Jason Isaacs teases a return to Star Trek as Prime Lorca

Jason Isaacs played Captain Lorca in season 1 of Star Trek: Discovery. Lorca was kind to Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) when she first arrived on the ship as a prisoner of war, he never asked his officers to do something he wouldn’t do, and he had a penchant for collecting odd things and displaying them in his ready room…the guy was instantly likable.

That being said, there was something not quite right about him.

Toward the end of season 1, it was revealed that Lorca was actually from the mirror universe, an alternate reality where everyone’s (usually) evil doppelganger lives. He was a high-ranking member of the Terran Empire, serving under Emperor Philippa Georgiou Augustus Iaponius Centarius (Michelle Yeoh).

The kicker was that Lorca had escaped the mirror universe because Emperor Georgiou wanted him dead for attempting to usurp her power. The only way to escape the Emperor’s wrath was to swap places with Prime Lorca, the captain of the USS Buran. He did just that and the Buran was destroyed, but we never saw a body, so we don’t know if Prime Lorca is actually dead.

Eventually, Mirror Lorca was killed, but since Prime Lorca’s death was never confirmed, is there a chance we’ll see him in a future Star Trek show? Tell us, Jason Isaacs!

“Where is Prime Lorca? Well, I admit that we talk. It’s not like when Mirror Lorca bit the bullet there wasn’t a clamoring for Prime Lorca, but the thing is, it has got to be a great story,” the actor said on The Empire Film Podcast. “Pike is already there! We know what he is like. We have seen him and he’s great. We don’t know who Prime Lorca is.”

"If he is Mirror Lorca’s Frank Spencer-like [wimpish character from a British sitcom] cousin, then nobody wants to spend time with him. He is going to have to be as interesting, as ballsy, and you have to find him a ship and find him a context to bring him into a story. So, we talk. And when and if we come up with something we think is fabulous I will happily go on a starvation diet required to slip into the snakeskin uniform again."

What is this “we talk” stuff? Does that mean Trek boss Alex Kurtzman has been talking to Jason Isaacs about returning to the final frontier?

While Isaacs doesn’t give a straight answer, he does gush over Anson Mount (Captain Pike) getting his own show: Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.

“People loved watching Pike,” Isaacs said. “They loved the retro thrill of it. They loved being on the Enterprise again. They loved Pike and Spock and Anson [Mount] and Ethan [Peck] were great. It felt, given that Picard is very different, and Discovery focuses on the number one and not the captain, it’s a much more traditional sense. That ship, those characters, felt at home.”

With Picard season 2 resuming production soon, Discovery season 3 on the way, the animated comedy Below Decks coming soon, as well as Strange New Worlds and a Phillipa Georgiou Section 31 series in the works, CBS All Access might not have room for a Captain Lorca show.

Still, there are other options. He could pop up in Strange New World, which will be much less serialized than the other live-action Trek shows running now. There are always surprises on the final frontier.

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h/t TrekMovie