What Does the Fortune Cookie Mean on Star Trek: Discovery?

CBS

In the Season 2 premiere of Star Trek: Discovery, the show spent quite a lot of time focused on a fortune that Pike found on the floor. What’s its significance? Here’s a look at where we’ve seen these fortune cookies before, and the top theories on what the premiere’s fortune might mean.

The fortune that Pike found read, “Not every cage is a prison, not every loss eternal.” Fans have many different viewpoints about that fortune and what it might mean. Some say that it’s hinting we’ll see Lorca Prime at some point, since no one knows what happened to him.

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Other fans think it means we’ll see Lorca Mirror return. Perhaps instead of truly disintegrating when Georgiou stabbed him and he was thrown into the reactor, he was caught up in the spore universe somehow. Stamets did make a comment about how nothing that dies is ever really gone, after all.

Other fans think it’s more of a reference to Pike, whose first appearance in The Original Series was in an episode called “The Cage.”

Aquarist Adam

@AquaristAdam · Follow

Captain Pike’s fortune cookie fortune…DAMN, FORESHADOWING MUCH?!
(For those who do not know, ‘The Cage’ was TOS’s original pilot, later remade into ‘The Menagerie’)
#StarTrekDiscovery @startrekcbs @StarTrek

11:45 pm · 17 Jan 2019

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But there’s a lot more to that fortune cookie than just the fortune that Pike found on the floor. In fact, it ties deeply into Lorca’s background. Mirror Universe Lorca said that his family made fortune cookies in the 22nd century when money was still used (that’s Prime Lorca’s family, according to Memory Alpha.) Viewers aren’t sure if Mirror Lorca was being honest when he said that, but I’m going to assume he was. It seems that would be pretty easy to verify.

But not only did Prime Lorca’s family make fortune cookies, Mirror Universe Lorca legitimately liked fortune cookies himself. He kept a bowl of fortune cookies in his ready room on the Discovery. He even tried to get Michael Burnham to read her fortune, but she wasn’t really interested in that.

So when Pike found that one random fortune on the floor of the Ready Room, it wasn’t too unusual since Lorca kept them all the time. Except it does seem strange that the fortune would have been missed during all that deep cleaning that I’d imagine happened after Lorca left. (Not to mention, when Mirror Lorca was revealed, Vice-Admiral Katrina Cornwell was so angry that she vaporized that entire bowl of fortune cookies.)

Pike disregarding the fortune — in contrast to how much Lorca liked them — was also another lesson in how different the two captains are. Maybe the meaning was as simple as that.