klingons and deployed the controversial spore drive a final time to travel to Starbase 46.

• However, Lt. Stamets had a terrible reaction due to the prior incessant jumps— leaving Discovery adrift in a mysterious chunk of space with no Federation outpost in sight.

And now, fast forward to the recent episode and boom! Some of our Theories and fan theories were correct and some might still prove to be correct or maybe they will simply just serve as misdirection.

• We are going to break down all of these one by one throughout our discussion, but let’s start with the obvious one and that is the Mirror Universe.

Most of us Trek fans love these parallel universe one-off or episodic arcs, there has always been a certain silliness to them. What I mean by that is simply the science of it all.

• We are dealing with a show heavily steeped on realistic science. A franchise that prides itself on the plausibility of theoretical science proving itself to be true. It’s a distant theory (fringe science) that could in fact be proven to be true someday.
• Bringing it back—you have a show that takes us to a universe where everything is similar but different, which honestly makes no sense. The likelihood of a universe so different but there still being a duplicate of yourself is extremely far-fetched.
• And you and i have theorized and bantered on about this for countless hours and we did an entire show on this. And we came to the exact same conclusion that Lorca did in this episode. Destiny.
  • This is a simple way to explain away the ludicrous idea of duplicates but also stay consistent with the themes of Trek and Destiny.

Destiny has always seem to be a part of Trek. In many ways, over the years,  it’s become an unseen or intangible character in itself. Always there pulling the strings of our heroes and correcting their paths.

• It’s one of the elements that I adore about the Kelvin Timeline movies —

It doesn’t take long , but once the crew figures out where they are at, they begin to look for ways to get back.

• They find data that suggests in the future, the USS Defiant will encounter a phenomenon that will bring it into this alternative universe’s past.
• This is where things get tricky —
  • The Defiant crosses over to the Mirror Universe is in the future for the characters of Discovery, but– when it comes out in the mirror universe, it’s about a century give or take.
  • In fact, as we discussed in our Patreon show last year, The original series episode where the Defiant crossed over, wasn’t even a about the mirror universe.
  • It wasn’t until the writing staff on Enterprise, used that episode to springboard their own narrative.

Confused??? — Let’s break it down a bit more.

• The Defiant first appeared in Trek canon in a 1968 third season episode of the original series called ‘The Tholian Web’—
• —Just to clarify, chronologically, everything in the original series hasn’t happened yet for the people on Discovery.

In ‘The Tholian Web’ Defiant was a sister ship of the old Enterprise.

• Nothing about this particular episode was about the Mirror Universe, the only original series episode that was about the Mirror Universe was ‘Mirror, Mirror’ in the second season. During the events in ‘The Tholian Web’ the Defiant got sucked into another dimension, though the audience never knew where it had gone. 

Now, Fast-forward to 2005. The prequel series Enterprise does a two-part episode called ‘In a Mirror, Darkly’, which takes place entirely in the Mirror Universe.

• Like the rest of Enterprise, ‘In a Mirror, Darkly’ occurs about 100 years before the original series. It’s here, where all the stuff in Burnham’s explanation from the new Discovery episode happened. It turns out that when the Defiant phased out of the regular dimension in ‘The Tholian Web’ it not only ended up in another dimension but it time-traveled into the past.

RELATED: From the Holodeck: Spotlight Interview – David Mack (Star Trek Novelist)

Star Trek fans – How can you help From the Holodeck? 

If you enjoy the show, please share, like and subscribe on iTunes and Stitcher. Also, leave us reviews! Every review helps our show gain popularity and boosts our rank. Additionally, to show your support, you can pledge to our Patreon Page.