About Mirror Georgiou in ”Such Sweet Sorrow, Part 2“

The premise of this thread is flawed, Georgiou didn't watch anyone die in agony, Leland had been dead for weeks and was just a meatsack Control was driving like a megazord. In that scene all that was destroyed was an evil AI. I had no problem at all with her smiling and enjoying her victory, it's kinda like robot wars when the audience is cheering when a tiny robot got torn apart.

She's also not a cannibal, period! We can't just invent new meanings for words. Cannibalism means eating members of your own species and nothing else. That doesn't mean eating kelpians wasn't awful but it was not cannibalism.

 

Seemed OK for 99.9999 percent of all Kelpians too, at least until a few weeks ago in all universe we know about.

 

First of all lol

Second of all, I have to disagree. Georgiou might have been watching simulated agony, but she was taking some very real sadistic pleasure in it. Michelle Yeoh's great delivery of "It's going to hurt, and I'd like to hear you scream now" was like a horror movie! She might be (mostly) playing nice in public but she still has a lot of Terran in her.

Think about it, she's only been in the prime universe for maaybe 5 or 6 months and she spent most of that time with Section 31. That's just not enough to reform someone after a full lifetime in a different universe and I think this scene being the last we see of her is a reminder of that. She has a lot to learn and I'd like to see a true redemption arc for her next season where she really gets religion on the ideals of the Federation.

Imagine the Federation's message of tolerance and diversity and sacrifice getting through and helping someone like Georgiou better themselves.. What's more Star-Trek-optimistic than that?

 

That query or debate about her reaction is *exactly* what the audience is *supposed* to have - it's a reminder that, while she's been on the side of the (Red) Angels this season, she's *not* a Starfleet good-guy. She's from the Mirror Universe, and was the empress of a system that ran on creutly and fear. The producer is right to be please with Yeoh's performance too- she doesn't go OTT or start chewing the scenery.

Leland, of course, died several episodes ago, when assimilated by Control, and thereafter was merely a cadaver animated by Control as a handy tool that could use door handles and pick up hand-weapons.

 

Angelus/Angel and Spike
Piccolo and Vegeta
Xena

They're not cannibals, but they're all in series where they were evil-turned-good.

Let's not pretend this is some radical concept, or that it hasn't been done before, or that people can't change. I refer you to what I said in a previous post in this thread that the storyline with Leland isn't conductive to Georgiou changing. Being stranded on a ship with Burnham on a daily basis is.

At least it looks like Georgiou has stopped viewing Saru as a meal. And she didn't exactly fight for her suggestion in the Enterprise Briefing Room.

And bottom line: She didn't ask to be brought into the Prime (don't even start) Universe. What would we do if someone brought Genghis Khan into 2019? He was used to doing things one way his whole life, then he'd have to adjust. Considering those types of circumstances, I'd say Georgiou is adapting pretty well.

 

I'm going to tie this back into Dukat now.

Most people during the second through fifth seasons of DS9, from about "The Maquis" until the beginning of "By Inferno's Light" warmed up to Dukat. Especially during the fourth season. "No I didn't!" If you're like most people, I'm going to call bullshit. Yes you did. That's what made "By Inferno's Light" so effective. Everyone thought he changed his stripes, but he really hadn't.

Georgiou, at least, will tell you where she stands and what she thinks. Dukat is a lying sack of shit who'll say all the right things to dazzle you until he gets what he wants. Georgiou hides nothing. Dukat hides everything... until it's too late.

You want to know when Dukat was the most honest? During the first six episodes of the sixth season, when he had everything. And in "Waltz", when he had nothing.

We have more to go off of for Dukat than we do for Georgiou, because her story isn't finished yet. But, if Gabrielle Burnham is anything to go by, she knows something about the potential for good within Georgiou that the rest of us don't. That even Georgiou doesn't know yet. Because Gabrielle got to watch countless scenarios about how the future could unfold and the way Georgiou acted in each circumstance.

 

But that's also true for millions of perfectly fine people. Take the Saw or Final Destination movies for example, people die in really gruesome ways and audiences love it. Or video games that allow you to abuse, maim and kill characters, those characters can be programmed to scream, cry and beg for their lifes. As long as the agony isn't real taking pleasure from it is generally accepted even if some people think games like that are disgusting.

And like you said yourself, Georgiou was reacting to simulated agony so I don't see the big deal.

Of course she's still capable of doing heinous things and not everything is fine and peachy, I just don't think that specific scene is a very good example, it did come at the end her fighting a very strong AI hand to hand, risking her own life for the sake of the mission (and for personal reasons). In the end she won and got to kill that thing and was happy to see it die. That's fine with me.

 

Well put. This is what I meant I noted the disservice to character interpretation by calling her a "space cannibal" and on and on. It basically ignores any sort of cultural context as you describe above.

It is difficult for me to take it seriously when this is a series based upon the idea of people becoming better but only the "right people." How did the Klingons ever past muster?

 

Yes, she is.

Also, she's an asshole. Seriously, Emperor of the Terran Empire = major league asshole.

 

Again, not by any definition of Cannibalism we have. Also, she's an asshole? Well then she'll fit right to the Federation where there have always been assholes wandering around in positions of power, especially most Captains of starships during the TOS era.

