While Bashir gets a handful of secondary plots in some first season
Deep Space Nine episodes (“The Passenger”, “Babel”, “The Storyteller”, “If Wishes Were Horses”), generally to solve a given episode’s medical problem, he doesn’t really get a dedicated “full focus episode” in the first year. And I don’t suppose there were any filming limits regarding Siddig.
Jake on the other hand gets dedicated plots in both “The Storyteller” (competing against Nog in trying to impress a Bajoran girl) and in “Progress” (trying to run a self-sealing stem bolt trading scheme with Nog). So it’s not quite as clear-cut as people remember.
Similarly, season one of
Voyager gives Harry Kim the main plot in “Emanations” and an important role in “Prime Factors”.
As for the truncated nature of the first season of
Starfleet Academy: While I can absolutely see where people are coming from with this, I can’t say it really bothered me while watching the show. The writers/producers can’t very well change the fact that they’re only going to get 10 episode seasons, and I’m sure they would love to get more episodes to flesh out characters and their relationships. I don’t think they really
needed to make it so the season represents the entire school year (which seems to be the reason why some viewers are not able to suspend their disbelief), but then I don’t really felt like we’ve been missing much between episodes. The fact that there were supposed to be weeks/months between “Ko’Zeine” and “The Life of the Starts” and then between that episode and “300th Night” seemed odd to me, because days or a week would have felt a little more plausible, but still I didn't feel I missed anything important from the actual stories they were telling.
The biggest niggle across the entire arc is how the show treated recurring characters. We are introduced to a "bridge crew" very deliberately in Episode 1 we never see again. Recurring minor characters like the Cadet Pickford or Dzolo or Ocam just kind of vanish. Indeed, the number of kids in the classrooms just kept dropping, making the academy seem progressively smaller over time.
- I agree that in hindsight it’s strange that they made it a point to introduce the bridge crew by name in “Kids These Days” only to then forget about them almost immediately.
- Pickford I don’t think was ever supposed to be any more than a minor comic relief background character, so while I would have appreciated to see her again, I didn’t really miss her.
- Dzolo I only missed in the immediate aftermath of “Come, Let’s Away”, but other than that I don't think she’s supposed to be an important character (although, again, I would have liked to see her again).
- With Ocam I didn’t feel he vanished. He was right there in “The Life of the Stars” where it made sense, but I didn’t really miss him at other times.
- As for the perception that the number of kids in classrooms kept dropping, I didn’t really see it that way. When they showed actual classes in “Beta Test”, “Vitus Reflex” and “Vox in Excelso” they seemed to be filled with lots of background extras. And as you say in your next point, they didn’t very often show traditional classes after that, so there just weren't any classrooms that could be filled with kids. But outside of classes, the atrium always seemed filled with dozens of extras and the numbers never seemed to noticeably drop, right up until the finale.
The early episodes must have been heavily rewritten and re-filmed later in the season's development. Thok is the obvious aspect; she's a fun, vivid character who outshines everyone else on screen, and she completely vanishes around the midpoint of the season.
I’m sorry, but I don't follow your logic here. Lura Thok appeared less towards the second half of the season (probably because of some scheduling issues with Gina Yashere), and that somehow means “the early episodes must have been heavily rewritten and re-filmed”? They admit that the season finale was heavily rewritten two weeks before shooting for that episode began, but other than that there’s nothing they obviously rewrote.
The first three episodes feel almost like a different show, much more comedic and so much fresher than the usual boilerplate shit that the show devolved into by the end of the season. Something really bizarre's gone on behind the scenes; episode eight and episode one feel so different that I genuinely wonder if Paramount pushed for big changes to the early episodes.
I didn’t get that feeling at all. There’s a certain variety between all episodes this season, but they still all feel like part of one coherent whole. There was certainly nothing so incongruent that would lead me to think there was “something really bizarre [going] on behind the scenes”. If anything, this feels like the most cohesive, most consistent season of any of the modern
Treks.
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