would have Shatner portray an ancestor of Captain Kirk, who happened to be the chef on the Enterprise (NX-01). The three pitched the idea to Shatner, but negotiations fell through and terms were not agreed on for him to appear on the show. Sussman began development on a script that saw the USS Defiant from "The Tholian Web" being brought back in time, instead of Tiberius. It was intended to be a sequel to that episode, as well as a prequel to "Mirror, Mirror". Sussman developed the teleplays for both parts of the episode, with Coto contributing the story for the second half. It was decided to have the entire installment in the mirror universe in order to maintain the events of "Mirror, Mirror" as being first contact between the two universes. The mirror universe features evil duplicates of the characters from the normal universe. Sussman had previously sought to use the Defiant in the second-season episode "Future Tense", but both costs and issues with the plot resulted in it being replaced with a previously unseen timeship. Part 1 was directed by James L. Conway, who previously directed the Deep Space Nine episode "Shattered Mirror" which also made use of the Mirror Universe. Part 2 was directed by Marvin V. Rush who normally served as Director of Photography on the show, and had worked with Conway dozens of times before and was familiar with his directing style. Rush looked at what was being done in Part 1 while he was preparing the second episode, and aimed to make his episodes fit with the that and not look like obviously like it was directed by someone else. On the sixth day of filming the second part of the episode, news was received that Star Trek: Enterprise had been cancelled by UPN as of the end of the season, which meant that "In a Mirror, Darkly" would be installments 94 and 95 of Enterprise 98-episode run. "In a Mirror, Darkly" was Sussman's final contribution to the show; he had previously been a staff writer on Star Trek: Voyager and worked in the Star Trek franchise for ten years. He later described it as his favorites of the Star Trek installments that he wrote, saying that "I knew when I was writing them that they would almost certainly be the last episodes I would be writing for this particular incarnation of Star Trek,