Tantalus field

AT: "mu"

The Tantalus field was a 23rd century device found aboard the ISS Enterprise in the mirror universe, which could be used to monitor and eliminate enemies from existence with the touch of a button.

History

Captain James T. Kirk owed his success against a number of enemies to the Tantalus field, and the unknown alien scientist whose lab he plundered for it.

In the novel Dark Victory, the "alien scientist" in question is Balok; however, in The Greater Good, a short story from the Shards and Shadows anthology, the "alien" is actually Simon Van Gelder.

The field was apparently a secret from everyone except Marlena Moreau, and to others it seemed that Kirk's enemies had a tendency to "simply disappear." The field was used by Moreau to save the prime Kirk when he was trapped in the mirror universe. Before leaving the ISS Enterprise, the prime Kirk attempted to convince Spock to reform the Terran Empire before it collapsed as a result of its own brutality. When Spock expressed doubts about his ability to survive if he attempted dissent from imperial policy, Kirk revealed the existence of the Tantalus field to him, telling him it would make him invincible. Kirk apparently hoped that Spock could survive long enough to change the Empire for the better.(TOS: "Mirror, Mirror")

Appendices

Background information

In a story planned for an unrealized William Shatner guest appearance on Star Trek: Enterprise, it would have been revealed that the Tantalus field did not kill its victims, but transported them to a different time. In the story, it would have been revealed that, sometime after the events of "Mirror, Mirror", Spock had used the device on Kirk, depositing him on a remote planet in the 2120s, where he would have later been discovered by the crew of the Enterprise NX-01 in the 2150s, shortly before the "mirror universe" was to have diverged from the standard Trek universe as an alternate timeline.[1]

The device was never seen or mentioned in any of the other "mirror" episodes in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine or Star Trek: Enterprise.

=Apocrypha

In the novel Dark Mirror by Diane Duane, Jean-Luc Picard looks up Spock's history, and finds that he managed, briefly, to become a very powerful and influential figure in the Empire, largely because his enemies had a way of "disappearing" when they became too threatening.

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