The fourth and last season of Enterprise was chock full of homages to the original Star Trek, including a visit to the Mirror Universe (previously seen in both TOS and DS9) in the two-part episode "In a Mirror, Darkly." But that story was not the first choice of the Enterprise creative staff. In fact, the whole Mirror Universe idea was conceived with William Shatner in mind. Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens penned the script, wherein Archer's Enterprise happens upon a sort of temporal/inter-dimensional penal colony, one of whose residents is Captain Tiberius, Kirk's alter ego from the TOS episode "Mirror, Mirror." Tiberius wants to use Enterprise's transporter to get back to his own time and place and resume smacking around incompetent underlings and bedding assorted female crew members (Kirk and Mirror-Kirk are not without similarities, after all). Tiberius convinces a reluctant Archer to help him return home, with the episode's payoff being that the two men wind up being responsible for creating the Mirror Universe in the first place. Despite the intrinsic awesomeness of a story in which William Shatner is revealed to be William Shatner's creator (because who else could possibly be up to the job?), Shatner and Paramount were unable to come to terms and the deal fell through.
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