"Mirror, Mirror" Mix-up Leads to Fix-up!

A note from Mike Okuda, Denise Okuda and Dave Rossi:

A friend was kind enough to e-mail us a note about the editorial error in last weekend's airing of the Star Trek: Remastered version of "Mirror, Mirror." It seems that somehow, a warp flyby shot was inserted into the episode, when the ship should have been orbiting the Halkan planet.

This may seem minor to some, but as many fans online have observed, the shot in question was a dumb mistake, one that we should not have made. We all do know the difference between warp speed and orbiting a planet. We won't bore you with the details of how we all turned blind and how we all failed to catch the slip-up, but we will tell you that we are taking steps to reduce the chances of it happening again. (We'd love to say it will never happen, but that's a dangerous promise to make, especially when human beings are involved.)

Fortunately, as soon as folks here became aware of the mistake, everyone jumped into action. A revised version is being prepared and will be used in future syndicated airings of Star Trek: Remastered. Believe it or not, this is a fairly time-consuming and expensive process because of all of the different versions of the show that have to be re-edited and replaced. Still, we think it is a measure of CBS Paramount's respect for Star Trek that no one has questioned the need for the fix or complained about the costs involved. The correction will happen this week, although at least some stations will probably air the uncorrected version this weekend.

We apologize to all of the fans who caught our mistake, and we thank everyone for your interest in Star Trek: Remastered. We love Star Trek, too, and we hope you keep watching!

Best,

– Mike Okuda
– Dave Rossi
– Denise Okuda

Editor's note: For this syndication master, the shot in question was inserted soon after Kirk's confrontation with Chekov in the corridor. In the original full-length version, as you can see on DVD, the corridor scene simply dissolved into Kirk's Quarters, with no transitional ship shot. In the syndicated version that just aired, the intent was to edit out the first couple of minutes of the Kirk's Quarters scene to eliminate some redundant dialogue, and use a ship shot as a transition to cover this edit. Thanks to the Okudas and the Rossi for clarifying this to us and the fans. They are forgiven!

:thumbsup:

I was wondering about that shot. Good to have the matter cleared up and corrected :thumbsup:

Never the time to 'do it right' but always time to do it over.

There is an advantage to having millions "proof read" one's work, however ;)

Hehehe, I was kinda wondering about that shot myself!

But why wasn't is proofread (proofviewed) prior to airing? Too rushed?

Never the time to 'do it right' but always time to do it over.

AMEN.

OAB

Yeesh...they're gonna fix it, and yer all still complainin'

But why wasn't is proofread (proofviewed) prior to airing? Too rushed?

Sometimes, when you've looked at something over and over again, it doesn't matter how many times you check, you'll miss it every time.

But, as a matter of form, they should have someone who isn't involved directly in the project--maybe a test audience of nit-picking Trekkers--to check the finished result. ;)

theres a story about the movie jurassic park that points how how you can miss something even though youve examined it closely.
just before the inital prints were to be made, the last second as it were, someone noticed a shot where you could see a stagehand sitting under a tree eating his lunch in the background. apparntly this was one of the cg dinosaur shots, so that shot was seen by a team of animators, one frame at a time, for days and days, over and over and over again, and nobody noticed this guy sitting there in the background. it was edited, still nobody saw him. the soundtrack was recorded and put in, still nobody saw him. so this shot was seen thousands of times by hundreds of people, and nobody caught this pretty serious mistake.
things like that are a lot more apparent when youre trying to find fault.

Never the time to 'do it right' but always time to do it over.So, what are you kvetching about? Considering the number of goofs, gaffes, glitches, anachronisms, and continuity flubs that make it into the final cut of most movies, we should be thankful to CBS Paramount for having enough respect for Trek and its fans to fix this relatively minor error. Would they even have bothered if the show were anything other than Star Trek?