Star Trek Mirror Universe Completely Destroys Earth?

For this weird Star Trek theory to make much sense, we’re going to have to review a few things, starting with the Terran Empire. Kirk ran into this Empire in The Original Series episode “Mirror, Mirror,” and he discovered that his evil counterpart, the captain of the ISS Enterprise, was part of this organization. We never get a glimpse of Mirror Earth, but we do learn more about both the reach and the brutality of this alternate-universe empire.

In traditional Star Trek fashion, Kirk makes an impassioned speech to Mirror Spock (the one with the iconic goatee) about the need to reform such an empire, if only because all this fascism was doomed to collapse under its weight eventually. Surprisingly, Deep Space Nine followed up on the Mirror Universe, and while we still never got a look at this dimension’s Earth, we did discover that the Empire had collapsed.

In a dark twist, it collapsed specifically because Mirror Spock ended up successfully reforming the Terran Empire, leaving it weak and vulnerable to an unholy Klingon/Cardassian alliance.

Onscreen, this is the only reason given for the empire’s collapse, and the dark irony that Kirk’s attempts to reform this evil universe actually made everything worse was peak Deep Space Nine. However, there is another possibility that might have led to the Terran Empire’s collapse. Given everything we know about this dimension, we believe that Mirror Earth would have been completely destroyed by the Probe from Star Trek IV.

Now, this theory relies on two big assumptions: one, that the Terran Empire’s seat of power in the Mirror Universe would be located on Earth, much like the Federation is in “our” universe. While that is never verified onscreen, it’s a reasonable conclusion because the Terrans are from Earth and are (unsurprisingly) the primary race within the Terran Empire named after their planet.

The second assumption is that the same Probe from Star Trek IV would end up attacking Mirror Earth around the same time as it did in the Prime Universe. That may sound like a pretty big assumption, but a weird feature of this alternate dimension is that it has many of the same people and major events in the Prime Universe like Zefram Cochrane making first contact with the Vulcans.

Because of that, the Probe most likely arrived on Mirror Earth looking for whales around the same time, and without anyone to time travel to the past and rescue some 20th-century whales, the Probe would destroy the planet.

Our theory, then, is very straightforward: the destruction of Mirror Earth would have been enough to further destabilize a reformed Terran Empire, giving the Klingons and Cardassians the perfect opportunity to attack. With any luck, we’ll eventually get a Star Trek episode or film to confirm this. When that happens, we have a simple request: can the Mirror whales please, please have their own evil goatees?