whoa whoa whoa what's all this stuff about Lorca?
The Voq/Tyler bit was obvious from the outset - massively telegraphed.
but I failed to spot anything about any evil Lorcas. What? How? He did smile weirdly at the end, granted, but how are people getting that he's from a mirror universe? He's ruthless, but what else?
So here's the 'evidence' (whether you think it's evidence or batshittery is up to you):
The main thing is the brief glimpse of the computer read-out in the last episode before Christmas. There's a screenshot of it on the last page (or the one before that). They're making their 100+ spore jumps to get the klingon data, and there's a nice little list of numbered jumps with the coordinates of each one, and then there's a line that says "Override: Captain Lorca" and the next jump has the coordinates listed as 'Unknown'. That's the jump to the mirror universe. The inference being that Lorca jumped them there.
Dotcom's expert reading of the eyes thing: Lorca's had eye issues throughout the series, can't look at bright lights, has to take drops, etc. In the most recent episode, Burnham said, in a totally throwaway line about the mirror universe, "even the light is different here." The inference being that Lorca has mirror universe eyes, which is why he has some issues with them in our universe.
Entirely circumstantial, but at the beginning of the series a lot of people generally thought Lorca was very un-Starfleet-like. His penchant for collecting other species and displaying them like trophies seems rather Terran Empireish. He's even got the skeleton of a gorn. For an example of people speculating that Lorca is a shady dude you can read
this article which came out very early on in the season. Obviously they got the Mudd stuff wrong, but it's evidence of people feeling that Lorca wasn't what we'd expect of a typical Starfleet captain.
Once you start thinking about it, lots of little things fall into place. Like why he'd want to bring the tardigrade on board and why he'd be a-okay with using it for the spore drive despite its discomfort. That in itself is
very un-Starfleet-like.
Mirror Lorca disappeared after his failed coup against the Emperor. (So did mirror Burnham—I'm excited for that story.) If he somehow used his spore drive tech to attempt the coup, and failed, and found himself in our universe either by design or as the result of an accident, a person so driven to attempt a coup on the most powerful person in the most powerful empire would presumably continue to think of ways to get right back on that. It makes logical sense that, having worked out he's in a mirror universe (our universe) he does exactly what our Disco crew do when they end up in the Terran mirror universe—take the place of his mirror self and try to blend in for his own ends. The ends being, in Lorca's case, to develop the spore drive tech in our universe to a) get him back to his universe, and b) perhaps see if it can be improved upon to make sure his second coup attempt doesn't fail.
His little grin when the Emperor comes on screen is the icing on the speculation cake.
This might all be bollocks. But until proven otherwise, it's totally canon.
