Star Trek Novels and Canon
- Thread starter JPW
- Start date
In season 1 she did, that was how we find out Lorca was from the MU. Upon seeing that star that was the core of her starship, Georgiou shields her eyes. Michael notes "light bothers you?" Georgiou explains the difference between humans of the two universes, that Mirror humans have an aversion to light. Michael gasps, then a montage of all the times Lorca's photosensitivity was brought up, as we then cut to Lorca down in the torture chamber where he reveals to his torturer (and by extension, the audience) that he is indeed Mirror Lorca.
I guess it was an idea of Berg and Harberts, the showrunners who took over season 1 from Bryan Fuller and were let go early in season 2, and who decided to use the Mirror Universe instead of the different parallel universe Fuller had in mind. Evidently subsequent showrunners decided to ignore the low-light thing, because it's so obviously nonsensical (in that none of the Mirror humans we saw in TOS or DS9 had any problems with bright light). I preferred to assume the light sensitivity is just a quirk of the particular subset of the population that Georgiou and Lorca are from, and Georgiou just claimed it was a specieswide thing because she was the emperor and saw herself as the template for all humanity. Although Section 31 has now contradicted that by showing that Georgiou was born and raised on a very bright planet. Maybe the light aversion was a side effect of a biological weapon that she, Lorca, and other humans were exposed to sometime after she became Emperor.
Although I think the bit where Georgiou addressed someone as "human" in a contemptuous tone, as if she weren't human herself, was early in season 3. I suppose one could handwave that she just considers "human" an outdated term for her own species and that members of the Empire prefer to refer to themselves as Terrans for propaganda reasons, to associate themselves with the Terran Empire in people's minds, say. Or maybe in the early days of their conquests, other species came to use "human" as derogatory, and it picked up that reputation even among Mirror humans and thus they decided to call themselves Terrans instead.
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