Yep. Get a high profile actor for the first series, pay him what he wants and promise him he won’t be stuck there for years
Spoilers What do you think of Lorca's Arc?
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Yep. Get a high profile actor for the first series, pay him what he wants and promise him he won’t be stuck there for years
In the context of Fiction, saying that a character is "one-note" or "one-dimensional" is the same as implying that people can't be like that in real life. A character who isn't believable. If Lorca is a manchild, then he is believable. However dreadful "manchilds" are, they still are real people from the real world.
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The journey was great, but the destination was pure crap. He was a layered and complex character for the entire season, until the point came where he had to be “the bad guy” at which time he became boring and two dimensional. I don’t understand why he couldn’t have just been power hungry and manipulative, but still with shades of grey.
I can buy the idea that Lorca was poisoning the spirit of Discovery based on, like, his first two episodes, but once they started giving him more layers, showing a degree of nobility like when he tried to take the hits for the other ship in that space battle, and even had him be genuinely inspiring and friendly with the crew, it makes it hard to buy that it was all a pose. It feels a bit like the "How I Met Your Mother" problem, where the ending they had pre-planned was perfect... if the show had ended five years earlier. Lorca seems to have gotten away from the writers in a similar way, to the point where their original plan didn't come out the way they meant.
Well, it's hard to say, given the final episode conclusively established that all of Lorca's seemingly-prudent or justifiable actions were so Michael would respect him and not based on his own motivations, but the impression I had from how he was trying to seduce Stamets with promises of exploration once the war was over is that he'd fully intended to take his time getting back to the MU. It wasn't until Stamets told him that he was retiring and Discovery would never jump again that he decided it was now or never. I think if Lorca always intended for the next jump... to be the jump home, he wouldn't have bothered trying to sell Stamets on taking the Discovery back out on an exploration mission in the shuttlebay.
Rewatching the scene, after Stamets says he's only going to do one more jump, while he's giving his monologue on having seen the universe from a wild new perspective, Lorca is gaping at him like he just said he thought they should consider seeing other people. Looking back, I can see the gears turning in his head as he tries to figure out if he can make the trans-universal jump with the data he has, and by the time he starts moving again, he's decided "Fuck it, home or bust."
Well, it's hard to say, given the final episode conclusively established that all of Lorca's seemingly-prudent or justifiable actions were so Michael would respect him and not based on his own motivations, but the impression I had from how he was trying to seduce Stamets with promises of exploration once the war was over is that he'd fully intended to take his time getting back to the MU. It wasn't until Stamets told him that he was retiring and Discovery would never jump again that he decided it was now or never. I think if Lorca always intended for the next jump... to be the jump home, he wouldn't have bothered trying to sell Stamets on taking the Discovery back out on an exploration mission in the shuttlebay.
Rewatching the scene, after Stamets says he's only going to do one more jump, while he's giving his monologue on having seen the universe from a wild new perspective, Lorca is gaping at him like he just said he thought they should consider seeing other people. Looking back, I can see the gears turning in his head as he tries to figure out if he can make the trans-universal jump with the data he has, and by the time he starts moving again, he's decided "Fuck it, home or bust."
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I think Lorca would have passed on the info to Starfleet if Stamets hadn't been deadset on the jump to the Starbase being his last jump. That's not an excuse for him overriding the jump to return to the Mirror Universe, but it seemed like he had no choice but to jump back after Stamets' refusal to continue.
I also realized we spent four episodes in the Mirror Universe, and we never actually physically saw the Defiant. I think it's a testament to how gripping the story was that the writers felt they didn't need to shoehorn the ship in again.
I think you have something there. I wonder if perhaps in an effort to keep the whole thing secret, even the mid-season scriptwriters didn't know about the MU thing? The showrunners could insert little tells into the finished scripts, but they might have been thoughtless when it came to leaving in compelling moments which made it seem like Lorca was something deeper than an amoral shitheel.
Reminds me of eccleston
If Hitler died jumping in front of a bullet to save someone instead of committing suicide, could we say he had "degrees of nobility" ?
(Don't take this literally. Lorca obviously isn't even remotely close to Hitler, this is just a casual example.)
I mean, what Lorca did trying to save the Gagarin doesn't change the fact that he brutalized the Tardigrade and wanted to disembowel it so he could create armor or some other militaristic delusion like that. It doesn't change the fact that he authorized Landry to terrorize Burnham psychologically pitting the prisoners against her in the Mess Hall, so he could manipulate her more easily later on.
