Spoilers Below.

So that Mirror Lorca theory turned out to be correct, and to be honest, I don’t know how I feel about it. There were a lot of things that excited me about Lorca before he was revealed to be a Terran, and most of that were the differences in his character from the conventional Starfleet captains.

Making Lorca a Terran seems to be the easy way out of writing a captain that doesn’t fit the mold of what the franchise makes Starfleet Captains, and what the fans expect to see in a Starfleet Captain. We expect to see someone running a ship that is fair and diplomatic like Picard. We expect someone heroic like Kirk. We expect to see the visionary like Archer. We expect to see someone who can care for and nurture the development of their crew like Janeway. We expect to see someone who embodies the ideals of humanity and tries to be, despite the bumps in the road, the best he can be like Sisko, even if it called for some unconventional methods at times.

In some sense, Lorca was these things. We as viewers saw the visionary when he told Michael that they were inventing a new way to fly. He had some of the hero in him, wanting the glory for winning the war himself. He cared for his crew, evidenced when he helped Tilly assume the mantle of the captain of the ISS Discovery. What we never saw was Lorca the diplomat, and to me, that made perfect sense.

Lorca was always billed as a solider and a military tactician. This makes sense for a Starfleet Captain who is running a ship during a war. As an organization they would want someone who has those skills, and doesn’t rely chiefly on diplomacy like the other Captains did. It’s also not what is typically seen in a captain. They, until now, always relied on diplomacy to prevail. Lorca was never a diplomat, but he was also never presented with a situation where he could be diplomatic.

I feel that the duality we saw with Lorca was where a large portion of what made the character interesting. The audience saw him manipulate Michael into staying aboard, and again when Stamets is hesitant to make the jumps necessary to decipher the cloak and chart the way into the Mirror Universe. He wasn’t above using manipulation to get what he needed. That was something we’d never saw a Starfleet Captain do before, then again, we also never saw the Federation or its captains in a war like this one before.

So that makes me wonder, where are Terran Lorca and Prime Lorca different? Do those moments, where this man, the Terran on the bridge of a Federation, can be a captain like the rest, more like Prime Lorca? Where Terran Lorca is manipulative, is Prime Lorca diplomatic? Hopefully, as events unfold, we’ll find out.