Star Trek: Discovery Discussion (SPOILERS HERE ONLY)

[Wowbagger]

Originally Posted by Flying Gremlin

In "Magic To Make The Sanest Man Go Mad" his main objective was to sell the ship to the Klingons.

He beamed Lorca into space and laughed as he asphyxiated.

He found one of the most sadistic methods for murder in the galaxy and used it casually on people who resisted him.

He was delighted to kill within the loop and we have every indication that he was delighted to kill outside it. Not threaten, not bargain, not leverage, not maroon, not even orchestrate something at a distance. Disco!Mudd enjoys looking the object of his hatred in the eye and watching it die in agony. Over and over and over again.

Harry Mudd was an immoral con-man who wants to make a buck. He makes his way scheming through the universe, but in the end he's too sentimental to kill even when it would be very, very convenient (as in "I, Mudd"). He is, basically, Quark -- if Quark didn't have the lobes for business.

Disco!Mudd's a psychopath.

I've caught up now with the finale, and appreciated the last episode for not kicking anyone's character in the teeth. ("Si Vis Pacem" didn't take any canon characters out to the woodshed, but really tore into Saru in a way that hardly seemed fair for Saru's first outing as main character. Or, should I say, Saru's first outing as official second fiddle to Burnham.) The finale ignored almost everything established about Lorca to date and cashed some checks it never wrote ("When I came aboard, you were a ship of scientists." Really? They were? Shame we never met them), but what was there was good and appropriately climactic and didn't try to make me feel Grim And Dark about Starfleet and its mission.

If the show stays on the course it set in "Into The Forest," it might just start growing on me at last.