Yesterday’s Empire – A Star Trek Mirror Universe Movie

Welcome to the fourth part of The Search For Story, a series of articles where we’ll take a character, group, species, timeline, or event and look at what that might look like as a standalone series, miniseries or movie.

In a recent article we looked at how time travel works in Star Trek, specifically as it relates to the story of Yesterday’s Enterprise and came to the conclusion that there may be no way to make an interesting movie in the prime timeline. There was however a path through the Mirror Universe.

Title: Yesterday’s Empire
Inspiration: The Mirror Universe, Yesterdays Enterprise and Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda
Setting: 24th Century

First the setup, after the events of the Star Trek episode Mirror, Mirror Mr. Spock had convinced his counterpart to push a series of reforms to the empire which included more moderate policies and less focus on force and more on sustainability.  Unfortunately this eventually left the empire unable to defend itself from its enslaved races and the Klingon-Cardassian Alliance would rise up against them.

We’re setting this movie up at the tail end of the empire in 2344, as the Klingon-Cardassian Alliance tore through the last of the ISS fleet their flagship, the ISS Enterprise NCC-1701-C made its last stand at Narendra III.

We open with the Enterprise traveling at warp towards Archer IV to retrieve a Terrain ambassador who had been secretly meeting with members of a Romulan delegation with the hopes of striking a deal that might just save the empire. While the Romulans lack real power after the Earth-Romulan War they have enough numbers to be of some aid to their former foes.

As Captain Rachael Garret will soon learn, the alliance has also become aware of the meeting.

As the Enterprise drops out of warp they find two alliance vessels firing on the planet. No match for these ships alone the Enterprise tries to hold them off while a shuttle makes a daring escape from the planet and manages to land on the Enterprise just as their shields fail.

Unfortunately the final volley has caused a warp core breach, with the clock ticking and crews unable to save the core, they have no choice but to eject the core, they finally drop out of warp at, you guessed it, Narendra III, home of a Klingon outpost.  They eject the core as the outposts defines force begins firing a volley of torpedoes which combined with the explosion of their warp core opens a temporal rift and the badly damaged ISS Enterprise is pulled inside and ejected 32 years in the future.

Welcome to the resistance Enterprise.

With the resistance slowly building their forces during the events of Deep Space Nine and closing in on the remaining leadership of the Alliance their victory seems all but assured.

The ISS Defiant and newly converted flagship the ISS Regent find the Enterprise C adrift with just over 100 survivors.

As the story continues we encounter a number of friendly faces from the resistance, and have some great cameo opportunities.

The rebellion is thrilled to have a real ISS Flagship back in the mix, a chance to overthrow the Alliance once and for all, but for Captain Garrett it’s not that simple, she believes that if the entire new ISS fleet were to return with her they might just stop the Alliance before everything and everyone she knows were obliterated.

Why such a departure?

I’ve looked at many ways to reimagined Yesterday’s  Enterprise, some were pretty promising, but ultimately it felt like a retread of the episode, there was no mystery. We know it all comes down to one battle, a battle that must be lost, and while it’s a great setup for a different genre entirely The Next Generation already did that version as closely to perfect as possible.

Yes, we could get to know the crew of 1701-C better, learn why the fight meant so much to them as individuals but that then becomes the focus, we need to start the movie earlier in their timeline and just as everything changes it’s over.

By setting them in the mirror universe we run into a slightly different issue,