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Briefly restated, the problem with the MU has always been that it doesn't make sense as a divergent timeline. A truly divergent timeline would grow farther and farther from the PU, starting from the point of divergence. Instead, the MU always closely correlates with the current contents of the PU. MU inhabitants are some variant of PU inhabitants, and the current state of the MU always seems to mirror the current state of the PU in some inverted manner.
My theory is that the MU isn't a divergent timeline. It's a by-product.
In Rivals: DS9, the El-Aurian con artist Martus Mazur obtains a device that alters the laws of probability. The device literally makes him lucky. However, the device can't create luck out of nothing. In the process of providing its owner with luck, it imbalances probability across the station.
Some people experience incredibly good luck, such as Miles being able to hit every shot. At the same time, others experience only bad luck. Eventually, the toll for all of Martus bad luck has to be paid, and the entire station is almost destroyed. Martus himself suffers a wild swing in luck as soon as the devices are destroyed.
If Martus, a 24th-century El-Aurian, could obtain such a device, I think it's obvious that a race such as the Q would have similar abilities. We know, for a fact, that they can alter even universal constants.
My proposal is that the PU is the result of Q (or some other powerful group) stacking the deck in the PU. Think about how many times Spock says the odds of the Enterprise crew surviving are infinitesimally small, but they somehow survive anyway. How many statistically improbable wins have we seen the Federation pull off in the PU? No one can beat the odds that many times.
Some powerful force has to be altering probability in the PU to create the 24th timeline we're seeing. This is why the MU is always crapsack world. Their universe exists as a perpetual counterbalance.
Going further, I hypothesize that the MU inhabitants eventually discovered this fact and realized there was only one way their universe would prosper. The PU Federation had to be destroyed.
So the MU infiltrated the PU with agents and instigated what we now know of as the Temporal Cold War with the ultimate goal of not only altering the history of the PU but of their universe. If the MU could prevent the foundation of the Federation, the relationship would be reversed. Their timeline would be the winner. We know from Kovich that there were MU soldiers fighting in the Temporal Cold War.
But the temporary Cold War failed. The Federation managed to preserve its history. So the MU's next plan was the Burn. Based on their own no doubt Mengeleish knowledge of Kelpian physiology, they must have realized the potential if they could just get a pregnant Kelpian close enough to a large source of dilithium.
Having finally achieved their goal of destroying the idyllic PU, they used advanced technology to move the two universes apart so that the influence of the PU on their own universe was diminished and there would be no further incursions.
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Theories about the MU tend to fall into a few distinct categories:
The Infinite Multiverse Theory
This type of theory postulates that in an infinite multiverse, the coincidences are explicable. However, while this can explain the first time we encounter the Mirror Universe, it does not explain plausibly why these coincidences persist years, even decades down the line for both universes or people keep bumping into their counterparts. Why is it that the two universes seem to keep running in parallel despite butterfly effects? Which leads us to the next hypothesis...
The Watchmaker Theory
This theory says that the MU and the PU are similar because someone is making them similar - Q, or some other omnipotent entity. The Watch implies a Watchmaker. Leaving aside the question as to why this entity would do this, my general hesitation towards accepting this is because it's just too pat and takes away any agency from the characters in both universes. The evolutionist in me also reflexively cringes away from an argument that sounds too close to Creationism.
The Collapsible Mirror Theory
The hypothesis that the MU is some kind of Schrodinger's Cat whose waveform doesn't collapse until someone from the PU intrudes, such that it is basically created anew at every crossover, is a fun idea, and would go some way to explaining any inconsistencies in the portrayals of the MU between episodes, but we run again into the problem of why the continuity between universes persists - events and people from previous crossovers are referenced, especially in the DS9 episodes.
A variant of this theory is that the infinite multiverse means that every time there's a crossover from the PU to the MU, it's a different MU, but because of coincidence, the same events happen (i.e. another PU had the same interaction with that MU). But again, that level of coincidence is a bit hard to swallow because you're talking about selecting very small changes in a very large multiversal set.
Unless, again, we're postulating that the coincidences up and down the timelines for both universes were predetermined somehow, which leads us back to the Watchmaker.
The Information Transfer Theory
Another hypothesis is that the mycelial network is facilitating some kind of information transfer between the two universes. However, then the question comes up - why these two universes? Why not information transferring between the Prime Universe and every other universe in the network? And again, this leads us to a deterministic answer - that someone wanted these two universes to interact in this way.
My idea, which combines a couple of the above theories is that the MU and PU are entangled somehow - analogous to quantum entanglement in particles, such that what happens in one affects the other:
The Entangled Universes Theory
I agree with the idea that the MU is a parallel universe - not a branch, which has only happened with the Kelvin Timeline - that developed independently from the PU, although initially along similar lines due to the sheer coincidence of the infinite multiverse... until the point of the first crossover, which was the Defiant incident (TOS: "The Tholian Web", ENT: "Through A Mirror, Darkly"). The similarities in people, events, etc. can be explained by chance alone up to this point.
