Through the Looking Glass

Episode Synopsis: Click Here.

References:

1. a looking glass: a mirror, or more specifically, a ladies' dressing mirror

2. Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (1871) by Lewis Carroll. The sequel to Alice in Wonderland.

"Contrariwise," continued Tweedledee, "if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic" (Carroll 1871). Spock and Tuvok might have some Vulcan sentiment to challenge Tweedledee's un-apparent logic. But so it goes, through the looking glass: The rules of reality shift left, down, backwards and we arrive in a different world with the same players in an entirely different game with entirely different rules and the experience begs the question--if we change the reality, will we be the same?

This week's episode featured Commander Sisko (Avery Brooks) and the alternate universe (one that comes up a few times over the course of the show). The alternate universe is the Star Trek Universe flipped upside down. The Bajorans (with help from the Klingons and the Cardassians) enslave the Terrans (that's us). This reality is about survival. This changes people, fundamentally. So, this week I spent a lot of time thinking about coincidences, opportunities, and what-if's. Let me illustrate.

Yesterday, my family came over to help move furniture. My new kitty, Dax, is terrified of strangers, so of course she took one look at my brother (6'0", 300 lbs.) and ran. She ended up on top of the kitchen cabinets. It took about an hour and a half to set up the new furniture and move the old stuff out. As we were about to leave, my roommate and I realized that we had left the door open and Dax may have ran out. This led to a search (and eventual rescue). After searching the apartment, I climbed onto the counter in the kitchen thinking she'd be on top the cabinets. She wasn't. Then, I noticed a small rectangular space behind the cabinets. Dax had wedged herself in and was stuck like a dead cockroach with her feet up on her back. It took another hour, a call to my brother for a drill and saw, and one completely ruined cabinet to free her. As if this weren't harrowing enough, the second I let her go she bolted out to the patio and jumped onto the balcony and proceeded (slow motion to me) to jump from the 6th floor. I managed to grab her back leg as she went over (and got scratched for my trouble). I locked her in a room for safety after that.

Now, many of you (maybe 6 of the 7 followers on this blog) are thinking: dumb cat. For me, it was a realization of what-if's. What if we walked out. And when we arrived home six hours later, I'd have a very dead, very squished kitty stuck behind my kitchen cabinets. OR. What if she leapt off the balcony and fallen six stories (in which case I'd have a very broken and most likely dead kitty).

There seem to be numerous opportunities for each of us to fall through the looking glass. My older brother deploys to Afghanistan in July for a year--his third deployment in this god-awful war. I don't imagine what reality is like there. I don't imagine the living conditions, the endless desert, the heat, the struggles of the Afghani people, the violence, the terrorists, the thousands of soldiers younger than I am sweating in the Afghani heat. I don't compare that to my life as I brush my teeth in my two-bedroom apartment, as I sip beer and watch the sunset over the Wai`anae mountain range, as I drive to and from work in my air-conditioned car, as I sit here free to write whatever I want. Don't they know the looking glass is fiction? It's not supposed to be real because it's a story.

I see the world and the people in it striving for the ideals of the Star Trek Universe. We all want to be free. We want to pursue our passions. We want to live in peace. But the damnable looking glass presents us with an alternate universe rife with IED's, executions (just last week the Taliban executed a 7-year old boy accused of spying), death, and suffering.

So what's the up side? That there are men and women like my brother, like Ben Sisko, willing to put it all on the line (to experience the looking glass and perhaps be changed forever) in the hopes that one day the Star Trek Universe will be the reality. And the alternate universe (i.e. our reality) and it’s Tweedledee logic and god-awful endings will be nothing but a bad TV show. Just like Alice, I hope to wake and find this looking glass universe nothing but a dream.

Episode #3: Take Me Out to the Holosuite (as requested by SamJam)

End Transmission.