How is it 'blatantly the only reason'
Spoilers Star Trek: Discovery 5x04 - "Face the Strange"
- Thread starter Commander Richard
- Start date
Well they spent money on new filming so not a clip show really.
Blatant because from the start, that was the big emphasis in the media. I'd be more forgiving if they'd done more with the characters, but with Gray it's especially egregious. He got a body, and then traipsed off to Trill. It felt like, once they got their magazine covers and such, they weren't really interested in doing much with either of them as characters. Like I said in another post, you contrast that with Captain Angel on SNW, who didn't get nearly the media attention but was treated more like a vital, interesting character, and it's jarring.
No offense, but, did you read the whole article?
Which is why Adira was "she" for their first few episodes.
my reading comprehension is fine. how's yours?
In case you need it spelled out, they adjusted the character of Adira to be earlier in their journey than initially conceived to match the actor. Hence the bit about being open for non-binary parts before being out publicly.
Emphasis mine. We haven't seen any confirmation as to the creators' intentions with the characters yet. Just because they ended up being severely underutilized, it doesn't necessarily mean that nothing was planned for them to begin with and they were just shoddily added for cheap representation points. You can't take what we know about the characters now or how people have reacted to them after having seen the finished series and use those to construct retroactive arguments about how there was never any legitimate reason to create them to begin with.
It might have something to do with the fact that Angel wasn't the first officially nonbinary character in the entire Star Trek franchise. If Adira and Gray weren't created, surely Angel would've received similar media attention, regardless of whether they got a more substantial storyline or not.
I think you're forgetting when Gray got to talk down Zora when she got depressed/had an existential crisis.
My apologies if I came off insulting. Posts on a message board don't allow for nuance in tone. I never meant to impugn your reading comprehension. I genuinely thought perhaps you hadn't read the whole article.
If they meant for Adira to always be NB, then it is VERY weird that they made a whole scene to spell that out, in-character, when it makes no sense in-universe that they wouldn't have established this well ahead of time. At a minimum, the whole issue was badly handled, both onscreen and off.
I don't want to continue to derail this conversation with minutiae about Adira's gender status. So let me try to spell out what, exactly, my issue with all this was as it relates to this episode (Which Adira appeared in for all of about ten seconds).
This episode should have had a similar impact to Shattered on VOY, or All Good Things on TNG. In some ways it does (The Burnham V. Burnham scene), but it misses the mark when Burnham has to appeal to the bridge crew about everything they've been through.
This is highlighted by the fact that I didn't even know Rhys had become chief tactical officer after Nhan left. The script wants us to have this emotional connection with those characters to make the climax work, but it asks us, the viewer, to do the heavy lifting and just assume that the emotions are there between the crew. This is an issue I've had ever since the end of season 2, when the whole crew decided to follow Burnham, which we know led to severe trauma for them. And while I could believe some of them choosing to do that (Like Saru, Georgiou and Tilly), it really rang false to me that all 100+ crew would do the same.
So when Burnham is making her heartfelt plea to the bridge crew, it has shades of Picard's speech to the Farpoint crew in All Good Things, but it doesn't hit that same note because we don't really know these people. But we could have. Instead, we created new characters in the form of Adira and Gray. Just about everyone, including their defenders, have acknowledged that they don't have much depth, that not much was done with them, and they aren't portrayed by very strong actors. So it is frustrating that the writers decided it was more important to squeeze them in there for the sake of representation than to make other choices, such as strengthening the characters they already had. And yes, I am thinking of Michelle Paradise's quote saying she wanted NB and trans representation on the show. Which is a laudable goal, but I haven't seen any evidence that she is a competent enough writer to both introduce representation like that and make it feel like a natural fit in-story.
I would have enjoyed Adira and Gray as characters more if, for instance, we'd seen Adira struggle with the overwhelming nature of being joined. I'd have liked Gray better if he, for instance, had an existential crisis and had to lean on Culber, who'd been through almost the exact same situation. But none of this is ever mentioned. They both undergo traumatic events and keep on going like they never happened. And that is why I feel like they are only there to check a box.
