Every commander has favourites for various and sundry reasons. Some they want to mentor because they can see potential. Others...well, because they have an agenda. Who knows about Lorca and Burnham? Lorca and Ash...that's an interesting case. It could be that Lorca sees Ash as someone like him, someone he has empathy for. That naturally brings people closer. Or, on the other hand, Lorca may be suspicious and he's putting him under close observation. He doesn't want to involve Starfleet counter-intel--yet--but he wants Ash near. It's a risk, but... Lorca, it occurs to me, is one of those uncanny folks who can pull high-risk/high-gain gambits over and over again and come out smelling like a rose.
But as for being a dick to Stamets...well, he deserved it. I actually observed a scene like that not once, not twice, but three times during my military career. It's always the same set-up, too. The guy or, as in the third incident, the gal, gets into the service for the "education benefits" but really didn't expect to do hard-core military work. A day job, in other words. Then comes 9/11 and Iraq. All hands on deck. The Air Force and the Navy are sending Airmen and sailors to do some of the Army's job because the Army is in the middle of a service-wide reorg to the Stryker brigades and is short-handed, and...well, you can imagine the situation next. Although the young servicemen and women have a small point--"I got in to the Air Force or the Navy, not the Army or the Marines"--the more cogent point is...that's irrelevant. They are there to do the job they raised their right hands for, whether or not it was in their original AFSC or rating. I saw commanders tear into each one of them--all three incidents--because, frankly, those folks should have known better. The CO was simply reminding them of their responsibility. Stamets got, what?, a mild verbal reprimand that lasted a sentence or two. The dressings-down I saw lasted many, many long minutes. Stamets should consider himself lucky. If anyone had talked like he did to pretty much all the commanders I'd known, he or she would've been strung up. Letter of Counselling, at least; maybe, if the CO was particularly incensed, a Letter of Reprimand. In other words, the kiss of death for an officer and, under some circumstances, even an enlistedman/woman.
Actually, you know who Stamets reminded me of, early-on? He talked as if he was David Marcus, not someone who willingly got into the military arm of the UFP knowing that something like this could have happened.
Now, granted, Stamets has grown on me. He's loosened up, got his head screwed on straight, and has become one of the more interesting characters on the show. But, originally, he sounded like he was from Berkley, this was the Late Sixties, and he was protesting conscription and Vietnam, not someone who was in an all-volunteer force.
