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Jason Isaacs VS Sonequa. Who Should Have Been The Series Lead? (Spoilers)

seigezunt said:
I love the show, but I do kinda think the determination to make this a "below decks" show was a failed experiment. Here we are, focusing on the captain, wondering if and when will the lead become the captain, and wondering where the CMO is. It might just be in the DNA of Star Trek for the leads to be the command crew.
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Yeah, it's really jarring if you look at Episode 3, where Tilly was just a lowly tech under Stamets who happened to be Burnham's roomie. She started out being integral to the story because she was as close to a friend as Burnham was going to get, but now she gets to be integral to resolving all of the issues just because they need to give her something to do.
 
XCV330 said:
I thought the doctor they showed this week was the CMO. Maybe I'm wrong. If she's not, how the hell many medical doctors does this ship have?
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We never really got a good look at her rank insignia, but if she were CMO, why is she calling Saru down to sickbay to ask his permission on how to treat Tyler? Patient treatment falls directly under the purview of the CMO, and no one, not the XO, CO or any non-medical officer of a higher rank can overrule that. Hell, it's bad enough that someone else on the medical staff is calling the acting captain down to sickbay for permission on how to treat a patient, as they should be calling the CMO if he/she isn't already on duty.

As for how many doctors are on board, that's another oddity, for a crew of 130 this ship is quite a large size medical staff. Assuming this doctor isn't the CMO, then that means there's at least four doctors assigned to the ship (CMO, this woman, Culber, and the whale expert) plus we've seen countless nurses running around sickbay. Now compare this to Voyager, a crew of 150 which only had one doctor and one nurse assigned to it, though they did also have an EMH to help out in emergencies. Comparable crew sizes in the US Navy don't even warrant a doctor to be aboard, usually just one or two corpsman.
 
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The Wormhole said:
As for how many doctors are on board, that's another oddity, for a crew of 130 this ship is quite a large size medical staff. Assuming this doctor isn't the CMO, then that means there's at least four doctors assigned to the ship (CMO, this woman, Culber, and the whale expert) plus we've seen countless nurses running around sickbay.
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In "Desperate Hours" Shenzhou is listed as having a ship's dentist in addition to the medical doctors.
 
The Wormhole said:
We don't know what Shenzhou's crew compliment was, so there's wiggle room there.
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Personally I’ve always thought Federation crew compliments were ridiculously small. A modern aircraft carrier carries a crew of like 6000 yet most Fed ships have crews in 500 range.
 
Captain Killy said:
Personally I’ve always thought Federation crew compliments were ridiculously small. A modern aircraft carrier carries a crew of like 6000 yet most Fed ships have crews in 500 range.
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Space is really, really big compared to the surface area of the ocean. Even if you consider that the Federation probably has something like three orders of magnitude more people, it's three dimensional rather than two-dimensional. Add to that that a lot of grunt work is probably automated in the Federation (even if we don't see many robots) and I can understand the relatively small crew complements.
 
They say 'series lead', but not really getting that. She's featured more than others, but it's not really playing much different than any of the other shows. Not like we're in the Lower Decks all season and never get to the bridge or anything. Lorca has been as much 'the lead' as Burnham. Or Stamets. Or Tyler. Silly to make that distinction, as it's not really played that way. She gets a little more screen time, but is that different than, say, Kira or Spock?
 
Obviously Isaacs. However I wouldn't blame him not wanting to be seen as the lead of Discovery.
 
The star of the show should have been Rosairo Dawson as Burnham like they wanted. I know she was at least Fuller's first choice. I kind of expected even before the show started that Lorca would steal the show from her and even made a thread here about it. It would have been like if Frakes had been the lead of ""TNG" and Riker was played by Patrick Stewart. If you main star isn't even in the conversation as being one the shows better actors then that is a problem. SMG is actually okay for the most part but she just isn't good enough to be a great serious lead. She can't elevate bad writing like most great actors are capable of doing.

Jason
 
SMG did an awful lot of posing and glowering. Probably mainly bad writing and direction, but agree that Dawson would have been miles better, she has 20 times the natural charisma with a chemistry that would pop and serve even underwritten material. Maybe a little more passion with Clem Fandango.

We'd probably care a little more in general. In the end, maybe giving Fuller the time he needed may not have been so truly monstrous a thing. They needed the time to work on this arc, clearly.
 
Is it just a case of Isaacs has greater screen presence than SMG?

Are we drawn to any particular actor in a scene over the others? Even if that character is more in the background?
 
MacLeod said:
Are we drawn to any particular actor in a scene over the others? Even if that character is more in the background?
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I actually like the majority of the supporting cast in Discovery so I wouldn't mind seeing more of most of them.
 
SMG has shown in the various parts she played in Once Upon a Time and Walking Dead that she just isn't lead material.

Isaacs on the other hand has owned his role.
 
To paraphrase what I said in a similar thread:
Ultimately, I think the problem with the character of Burnham as a lead is that in the pre-Discovery episodes she's introduced as having an interesting backstory and being a renegade (although, let's be honest, throughout the series and movies other characters have done more extreme things than her mutiny; look at Kirk in The Search For Spock), then she's put on Discovery with characters with more interesting backstories and who are also less than squeaky clean so she doesn't stand out as much. Personally, barring the opening episodes, I don't see the way the attention is divided between characters to be that much different to previous Trek shows, it's definitely an ensemble show. However, from Episode 3 onwards Lorca definitely felt like the lead character to me.
 
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