Tantalus

This is totally batshit, admittedly. But still...

Disco gave us an episode named "Lethe," which dealt a lot with Admiral Cornwell, prompting fans to speculate that she might somehow become the Lethe who was a character in the TOS episode "Dagger of the Mind" -- a woman on a penal colony for the criminally insane who describes her former self, before treatment with the neural neutralizer, as malignant and hateful. Seeing Emperor Georgiou snatched by Burnham and brought along for the ride to the Prime Universe, I speculated, mostly facetiously, that she, not Cornwell, seems more likely to become Lethe. Certainly, the words malignant and hateful describe MU Georgiou pretty well.

And then something hit me -- something I somehow had never noticed in my four-plus decades as a TOS fan.

The penal colony in "Dagger of the Mind" is on Tantalus V. The Mirror Universe device used by Kirk to destroy his enemies in "Mirror Mirror" is the Tantalus Field.

Tantalus is a figure from ancient Greek mythology -- he invited the gods to a feast and cooked up the body of his own son to feed them. ("Here, have my ganglia. You deserve a treat.")  This offended the gods, causing Zeus to hang him forever above a stream for which he eternally thirsted, but of which he could never drink.

Also from ancient Greek mythology, Lethe is one of the rivers of the underworld across which the dead were ferried by Charon. Emperor Georgiou's palace-ship is the ISS Charon.

That's a whole lot of coincidence going on right there, unless it's not. Could Emperor Georgiou actually become Lethe, and somehow her Tantalus V experience find its way back to the MU in the form of Kirk's Tantalus Field?

Crazy, right?