Welcome to Atop the Fourth Wall, where bad comics burn. In this episode, we encounter an evil mirror universe where Star Trek comics are... a bit weird. http://atopthefourthwall.com Originally uploaded August 1st, 2011. ORIGINAL INFO: Behold this classic tale of the starship Enterprise… and how her crew is incredibly incompetent. RUMINATIONS: I came up with the idea for this episode two weeks before I did it and, in fact, filmed all the additional elements while I was also working on the second Rise of Arsenal episode. There was always that idea of the “mirror universe episode” thing in the back of my mind for the show, but no good reason to do it. Two things finally gave me the impetus to do it – one, finding the mirror universe gold vest on Ebay and two - rereading Comics101.com’s look at the first Gold Key Star Trek comic. Gold Key’s first issue is so far removed from Star Trek aside from character names and look that it might as well be an alternate universe version of the comic, so I figured that would make for a good way of doing the mirror universe plot. The idea of the AI to handle Comicron One came not from 2001: A Space Odyssey, but rather the webcomic Schlock Mercenary, wherein every spaceship has an AI with their own personality and characterization, including a holographic avatar. I loved the idea for the show and thought it would add some more needed cast members who were not played by me. Since she lives an hour and a half away from me, doing voiceover was also ideal. To add onto our list of geeky influences, Nimue’s speech patterns and habit of saying what sort of statement she’s making before she speaks (Information, Speculation, Question, etc.) comes from the British sci-fi series Blake’s 7 and the artificial intelligence from that show named Zen. Obviously, with an onboard computer there would always be the possibility of her going rogue and trying to kill everyone, even putting her in the HAL 9000 appearance, but I didn’t have any definite plans there, so I decided to lampoon it in her first appearance. It might go on longer than it should, but I thought it was funny in the end. The one change to the footage shown in the mirror theme song is that the Lord Vyce Mirrorkara encountered was pretty much blown up, as opposed to the main universe, wherein he was simply knocked out. I leave it for others to speculate how this Vyce operated, whether he was fighting the Entity or just some conqueror or someone else entirely. The more important thing is that things ended up differently, especially as Mirrorkara took over his universe’s Comicron One and planned to use it to take over the world, while the rest of his supporting cast were pretty much indifferent to the whole thing. Mirror Pollo is, of course, played by Tom Servo. I figured it was a good opportunity to finally use the puppet properly in the show at least once until what would happen later on. The normal Pollo body was going to be put in the glass case, but it didn’t fit. As such, I decided to instead use a fan-made Pollo body that was actually made of metal. Mirror Insano is of course played by me with a blonde goatee (and those goatees are a pain in the ass to work with and feel really weird on the skin), since I knew Spoony would either be unavailable, lack the white goggles Mirror Insano has, or just that green-screening him in wouldn’t look good. There are tiny bits of foreshadowing in the background and foreground – primarily bits of technology that would matter later, like the mobile emitter, a half-completed phaser rifle, and the aforementioned metal Pollo body, since by then I had figured out what I’d be doing after the Entity arc completed. Speaking of, this episode plants the idea that Pollo needs a new body… which he desperately did, since the thing was several years old and the paint was chipping in places. This episode annoyed some people… not because of the Mirror Universe idea, but rather because I didn’t go far enough with Mirrorkara reviewing differently. Ironically, I deliberately chose NOT to do that since I feared viewers would hate an episode being so different, so aside from a line of dialogue here or there, I still wrote the review up as if it was a regular episode. If I ever do another mirror universe episode, I’ll make sure to correct that. Only thing left to say there is once again Iron Liz did a great job in it, especially with her reaction to the Agonizer. The sign of her mirror duplicate being evil was that one’s love of 4th edition Dungeons and Dragons, which I knew Liz HATED with a passion and could rant about it for hours.

• published: 26 Jan 2015
• views: 34