In MU 2154, the MU Tholians detonated a tricobalt explosive in an unstable region of space, tearing a rift through to interphasic space, which reached the PU but in PU 2268. Through this rift, they broadcast a fake distress call which lured the USS Defiant to the location, where it was caught in the rift causing all sorts of nasty effects to the crew as they were pulled through interdimensional space and time.
This was the most traumatic of all the crossovers we've seen because this was the first time two universes which were not supposed to interact came into contact.
But once they connected, they became entangled, like two quantum particles. In effect, the two universes became permanently locked together from that point onward, possibly even leading to ripple effects up and down both universes' timelines analogous to what happened when the Narada and Spock traveled into the past of the Prime Universe and split off the Kelvin timeline (ST 2009).
So the flow of events in the MU from 2154 onward became influenced by the PU, so that by the time the Discovery crossed over in 2257 and Kirk and Co. crossed over in 2267, the two universes had even more similarities - the same people being born and assigned to the same place, the same missions, etc. - and this continued on into the 24th Century of both universes.
This explains why the MU and the PU seem to be so inextricably linked, and also why crossovers subsequent to the Defiant Incident became much easier by comparison - the entanglement had already been established. Although Discovery's crossover was the first one chronologically from the PU side, it was the second if viewed from the perspective of the MU side, and so on for Kirk's crossover.
The multiverse, I submit, likes symmetry as much as our universe does, and "wants" to bring the two into conjunction as much as possible, just like two entangled particles. However, by the point of the collision, the history of the two universes were already so different, the momentum of history and the cultural environment shaped the doppelgangers' responses to the same subsequent events - one savage and brutal, the other idealistic and benign. That explains why very stark differences in personality, etc. still exist among the similarities - all without the need for a Watchmaker.
(For example, in the licensed Star Trek MU novels, the rebellion eventually succeeds in creating a Federation-like commonwealth of planets, so ultimately in both universes the historic endgame is the same - except they get there through very different paths)
But eventually, the universes began to drift further apart, but that's another story.
I think the explanation is in the description of the theory. If there's infinite multiverses, then eventually two of them are going to have the kind of relationship that the Prime and Mirror universes have where one is the edgy evil twin of the other. It's improbable, but infinite universes mean that sometimes improbable twins happen. At that point, it's just a question of how often it does happen.
Theres a variant on the watchmaker.
It doesn't necessarily need to be an intelligence creating the relationship. Both the PU and the MU could be reflections of something.
In other words, the Star Trek main timeline isn't the prime universe. Its a reflection just as much as the MU is
Data puts forward a theory in Clues that some quantum fluctuation could be accounted for by trillions of smaller microcorrections. So Q stopping a supernova because the planet nearby has a delicious beverage could cause multiple smaller changes in the Parallel Universe making it very slightly different but still similar to the core universe.
This is discussed in the book series Coda that ends the literary universe. They claim that every different timeline also has its own Mirror Universe that’s somehow paired specifically with that timeline.
It’s entirely plausible that Q and other Extratemporals who exist outside the normal flow of time can and maybe do “tinker” with all the timelines in some way.
The Prophets brought Akorem Laan to 2372 to force Sisko to accept he was the Emissary, and then Laan was sent back to his time (2170s) and his incomplete poem was completed - but Bajorans remembered how it wasn’t completed. Q sends JLP through three time periods and to primordial Earth to see the effects of an anti-time anomaly he and two Enterprise-D’s and the Pasteur created in order to stop it; and later sent him and the La Sirena crew to 2020s Earth to prevent the Confederation of Earth supplanting the UFP as Earth’s interstellar government.
But what also makes it not plausible is Parallels: in that TNG episode we see several timelines where Worf is XO of the Enterprise D under Riker, is married to Deanna Troi, but also contains one Enterprise D where the Borg won and Riker is losing a war of attrition. This somewhat validates the Infinite Multiverse theory, but also incorporates the Watchmaker theory.
But two things lead me to wonder why the Watchmaker stopped doing their “job”:
as seen on screen, the Kelvinverse Enterprise did not have a Robert April captain it - as it was under construction during Pike’s tenure; and
There’s no Jake Sisko, Molly or Yoshi O’Brien in the Mirrorverse.
The consistency of the Mirrorverse in prose and screen is that the same “influential” individuals are seen throughout; they end up in the same relationships and places, and have the same life progression experiences; mirror Archer captains a starship (USS Defiant instead of NX Enterprise); Smiley O’Brien is an engineer; Michael Burnham is close to Philippa Georgiou and attains high rank aboard starship.
