They're going to repurpose Issac's short-lived show Awake for Star Trek. When good Lorca goes to sleep, he immediately wakes up and finds himself as evil. And when evil Lorca goes to sleep, he immediately wakes up and finds himself as good again. Everything is the same... but also different.
That'd be about the only way I see Lorca turning up on DSC. If he's actually an active character, it seems much more likely it'll be SNW or a Short Trek. That said, I'm wondering just how much the general public (as of 2257) knows about what happened to Lorca. Is it now public knowledge that it was his mirror counterpart who was captain of Discovery?
I always thought the one most likely to be thrown forward 1,000 years was Pike himself. The Talosians would read from Pike's mind that Discovery went to the 32nd century. Then, they freeze him and Vina in suspended animation for a thousand years, at which point Discovery finds him. The crew then reanimate him and his and Vina's injuries are easily cured with 32nd century medical tech, and Pike and Vina join Discovery in their season 3 adventures.
^ Given that Pike will be a central character in SNW, that's unlikely. Anson Mount won't likely be available to work on two shows at once.
He might have meant his STO role from last year. Well, one of them might be Rekha Sharma, she tweeted that she recorded for something on the same day Al tweeted that he recorded with someone.
If Strange New World is set prior to Pikes stint on Discovery, Prime Lorca could still be alive if it’s pre Klingon War? Either way, I’m so here for Jason to appear on any of the shows. Lorca is one of my all time favourite Trek characters.
They decided to keep the existence of the Mirror Universe classified in "The War Without, The War Within". So the public wouldn't know. And considering both Discovery and the Spore Drive were classified completely at the end of "Such Sweet Sorrow, Part II", I wonder how much information was made public even beforehand? Or, if it was: how much would most people actually know realistically? I'm thinking back to the Iraq War and Afghanistan and I couldn't tell you offhand any of the details about any of the engagements. I know some broad strokes but no hard details. And that's even with Internet access. I could look it up if I wanted to, but I haven't. Nor do I ask any of my friends who served about any of the details. I imagine the average person in 2257 wouldn't look up the nitty-gritty details of the Klingon War or know about Discovery either. They'd just know "The Federation fought the Klingons in a war! Now it's over because the Klingons have a new Chancellor who called off hostilities."
Basically everything from "Context" to "Choose Your Pain" to "WWWW" supports the notion that the very existence of the Spore Drive was not just a state secret but also something that was strictly need-to-know within Starfleet itself. Pike didn't appear to know about it after the war, either, despite having spent plenty of time aboard the very ship already. So keeping alternate universes under wraps would not require any extra effort: Starfleet would simply keep on suppressing all information about the adventures of NCC-1031, just like it always had. Pike did know about Lorca. But that, too, may have been need-to-know, and perhaps Pike did need to. Although it's difficult to say why: none of the Discovery heroes would have been motivated to volunteer this information to him, and Starfleet would have had little need to arm Pike with the knowledge when letting him / telling him to commandeer the ship. Sure, the psychological impact of Pike being able to say "I'm not Lorca" was significant, but if the heroes couldn't accept Pike without it, they should simply have been drummed out of Starfleet. (Heck, if the ship did reach Vulcan and "our" Lorca got aboard, sat in the center chair, and told the crew "I'm exactly as evil, manipulative and crazy as my other half, and that's the way Starfleet likes it, now kneel!", the same would apply.) Timo Saloniemi
Pike says in the season 2 premiere that he read the "classified parts" of Lorca's file, which presumably refers to his disappearance and replacement with Mirror Lorca.
What that means in practice is that some higher-up chose to give Pike access to the classified parts. Which is pretty weird: Pike's own ship breaks down, he searches for a replacement, and meets with the Discovery - at which point, within a matter of minutes, some Admiral decides he ought to know who Lorca really was. But not that the ship has a spore drive! The fact that they can jump to the other side of the galaxy surprises Pike in the next adventure, which is odd because a) solving the mystery of the Red Signs absolutely calls for the spore drive, so apparently Pike was vectored to the one and only spore jumper on purpose, by some higher up, but b) it then should follow that Pike would be informed of this capacity ASAP, lest he say "Not that old science tub, I wanna take over the dreadnought Muscular which is also much closer!", yet c) the spore drive is also crucial in the whole Lorca switcheroo business, so if Pike is told about Lorca, he should be curious about the special capabilities of the science tub, too: if it can jump between universes, perhaps it could help visit those faraway Red Signs, too? In some ways, the back of Season 2 was broken about one-third into the season, with the writer-producer changes. But there was a pretty big spinal fracture within the very first episode already, and especially between it and the next one! Timo Saloniemi
Pike doesn't seem to know about Georgiou, his old drinking buddy, being replaced either. Perhaps he is just told that Lorca went mad, again, and had to be put down, and then the ship went on to Qo'noS and install Starfleet's puppet Chancellor. But, for me, with all these cracks in play, I think Pike knows much more than he lets on. He was either told or chose to keep his knowledge secret, and adapted an "Aww, shucks" attitude towards these revelations as they came. Evidence for this is the wink he gives to Georgiou at the mention of a mirror universe in the last episode, even though he had never been told of its existence onscreen.
Somebody mentioned this ... So I just had to do it... (anybody else fall immediately in love/lust with Erin Gray?) /