Mirror world reminds me of TNG's "Remember Me"

[Sci-Fi Girl]

Not in how it looked, but more in the idea, and how they escaped. I will explain what I noticed in a minute, but first I will back up for those who may not have seen Star Trek.

My family started watching Star Trek: The Next Generation when I must have been 7 or 8, when the second or third season was airing. From then on we watched every episode that aired: new, rerun, and all the syndicated reruns. By the time I was an adult I had seen each episode so many times that I literally have no memory of my first impressions of many of the episodes.

Anyway, we each had our own personal favorite episode, and mine was one called “Remember Me”.

—- Spoilers ahead for an episode that aired 25 years ago! 😉 —-

“Remember Me” starts with the show’s resident prodigy genius, Wesley Crusher, running an experiment in engineering. His mom, the ship’s doctor, drops by to say hello. As she watches, something in the experiment goes wrong, and when they look up, she is gone. They assume she left.

She didn’t. She was in fact sucked into the warp bubble that her son had created. (It doesn’t matter what a “warp bubble” is, as it is a fictional creation that does what the plot of this story needs it to. This is not contrived, in the setting it is a perfectly good narrative device.)

For a while, no one realizes what has happened, not even her. She doesn’t know she has been transported to a bubble universe that is a reflection of her thoughts and fears at the moment she entered. What follows is a suspenseful mystery as she tries to puzzle out what is wrong with the universe, as it becomes progressively stranger.

Eventually she realizes that the freak windstorms that she has been avoiding are not in fact danger, but actually her son’s attempt to rescue her, and finally dives into one, returning to reality.

During this time, in the real world, her son figures out what happened. In order to rescue her he must use more than science, a mind over matter, “thought affects reality” technique (just as it does inside the warp bubble). In other words he, and only he, can “think” her to safety, aided by a mystically abled acquaintance of his.

—- end recap —-

In the current episode of OUAT “I’ll be your mirror”, when Emma and Regina are trapped in the mirror world, they both assume that Henry will figure out a way to rescue them, and are determined to be “in the right spot” when he opens the inevitable portal to get them out!

So: mom(s) trapped in a pocket universe, and their special son with *thought power* (truest believer) is trusted to save them. The main difference being that they know and expect this.

So in the scene where Emma and Regina discuss this, it felt like a great big nod to my favorite episode of Star Trek! 😀

SFG

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