When you introduce a character by showing him doing horrible shit like that, you're implying to your viewers that they shouldn't believe a word that comes out of his mouth. There are several cases on TV of "Let's show the other side of the coin" like in Nu-BSG with Gaius Baltar being portrayed more as a Cylon pawn than a genocidal maniac or even in DSC itself with Burnham fucking up with her mutiny, despite being an exemplar Starfleet officer. What they did with Lorca in DSC doesn't fit that trope. It was quite clear since the beginning Lorca was a baddie. Fans just happened to like him. And it's understandable since Jason Isaacs is likable as hell.
I take your point, but it seems in that case they should've spread Lorca being not just shifty and secretive but malevolent and brutal throughout the season, instead of front-loading it. Gaius Baltar is actually a great example; the show was very effective at establishing him as a weak man who'd made bad decisions that left him between a rock and a hard place, without having him actually be malevolent and hate-filled like, say, Cavil, but that meant it always rang false when they tried to make Baltar more cruel, calloused, and violent, like with giving away the nuclear bomb in season 2, or killing the dying Six who accused him of poisoning her ship in season 3, and they eventually stopped trying to push him in that direction. Now, based on how I and others have interpreted Lorca, that kind of change in Baltar might've worked if they'd tried it after two episodes and not after twenty or forty episodes of the show had solidified his character.
The way Lorca played in Discovery, it seemed like we were learning more about him in a way that would lead us to reevaluate his earlier behavior as a bad first impression. "Lorca wants to end the war above all else" is interpreted as "vivisect this animal" in his second episode, "not voice concerns about the Admiral who wants to take away his command leaving on a mission that, frankly, she has no less reason than he does to believe is a trap" in his fourth, and "inspire the crew to take on a harebrained, risky plan that actually works perfectly" in his seventh episode. There's a line of development here, a softening and focusing, except not really, he's just motivated by whatever makes Discovery do more spore jumps and Burnham approve of him personally, and any patterns that are seen are ostensibly entirely artificial impositions of the audience, the Lorca character we're seeing being doubly illusory.
From the interviews, it sounds like "Lorca being monstrous" and "Lorca being a stranger to us, seen but through a glass darkly" shouldn't have coincided the way they did, and we should've always felt, continuously, that Lorca was the albatross around the Discovery's neck. And this wasn't just Jason Isaacs strutting around the screen, the characters themselves, explicitly, came to like and respect Lorca after distrusting him initially. Stamets hated his guts in "Context," and in "Forest" he's thanking him for the greatest experience of his life. With rare exception, the more we saw of Lorca, the more sympathetic he seemed, and 99% of the time in Star Trek, that means "Don't judge a book by its cover, the rock-monster is just a mother protecting her eggs, and the shouty knife-man just wants to tell you a story about making friends."
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I don't know about that. How can you explain at the beginning of one Episode Lorca telling a sad story about how he didn't have his eyes fixed because he wants to remind of his fallen comrades and at the end of the next Episode he sends an Admiral to her death ?
If you want your audience to reevaluate a character's behavior, you don't show them repeating the same type of behavior that caused the bad impression in the first place. Especially after having a "development" like that one at Choose Your Pain. You show them making the option of not going through "the shortcut", because they are not always assholes. Lorca is always getting caught crossing "the shortcut", every time.
Look at Michael. She's flawed like Lorca. She actually ponders about not making the same mistakes again several times throughout the Season, she actually makes the decision of doing the right thing. Lorca never gave two shits about any of this.
That always sounded like a red herring. I mean, really, this is how people writing a Star Trek series wanted their audience to believe a Starfleet officer wanted to end a war ? By torturing an animal ? Even Sisko was more ethical. Sisko at least had the excuse of supposedly not knowing what Garak was up to. Lorca was Sisko and Garak at the same time. I don't think the whole "he wants to end the war" thing was ever supposed to sound believable to the audience.
Lorca always sounded like he had an endgame that had nothing to do with the war. If you're sitting on such a powerful weapon like the Discovery, why would you need to manipulate people like he did ? Didn't that always looked like a bit overkill to you ?
This is actually the biggest piece of evidence proving that every sob story Lorca told to justify his behavior through Episodes 3 to 6 were utter bullshit. He gaslighted Stamets into respecting him. That scene was specifically crafted to show how rehearsed Lorca's pep talk was, how un-sincere he was when looking at Stamets telling all that hogwash about exploration and how Stamets had a worldview so different from his Captain that he ended up falling for his lies. That's why Saru says Lorca abused "their idealism".
