The trouble with Lorca

Not gonna lie: The Disco writers have disappointed me.

It turns out Lorca's story was simply, "He was fooling everyone; he's evil." So all the things that didn't make sense...just don't make sense. And not just on a plot level, which I could easily forgive under the right circumstances, but on a thematic level, in a way that leaves us dissatisfied and disbelieving the internal logic of this world.

A captain destroys his own crew, ostensibly to save them from torture at the hands of the Klingons. So Starfleet claps him on the back and gives him the most important command in the fleet. He goes on to run that ship in a decidedly un-Starfleet-like way, and the only person who's especially troubled by this is Cornwell. He throws her to the Klingons and gets away with it easily. He dupes his own crew handily, threat ganglia notwithstanding.

All the while, the story is peppered with signs that none of this is as simple as it seems; things that make us think that all this is about a leader in a time of war making tough decisions and sacrifices in order to achieve the larger goal; a man tormented by something (PTSD?) but trying to power through. How else could they expect to keep the audience on the hook? They have to make us feel that there's a reason this character is getting away with it; that there's some internal thematic logic playing out, and there will be redemption in the end.

I had assumed we were in Search for Spock territory: Kirk disobeys the rules because of his internal moral compass that places loyalty and friendship even above duty. He risks everything to save Spock. It made so much sense to me to think that the crew of the Buran was alive in the MU, and Lorca, Kirk-like, was going after them. Better yet, in The Undiscovered Country, Kirk is chastened; he must confront his own failings and prejudices; he hasn't always been right. That same kind of story arc would have made sense of Lorca's story; you'd still have had to squint to accept Starfleet's lack of concern about his actions and the Discovery crew's credulousness, but at least you'd have a sense of thematic logic that justifies all that squinting.

[EDITING TO ADD: Then there's that memorable Spock quote from the end of "Mirror Mirror": "It was far easier for you as civilized men to behave like barbarians than it was for them as barbarians to behave like civilized men." That should have counted for something; Lorca should have been able to pull off the charade only because there was something more to the story.]

But...no. Lorca is simply a very sneaky villain; Starfleet and his own crew just look foolish. Hence my disappointment. It feels like the writers crafted an interesting, complicated character on a meaningful arc, and then just tore his page out and threw it away unfinished. It's a shame. While I'm still interested in the rest of the characters, the spark is a little dimmer. Next season they're going to face an uphill battle getting me to re-invest in them. Burnham, Tilly, Saru, and Stamets all seem worth the effort, but despite Lorca, not because of him.

And then there's Emperor Georgiou. If she's the one who gets the redemption arc, I'll be dumbfounded, because she's a known genocidal psychopath who eats sentient beings. Hey, maybe she, and not Cornwell, turns out to be the Lethe of "Dagger of the Mind." Now THAT would be a neat twist. It certainly fits that, in the Prime Universe, Georgiou would wind up in a facility for the criminally insane, mind-wiped, describing the person she once was as malignant and hateful. But it sure seems like Burnham should have just left her to die in the Mirror Universe.

Aside: There's a certain glee in evidence on social media from those who've decided that Lorca "stans" have just been mindlessly fan-girling the white man and have now gotten their come-uppance. But the writers worked hard to misdirect the audience about this character, so you really can't blame the audience for being misdirected.

Last thing: That speck that fell on Tilly’s shoulder? Either Culber, who was last seen wandering the mycelial network, or Lorca, who was last seen disappearing into the heart of the mycelial engine. Or Tilly hears a Who. Or something else. With my track record, I wouldn't put much faith in me.