Star Trek Discovery Reveals Beloved Hero Caused Millions to Die?

Even by Star Trek’s standards, this theory is strange, so bear with me. Let’s start with what we know: based on Michael Burnham’s examination of the abandoned ISS Enterprise, we know that Mirror Saru became a rebel leader who led the ship’s crew into the Prime Universe. This plan was successful, but they had to abandon ship, eventually resettling into this new dimension and leaving the Mirror Enterprise behind.

According to the plaque that Michael Burnham reads, the crew decided to mutiny after the Terran High Chancellor “was killed for trying to make reforms.” He conveniently goes unnamed, but this chancellor is Spock, who was inspired by Kirk from the Prime universe to take control of the Empire and reform it. In The Original Series, this was meant to be a happy ending, but Deep Space Nine would later explore how this violation of the Prime Directive rather directly caused the violent destruction of the Terran Empire.

Michael Burnham discovers that the mutineer crew brought refugees with them who wanted to flee the Mirror Universe. The episode doesn’t specify exactly how he joined them, but the plaque on the ISS Enterprise says that a Kelpian slave turned rebel leader (Saru, of course) helped them. This directly pays off some dialogue from “Terra Firma, Part 2,” where Emperor Georgiou was told by the Guardian of Forever that the Mirror Saru she helped when she didn’t have to would later go on to “save others, a lot of them.”

All of this sounds mostly positive, so why am I blaming Michael Burnham for the deaths of millions of people? While “Mirrors” is deliberately sparse in details, it seems very likely that Mirror Saru was an ally to Mirror Spock. That would explain why he had both easy access to a ship as important as the ISS Enterprise (doubly surprising for a “rebel leader”) and enough of a warning to help the crew get away after Spock is executed for his reforms (presumably, the Vulcan would have had time to warn his allies about recrimination for associating with him).

Speaking of those reforms, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine later verified that the visiting Captain Kirk was a little too successful: once the Terran Empire that had brutalized aliens throughout the galaxy began to soften, the hardened aliens began to pounce. Groups as diverse as the Klingons, Cardassians, and even Bajorans had teamed up to destroy the empire that once oppressed them. The result is that countless people were killed, and the surviving humans and Vulcans were enslaved except for small pockets of resistance.

Put it all together, and you get a weird chain of events: Michael Burnham partially inspires Mirror Saru and goes out of her way to save Emperor Georgiou from certain death. Georgiou goes on to further inspire Saru, giving him the information (mostly about how he could live through vahar’ai instead of dying) necessary to become an effective rebel leader. According to my theory, the generally peaceful Saru (someone who had extensive contact with residents from the Prime Universe) would have helped advise Spock on reforming the Terran Empire, something he would know quite a bit about how to do thanks to his time serving Georgiou.

If this theory is true, then Michael Burnham shares culpability with Captain Kirk for the millions of lives lost in the Mirror Universe. Admittedly, the Terran Empire was brutal and deserved to fall, but Kirk shouldn’t have violated the Prime Directive by trying to get Spock to overthrow an empire. In turn, Michael Burnham shouldn’t have saved a Terran Emperor for a lot of reasons, and one of them was that Georgiou inspired the man who inspired her eventual successor, leading to the catastrophic collapse of an empire.

Michael Burnham is a character who is all about giving “the Vulcan hello” to violent races like the Klingons. In this case, though, an act of mercy effectively gave “the Vulcan goodbye” to millions of lives.