star trek: discovery

WARNING: The following article contains spoilers for the most reason episode of ‘Star Trek: Discovery.’ If you haven’t seen the episode and don’t want anything spoiled, the time to stop reading is now!

In this week’s episode of ‘Star Trek: Discovery,’ the Mirror Universe version of Captain Lorca met his demise at the hands of Mirror Universe Phillipa Georgiou, Emperor (Empress?) of the Terran Federation.  It came as a fairly decent shock to most, who assumed that Jason Isaacs was committed to the show for the long haul, but after the episode aired, Isaacs revealed that he had only signed on for one season.

In an interview with EW, Isaacs talked about the season and its goings-on.  When asked if Mirror Universe Lorca might ever make a return, he said:

“I would say, yeah, the prognosis is not good for him given he was dissolved into a million pieces on camera. There are not many homeopathic cures that can help that.”

He also spoke at length about what viewers could go back and look for in the previous episodes to indicate that Lorca was an “evil twin” – you know, if you hadn’t clearly seen this stuff the first time through:

“Well, there’s the giant bold story points: Why the hell would I get some prisoner, some mutineer, re-route her ship, and promote her way beyond her capacity, in defiance of everybody else in Starfleet? If not to engender loyalty because I had a long-term plan for her. She’s great, but nobody is that great. There’s a number of little things. The fact that [Admiral Katrina Cornwell] and I, that I can’t remember instances that she’s referring to. And I sleep with a phaser in a paranoid way. And when it looks like she might take the ship from me, I consign her to a trap that I must have seen coming or set up. And then there’s forcing Stamets to do a bunch of jumps that were unnecessary, and the mapping I was doing privately. I was prepared to break Starfleet rules and directives. And even when I’m back in the Mirror world pretending to be Prime Lorca who’s pretending to be Mirror Lorca — if you can follow that twisted logic — and when Burnham comes to be and says they’re asking me to kill the people down on the planet and I say, “Just do it.” I’m not sure Kirk or Picard would have done that. This is a guy who’s had his eye on the prize for a very long time, and he gets very close.”

Isaacs also spoke about the parts of filming ‘Discovery’ that he enjoyed the most:

“Anytime you’re on the bridge, and you’re there with all your chums, and you’re pretending you’re being hit by torpedos, and you’re laughing secretly because one of you went left instead of right, or somebody fell over … this series is very intense and serious, so in between takes we were laughing. It was mostly hanging out with other people, and sucking our stomaches in trying to squeeze into these uniforms made for American Girl dolls. We played a lot of table tennis in between, and we went out and ate a lot, came over to my house and played games. It was a very collegiate lot. The stuff on camera was almost irrelevant; I liked hanging out with them. I think you’re going to see extraordinary work from them. I liked the politics of it as well, that in the last episode I could make the Mirror world clearly a parallel about today’s world and the dangers of extremism.”

Feel free to click the interview link above to read many more questions and answers with the actor.

‘Star Trek: Discovery’ airs on Sunday nights on the CBS All Access streaming service.