but Stamets should have been the chief engineer who was working on a revolutionary means of propulsion. Nothing wrong with that, nothing that wouldn't make sense in the context of an ST show.
The show and its cast is very poorly thought out. It's good to have different people with different jobs and points of view and skillsets on a show so they can work together and bring something to the table.
They make Stamet's expertise far too narrow. Assuming that the spore drive won't last forever on the show, what's next for him? There was no reason he couldn't be a spore expert and the ship's chief engineer to give him more options down the line.
And also because, it's Star Trek, we have always had a chief engineer (except when we didn't - TNG S1 - and that was fucking weird). It's part of the lore and it fits logically with having a ship-based show.
We also have glorified extras as bridge officers in roles that would also have been filled by major characters/series regulars on any other show. Instead, the show has an extremely tiny core cast and focuses way too much on one character. Discovery's crew hasn't gelled and it makes it feel less of an actual, lived-in place with real people.
I completely disagree - I think the crew, and definitely the casting, have been some of Discovery's best aspects. Older shows, especially Voyager and Enterprise, set themselves up by imagining the crew of a spaceship (Captain, first officer, ops officer, tactical officer, doctor, etc) and then making them all regulars, with a consequent need for story focus and screentime. Then they sat down and said "right, what are we going to do with this lot?" This approach meant that the crew didn't fit the story, they had to try to fit stories around this crew roster they'd come up with. Inevitably you ended up with alleged
regular characters either fading into the background entirely (Kim, Mayweather) or with very little to do outside of their "focus weeks" (Neelix, Reed, Paris, B'Elanna, Chakotay, Hoshi). It's called the 'crew roster' trope and Star Trek is the past master of it. To an extent, it lends itself to episodic storytelling, but not really to arcs. As Enterprise and Voyager went along, it is no accident both started to focus around a much smaller group that were carrying the actual stories.
Discovery took a different approach - what characters do we need to tell our story? We'll create those and they will be our regulars. They won't form the full crew of a starship, but they don't need to. Our story doesn't need the helmsman or the chief engineer so when they're needed for logistical reasons they'll just be a name, like one of TNGs recurring helm ensigns. It kept the story much more focused, without weird tangents to catch up with the chef engineer or hang out with the Doctor's son. One of Discovery season 1 writers' best decisions.
Now in season
two, the writers are presented with a set of characters written for season 1's story. They've added some new ones relevant to this year, but it remains to be seen whether they will follow through on retiring more irrelevant ones or reducing their roles. I'll be interested to see how this progresses.
