Star Trek: Discovery keeps the pedal to the metal with twists and turns after coming back from its winter break. One of the major revelations out of last night’s episode “The Wolf Inside,”? The Mirror Universe resistance and its surprising leader.
In the Wolf Inside, the Discovery crew continues hiding undercover in the dangerous Mirror Universe, disguising themselves as their Terran Empire counterparts. For Michael, this means posing as the ruthless captain of the Shenzhou, whereas Lorca is a prisoner of War, and so on.
That’s trying for all of them. For some, like Lorca, it’s a physical challenge as he’s being constantly tortured in the Agony Booth. For others, like Burnham, it’s an emotional and psychological battle, as she runs the risk of being discovered AND losing her soul in the inhuman things she has to do to maintain her cover.
In this episode, she is tasked with a very important mission from the Emperor: the Klingon leader of the resistance, codenamed Fire Wolf, has been located. She’s ordered to destroy the rebel base and snuff out the resistance once and for all.
Obviously, she doesn’t want to do this, and sets out to find another way. She and Tyler down to actually meet the resistance and get to the bottom of what brought them all together, in the hopes of figuring out how to negotiate with the Klingons back in their own universe.
The Mirror Universe resistance itself is maybe one of the most interesting inclusions of these recent episodes, for a couple of key reasons.
First and foremost, it’s a coalition of all the races the Terran Empire has attacked and subjugated. Klingons, Vulcans, Andorians, and Tellurites, all working together because of a common enemy.
Outside of the Klingons, what’s interesting to note is that in this universe the Andorrans, Tullrites, and Vulcans still ended up in an alliance, just like the Prime universe, where they were founding members of the Federation of Planets, along with Humans, of course.
That fact was seized upon by Burnham, seeing that this could be the seeds of a Federation for this universe if the Empire could be defeated, a callback to the realization that Mirror Universe Spock will have in the Original Series episode “Mirror, Mirror.”
The Klingon inclusion in the Mirror Universe resistance is a focus of this episode, and one of the more compelling aspects of it, because their leader is…Voq. That’s right, that Voq. The one that’s actually Tyler in our universe.
You see, the Klingons in this universe, having been defeated by the Terrans, were able to put aside their aggressive nature because of a common enemy: the Humans.
How that’s going to relate back to the prime universe, we don’t know. Obviously, at this point in that universe there’s no greater threat that could bring the two sides together, and there probably wouldn’t be for at least a few decades.
Unfortunately, it didn’t end well for the resistance. Despite Burnham letting them escape, the planet was fired upon by none other than the Emperor — or should I say Empress — herself, potentially wiping the Resistance out for good.