He abused Cornwell's idealism too when he told that story about his eyes in Episode 5. The difference here is that his cynicism was not made obvious to us, so we couldn't figure out how full of shit he was at that point. The clues were there, though. I mean, he cared so much about his crew to a point he visually impaired himself for life, but one episode before he had this half-arsed reaction to Landry's death: "Find a use for that creature. Don't let her death be in vain"... I mean, his right-hand onboard Discovery, someone close to him, dies being ripped apart and he's still thinking how he can torture the Tardigrade ? That is definitely not a characteristic of someone who cares about those who serve under him.
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Yep, between this and Ash/Voq and then them circlejerking on after Trek what geniuses they were for this unexpected twist. Ugh.
What arc? More like a flat line, foreshadowed as soon as a Gorn skeleton was spotted in his ready room and all the more so when Cornwell noticed the "mysterious appearance" of the scars on his back. Lorca's "context is for kings" speech was reeking with sociopathy.
I think we've got it backwards - it isn't that they can't keep Lorca because he's too expensive/desirable, it's that they had a one season character from the get go and hired an expensive/desirable actor for that season. He's said that he knew the arc of his character before he was hired, so the question of his recurrence was probably settled right up front. The question will be whether part of the pitch to him was an ongoing rule after this arc was over.
You're all attacking Lorca for the torturing of the Tardigrade. Don't forget that when Starfleet found out about it... They were practically begging him to continue!
There's no indication Starfleet "found out about it". They knew the Tardigrade was the key for the Spore Jumps and that's it. We can't be sure they knew it was a painful process for Ripper.
If Lorca's behavior is an indication for anything, he probably omitted the fact that he tortured the Tardigrade to his superiors. He didn't allow Culber to report the experiments they were doing on Stamets because he knew Starfleet would shut them down. It's quite probable he used the same logic before.
Even if it wasn't, it is still using an alien life form, potentially intelligent given that it navigates a multiverse like its nothing, as a beast of burden. Starfleet appeared to have no issue with that at all. In fact, they intend to start searching for more tardigrades right away.
The thing is, we don't know the exact information Starfleet received about the Tardigrade. Maybe they didn't know it was being pierced inside a cubicle. I don't think they even knew what happened onboard the Glenn. If they thought, just for a quick example, Ripper was wandering free around the cultivation bay and the Discovery was getting information for the jumps through remote scans instead of invasive ones, well, I don't really see why Starfleet would feel alarmed.
Between the Federation approving torture on sentient beings and Lorca lying on his reports, I will always find the latter more believable since there are actual instances of him doing that.
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Lorca carried this show, I'd go as far as to say he is the best Trek character since Picard or Data, I found him fascinating and he lit up every scene he was in.
That's why I was so disappointed by his death, for him to become a stereotypical master-plan bad guy, who was defeated all too easily, didn't really do it for me.
Where we go from here.. who knows ?
That's why I was so disappointed by his death, for him to become a stereotypical master-plan bad guy, who was defeated all too easily, didn't really do it for me.
Where we go from here.. who knows ?
I can see how that's a plausible account of what the writers might've intended. But for me, like for you, it just didn't work. Honestly, even trying to look at things from Michael's point of view, the events of episode 13 don't hold up. After she discovered that Lorca was from the MU at the end of episode 12, I'd expected her at least to feel conflicted about whether to side with him or the Emperor, and to try to find out more about his motivations and the larger context. After all, Lorca had been (at worst) morally gray throughout the previous episodes... whereas ep 12 established that the Emperor was a complete psychopath, and she even tried to have Michael killed (again) at the beginning of ep 13. Instead, what we got was Michael turning against Lorca completely and immediately, apparently for no other reason than that he'd lied to her, and collaborating with the psychopath.
Even if we're supposed to identify with her, IOW, her motivations in ep 13 seem incredibly shallow and just don't ring true.
People accused him of that (sending Cornwell to her death) when the episode was broadcast, and I found the charge just as inexplicable then as I do now. Consider:
- Cornwell volunteered for the mission of her own volition. She, like Sarek (a smart and experienced diplomat), believed that the Klingon meeting was potentially a serious chance for negotiations, not just a trap.
- Cornwell outranked Lorca. If she didn't want to go there's no way he could have forced her, and conversely, if she did want to go, there's no way he could have stopped her.
- Really, the worst one could accuse Lorca of is not trying harder to argue her out of it. But objectively, he had no way of knowing it was a trap any more than Cornwell or Sarek.
- Cornwell had just threatened his career. If she then offered him a chance to buy some time to (re) establish his credibility on a silver platter, and he took it, that doesn't really mark him as an Evil Shitheel from the MIrror Universe. It's completely consistent with him being just a somewhat obsessive captain who takes an opportunity when he sees it.
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