But while Sisko married Jennifer, there’s no Jake Sisko. We never see if Keiko and O’Brien get together, nor if Worf ever conceived Alexander. While the latter examples aren’t confirmed to have or have not happened, Jennifer confirms that she never had a child and mirror Sisko is dead. While it’s yet to be confirmed on screen that Prime Jake Sisko becomes an influential figure, that he’s not in the Mirrorverse is a glaring inconsistency for the Watchmaker theory.
We also don’t know if the Mirrorverse encountered and/or vanquished the Borg. That could lead to there being billions of people alive there who aren’t in the PU. There’s also no evidence of a Dominion War occurring, so that would leave billions more alive in the Mirrorverse that aren’t in the PU.
Those inconsistencies, to my mind, validate Emperor Georgiou’s “glitching” in the 32nd Century - what was the PU’s mirror drifted away because the Watchmaker stopped “transferring information - if there was a Watchmaker at all.
It’s why, to my mind, in many ways all the parallelverses and the Mirrorverse likely are butterfly effects - a pivotal decision here or there created them. And because Extratemporals like the Q and the Prophets, et al, tinkered at particular junctures to ensure their “favorites” - to use a Q term of endearment - were at those junctures at critical times instead of someone else (ie Picard’s changed life in Tapestry), it’s possible that the PU has a timeline already written that they’ve already seen and experienced, and their “manipulations” (or lack thereof) are there to ensure it’s fulfilled, and the Mirror was just a “negaverse” experiment - like a worst possible outcomes sandbox to test what happens if species aren’t guided or nudged. And all the other parallelverses are “Oh, so that’s what would’ve happened if we didn’t intervene or whisper in an ear.”
So the Q Continuum is basically like the 4th-wall break writer’s room for Marvel?
Do we know for sure that the mirror universe we see is the same one every time? Like enterprise and discovery definitely are connected. But are the kirk era and ds9 era mirrors the same?
In the very first DS9 MU episode, “Crossover”:
So we know those mirrors are linked, but are the others? Could there be two very similar mirrors?
If Q or a similarly powerful group of aliens made it so the Prime and Mirror universes were effectively paired, then why would they allow for them to move apart? It'd be no big deal for Q to click his fingers and disappear someone he found meddlesome. Any Mirror Universe covert luck operation could be stopped in its tracks like it was no big deal.
The continuum had it's last contact with the Federation in 2590. Q died, and he seemed to be the one most interested in humanity. Him dying is complicated because he's a being who lives a non-linear existence in time, but he still seems to have mostly concerned himself with Jean Luc Picard. There's actually a really intriguing theory that was posted to this sub about how the alt timeline we see in Season 2 of Picard might have been the original timeline for the PU, but Q changed it to give humanity a second chance to prove themselves. I think this would align with my theory.
Its last confirmed contact. The thing is that first and final contacts can get a bit nebulous at times. Amanda Rogers from True Q had been born in 2351 for example, even though the first official contact with the Q wasn't until 2364. So while from the Federation's perspective, the final contact that they could prove was in the late 26th century, it's quite possible there'd been other contacts that they weren't aware of.
Binding two universes together into a relationship similar to what you see between the Prime and Mirror universes doesn't require direct contact, either. There'd already been at least a few crossovers between the two universes by the time the Federation knowingly came directly into contact with the Q, so it's not like they desperately needed someone to be whispering into the Federation's ear about it the entire time.
Maybe Q was keeping them intertwined, but after he died they naturally drifted apart.
Okay, but why not get one of the other Q to take over? Even assuming it wasn't fully sanctioned by the Continuum, not every Q would be overly concerned about that and there'd probably be someone willing to step into his role.
I was sorta on board when talking about the Mirror Universe being the "bad luck" magnet, as the Prime Universe sucks up all the favorable probabilities. I never really like when people theorize that the Q Continuum is pulling the strings for everything, but hey it's not the most unlikely thing in the world. Trying to tie in the Temporal Cold War AND the Burn, though? Ehhhh.... no...... other than being major widespread events, there's nothing to link them to the Mirror Universe. You could just as easily say it was the Iconians, or the creators of the Doomsday Machine, or Wesley slipped on a banana peel. Besides, not everything has to connect to everything else.
Also
Are you talking about Yor? Because he's from the Kelvin timeline (TNG era), not the Mirror Universe.
u/khaosworks voiced some of my own thoughts in the top comment, so I won't expound on that. All I'll say is that after seeing just how closely the Mirror Universe, well, mirrors the Prime Universe in all of these episodes, if there IS a power behind it all, they must hate Jake Sisko.
I actually only suggested the Q as one possibility. It could be any number of godlike beings.
Yes, good call. I got that wrong.
In the William Shatner Fanfic Trilogy, it's bc the Preservers made the different Quantum Realities, and the Mirror Universe was almost destroyed during the events of said trilogy...