Persistent, Niggling Questions

[Nate the Great]

So I just saw "In a Mirror, Darkly"...

PNQ: What's the point?

Okay, I know what the point was: Mirror Universe stories always get lots of viewers, and seeing the cast in TOS uniforms especially when they're miniskirts doesn't hurt the ratings.

But I mean, in the grand scheme of things, what affect did this have on the main crew? It's like that episode of Voyager when the duplicates fell apart into metal ooze. Our crew didn't learn anything at all. No morals about the human condition were imparted. Once again it just feels like the creators were getting bored with the small box that THEY HAD WRITTEN THEMSELVES INTO, and the only solution was to ditch the boring characters that they'd written to make a plot that has no impact on the show they're supposed to be making.

(Actually, this is reminding me of my complaints about Trek 11. The existing characters were deemed boring, so make new ones without any regard for continuity)

But really, pull these two episodes out and nothing is lost. The regular versions of the characters never appeared, so there was no characterization.

And by the way, where did that mainline Archer hallucination come from? It wasn't the mainline NX-01 that the mirror guys found, it was the Defiant. In the timeframe the Defiant left, Archer was long dead. Mirror Archer read the file on Regular Archer and became haunted by it? Haunted by a guy he'd never meet who was long dead?