 

Control is not a being, therefore it cannot suffer.

Given this, I don't know why the body screamed - probably in the (obviously vain) hopes of eliciting sympathy. Or perhaps the writers just thought it would look weird if Control just laid there like "What are YOU looking at?" as it disintegrated.

 

Because it was suffering.

People are twisting themselves into pretzels trying to justify the Cannibal Queen's apparent sadism.

 

She's human and she was eating another totally different species that she seemed to view simply as livestock. Sapient livestock, but nonetheless it's still livestock of a differing species than herself.

She may have considered Kelpians no more important than some humans view whales. Some humans still eat whales -- but that isn't considered cannibalism.

The definitions for cannibalism I've seen have nothing to do with intelligence, sentience, or sapience, but rather very simply an organism eating a member of their own spices. The "their own species" part seeming being important to the definition. There are many examples of cannibalism among fish. Several species of spiders engage in cannibalism of the male after mating.

 

Maybe control being driven from Leland's body hurt the body of Leland, so Leland's body screamed.

Having said that, she didn't seem too upset about Leland being hurt, but one could argue at that point she was more concerned about Control than Leland. And she quite possibly might had already considered Leland (the person) a casualty by then, even if his body was still technically alive.

By the way, I wasn't convinced Leland himself was dead. I thought he possibly would be able to survive Control being forced out of his body. However, I recently read some thing by one of the producers that mentioned that Leland is dead. Too bad, I liked the character (pre-possession by Control, that is).

 

Control can't feel physical pain. It was probably emotional anguish, not physical.

 

Some people like to root for the bad guys because they know they're *supposed* to root for the good guys, and they don't like being told what to do. This obstinance is frustrating, but also a component of creativity and liberty, with the unfortunate side-effect that they go out of their way to see merit in the bad guys' behavior. They don't understand a more subtle truth, which is that it is just as rebellious to choose to support the good guys because you want to, rather than because you're supposed to.

But another aspect to consider is something that might be hopeful: a concept that Anton Lavey (yes, the founder of the Church of Satan) called the Satanic Opposite in his book "The Satanic Witch". Basically, the idea is that people when given the opportunity to indulge in fictionalized thought or behaviors, like acting, roleplaying, or watching entertainment, will tend to go with *the opposite* of their real morality or personality, just for fun and a change. (He also offers some advice on how to use this tendency against people, but we'll leave that to one side for now. ) The point being that you can take heart that people enjoying Mirror Georgiou being a bad girl would almost certainly condemn the same behavior in their real lives and worlds.

Probably not sociopaths, as others have pointed out about the effect that would have had on Nhan's career in Starfleet, but it IS very much worth remembering that Nhan is from a world that isn't a member of the Federation, and their general social mores may be fairly different from what we're used to in the Federation. I was surprised by her response, but on reflection I wondered if this scene was foreshadowing Nhan being an ally to Mirror Georgiou when she wants to get things done in a way the rest of the crew might not approve of once they're all in the far future.

 

I don't see how the body could scream without a human consciousness inhabiting it. Bodies don't just scream on their own; that's something that only a conscious, living entity can do.

That said, perhaps there was a remnant of the real Leland in there after all - no longer in control of his own body, but forced to sit there and watch while Control wreaks havoc in his name. Kind of like what happens to a human host in the Stargate SG-1 universe when a Goa'uld inhabits the body (the host remembers everything the Goa'uld does, sees everything the Goa'uld sees, but is powerless to do anything about it).

So maybe that's what was doing the screaming - the last remnants of the real Leland.

As for Georgiou: She was equally disposed to hate Leland and Control. Georgiou and Leland never got along even before Control took over Leland's body. So I can buy that she would gloat over both of their deaths - Leland the human, and Control the entity. Hell, I doubt she ever believed, or cared, that there was a difference.

Premier Bhavani (from TNG's "The Price") seemed like a fairly even-tempered individual.

I admit that it's really not possible to get a read on Barzans, as a species, based on only two characters, but I see no reason to assume anything unusual about them. As we've said, Nhan could simply have a unique sense of humor - there's no reason to think she's crazy. She hasn't done anything to suggest otherwise. And of course she wouldn't be able to make it in Starfleet if she was crazy.

And the fact that Barzan isn't a member of the Federation...that's not really anything to go on, either. In "The Price" we learn that Barzan is a world that is somewhat lacking in resources, and they don't even have interplanetary spaceflight capability. If anything, those would be the reasons why Barzan is not part of the Federation, not any intrinsic crazyness on the part of its native species.

 

Though I don't applaud Georgiou taking pleasure in destroying Control, and grinning, it can't be forgotten that Control wants to eliminate all life.

This isn't Good vs Bad. It's Bad vs. Worse. If Control wants to wipe out all life everywhere, then it's The Worst. It's not black and white. It's black and pitch black.

I don't feel sympathy for something that wants to destroy everything. I don't feel sympathy for Control. If Leland were alive, I would feel sympathy for him. But it would be sympathy for Leland, not Control.

 

I'm just gonna put this out there - I DID feel sympathy for Leland. He didn't deserve what happened to him. He would be as horrified as anyone to find out what Control was up to.

 

This. If someone offers a spoon of Vegemite or Armageddon, what's the best choice of the two? I think we all know what it is.