General Star Trek thread

I remember that Discovery episode being the point where I started to smell a rat with regards the writing for Burnham. I was still pretty invested in Discovery in Season 1 up until Lorca started twirling his moustache and declaring that he was an Evil Terran! (Muu Ha! Ha! Ha!). But Michael was an issue pretty early, and it was the episode with the abandoned Crossfield-Class that started that off for me.

In an attempt to build character, they shoehorned in the idea of Michael liking “Alice in Wonderland”. Normally, not a bad idea. This adds a little depth to a character. However, I’m not certain if this was due to bad directing or Martin-Green herself having a crap range, but they had Michael quoting Alice in Wonderland while she crawled around the Jefferies tubes of the other Crossfield Class, all without any context or even emotion. She wasn’t doing it because she was scared or worried or needed to focus; she just suddenly starts quoting….because the script said so…I guess. It became this very odd and almost jarringly artificial attempt to make her character appear to have depth. This was a bit off-putting and ruined my suspension of disbelief a little, an issue that was amplified when it became apparent that the whole show would orbit around her.

So these episodes are usually quite good, but Discovery’s example has the distinction of being the one that showed me the first serious crack in the show’s format.

The first half of season 1 had much stronger legs than much of what happened afterwards. I suspect those early episodes was them using up material Bryan Fuller developed for the show before he broke ties with CBS. Once they had mined Fuller’s concepts for all they were worth they had to make up their own stuff with the less-than-great writers they had left and I suspect Stamets was a casualty of that.

I really liked early Stamets in Discovery. He had an edge to his character. Kind hearted and willing to do the right thing when called for (such as saving the Tardigrade) but also unwilling to suffer fools and the sort of bullshit Michael would offer up. They totally neutered him in subsequent seasons. I thought we would see original Stamets when it looked like he was going to throw up in his mouth upon hearing Tilly would be his superior officer but neutered Stamets quickly took over unfortunately.

The gay aspect of his character was also done really well in season one imo. After 50 years of Trek completely evading the fact of gay people's existence, they introduced Stamets and Culber just as seamlessly as they introduced Uhura or Sisko or Janeway. Just competent officers being who they were and doing their thing and leaving the audience wondering why was it ever a big deal in the first place. It's a pity they didn't do trans people as much justice, Gray was a bit of a **** pointless character. I do like Adira though, some seriously weird writing around the character (Stamets and Culber adopting them as their adult child) aside.