So yes, this episode was good. Perhaps one of the best Discovery has done. HOWEVER, it failed on an emotional level because the writers do not have a strong enough foundation with these characters to create a valid emotional response.
I'm sure Jason Isaacs would have returned but having Lorca there would have been a distraction, given who he turned out to be. It would have been hard not to address that.
Fun Fact: Callum Keith Rennie starred in a TV series called Shattered.
Fun Fact: Callum Keith Rennie starred in a TV series called Shattered.
I also apologize for my tone. And I agree with you completely about the failure to add depth. I just thought it was important to establish exactly what was going on behind the scenes.
A hard disagree. It was handled in the most elegant and LGBTQ-positive way possible. Stamets made a simple mistake, Adira calmly corrected him, which he accepted with a shrug, after which everyone went on about their days. Which is exactly the treatment trans people have been wishing for since forever. As we saw Adira meeting the Discovery crew, they couldn't quite have done it the same way as it was with Angel who had already arrived on the Enterprise by the time we first saw them, so we can infer that preferred pronouns were requested at some point. With Adira, it was either them stating their pronouns on screen or the crew just abruptly starting to gender them correctly without any explanation (this includes both already using they/them to a completely unknown person they have just met and starting to gender them correctly at some later point), which would've reduced the already announced first in representation to a secret conspiratory wink.
Nhan was never chief tactical officer to begin with. Rhys had been tactical all along, and Nhan was one of many security chiefs. Folding the two positions into one was a TNG invention.
Far From Home (Season 3x01) established that out of 136, 89 members of the crew (65.4%) decided to go to the future, including Nhan who was granted a last-minute transfer from the Enterprise, with one not surviving the trip. Your mileage may vary on whether almost two thirds is still to much or not, but it was very pointedly not everyone.
3x02, actually.
No they where "she" the first few episodes because del Barrio hadn't come out to all their family when filming started.
I'm not sure why that would make a difference. Can a person not play NB if they aren't NB themselves? Jessie Keitel isn't NB, but she played one on SNW.
The other side is that Adria is also there to play off of Culber and Stamets and create a new relationship with them. They all gravitate together as a found family, and add a new dynamic as they adopt Adria. It's sweet and fun and I thoroughly enjoyed their interactions in the opener. I don't think that relationship would be the same with any of the other bridge crew, though I'm sure they could try to adopt Detmer...
Or...maybe...by having them come in already being called by their correct pronouns,we highlight how much of a non-issue it ought to be? No one on TOS ever talked about Uhura being Black, which arguably did more for inclusivity than pointing it out nonsensically in character.
He hasn't been chief tactical all along. As stated in that episode. But, again, the confusion here is evidence of exactly what I was referring to. I've watched every episode of DSC at least twice, and could not tell you who the chief tactical officer in season 1 was if you held a gun to my head. Landry? BAM.
2/3 is still way more than is believable. And Nhan transferring from her own ship to go too is even more nonsenical (as much as I liked the character). But really, trying to refute my point by saying "Well, it was just almost everyone, not everyone" kinda actually reinforces what I said. Most of these people had known Burnham for, what, a year at most? It did not feel earned.
Well, that's where our experiences differ a bit. I found Stamets's fixation on "adopting" Adira so sudden and so extreme that it creeped me out. It's not as off-putting now, but oh jeez did I hate how they wrote it for the season 3 finale.
They can, but in this specific case the writers decided to sync up the experiences of the actor and the character, for greater verisimilitude. So Adira decided to use They/Them pronouns, and then tell the crew shortly after Blu did the same publicly.
I think it comes down to how one views Stamets. Early Stamets is a curmudgeon that is a genius. Over time, we see him moving past his work, and building on his relationship, and seeking that relationship, to the point that he is angry as hell as Burnham for risking people. He's actually moving through Erikson's developmental stages in a way I quite expect and understand.
Yeah, I can see that. I just wish it were real. Instead, he got altered by Tardigrade DNA, and while sometimes we see flashes of Old Stamets, it's mostly the altered one, and I have a hard time viewing that as real character growth.
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