Star Trek: 10 Characters That Faked Their Way Into Starfleet

Oh, Lorca, Lorca, Mirror Lorca. Certainly not the fairest of them all, he might have been badass, if he weren't just plain bad. He eventually got what was coming to him in the form of the ISS Charon's mycelial core — don't let the tardigrade hit you on the way out! — but not before causing a few headaches on Starfleet's plane of the cosmos.

It was your more 'traditional,' and original, beam-back through an ion storm whoopsie — leave the funky wormhole malarky and multidimensional transporter devices to later, if you please — that saw the Gabriel Lorca from the other side hop over to the Prime Universe. To impersonate himself in Starfleet on our end of the looking glass, all Mirror Lorca had to do (pretty much) was tone down the evil (ish), lie on the psych evaluations, and make up an eye-watering story about the USS Buran.

Lorca's Machiavellian fakery more than just worked as self-imitation, however. He convinced his way to command of the USS Discovery — one of Starfleet's most powerful assets — during a time of war. Admiral Katrina Cornwell did start to suspect something was up with her once friend and lover. A phaser to the face will do that! And what's that strange triangular scar? Alas, Cornwell was dispatched to a dodgy rendezvous with the Klingons before she could do anything about it. From the Discovery, Lorca could then manipulate his way back to his own backyard, with Prime Michael Burnham having been part of his plan for Mirror dominance all along.

As for Prime Lorca, he's either dead or doing his best to avoid the agonizers!