Captain Georgiou was very likeable, which made Burnham's mutiny even worse.
It might be unfair to the Picard writers, but I would argue that the institutional failure was greater in Season 3 than what faced Burnham. Considering what transpired on Lower Decks, Prodigy, and past interactions with the Borg, Shelby's initiative was reckless and dangerous (and felt more plot-driven). Owing what little we saw of Shelby in TNG, I could've imagined she would be less sanguine with this plan, but if they had had Jellico or Nechayev behind it, I could buy that.
Burnham's actions played a role in starting the war, but all she did was get ahead of what the Klingons were already planning to do. She was ultimately proven right, which was a cold, bitter comfort.
I do think that Georgiou came across as a more traditional captain, and I did like her, but I also don't think the first two episodes spent anywhere close to enough time to really establish her to make me really feel deeply about her loss. That's not on Michelle Yeoh at all, that's on the way it was written. I still wish they had either just started with the third episode and then used flashbacks, or did a mid-season "movie" about the Battle of the Binary starts to provide the backstory-or maybe just a two-parter right off that better established the Burnham/Georgiou relationship so they could really rip our hearts out when we got to Burnham's mutiny. Everything was just too rushed.
Burnham's actions played a role in starting the war, but all she did was get ahead of what the Klingons were already planning to do. She was ultimately proven right, which was a cold, bitter comfort.
I do think that Georgiou came across as a more traditional captain, and I did like her, but I also don't think the first two episodes spent anywhere close to enough time to really establish her to make me really feel deeply about her loss. That's not on Michelle Yeoh at all, that's on the way it was written. I still wish they had either just started with the third episode and then used flashbacks, or did a mid-season "movie" about the Battle of the Binary starts to provide the backstory-or maybe just a two-parter right off that better established the Burnham/Georgiou relationship so they could really rip our hearts out when we got to Burnham's mutiny. Everything was just too rushed.
I've always felt they should have brought Admiral Clancy back and say she was the one who endorsed the plan to network all the ships together. Then, when she gets shot by an assimilated twenty year old, Picard could comment "now that is sheer fucking hubris."
Which I think is the point. Burnham isn't likable at first but has to build past her guilt and shame of losing Georgiou. Lorca won't let her escape it and then seeing Georgiou in the flesh, like a mirror,makes Burnham hold on to the guilt.
Ah, but that would've required Lord Terry to acknowledge another aspect of the first two seasons and making season 3 more consistent instead of yanking another action figure out of his toybox.
Honestly, I felt Burnham wasn't just unlikeable at first. She was never likeable.
I get that.
I maintain that the intention from the start was that Burnham was a likable character, a character that the audience would root and care for. It makes little sense to build an entire series around an unlikable character. Making Burnham's Spock's sister was a way to appeal to fandom right off. And then the praise that other characters heaped on Burnham was also meant to establish that she was the next great franchise character. I think the writers just fumbled. It sort of reminds me of the first Captain Marvel movie, where I also felt the writers tried even harder to make Carol Danvers a cool character, but the way they went about it (as well as the direction given) did the opposite. I do think Discovery did right by Burnham a lot more than the MCU did with Danvers.
I also feel that Discovery was aiming for the kind of morally gray complexity of Nu BSG or Stargate Atlantis, that had complicated, flawed characters, but were still heroes the audience was supposed to root for and like on some level.
Burnham losing everything and having to earn back respect and trust, her friendship of/mentorship with Tilly, her doomed romance with Ash Tyler, etc. were not something I think the writers would've spent time doing for a character they wanted to be unlikable. They were seeking to make Burnham a sympathetic character that the audience cared about.
What exactly do people not like about Burnham?
I also feel that Discovery was aiming for the kind of morally gray complexity of Nu BSG or Stargate Atlantis, that had complicated, flawed characters, but were still heroes the audience was supposed to root for and like on some level.
Burnham losing everything and having to earn back respect and trust, her friendship of/mentorship with Tilly, her doomed romance with Ash Tyler, etc. were not something I think the writers would've spent time doing for a character they wanted to be unlikable. They were seeking to make Burnham a sympathetic character that the audience cared about.
What exactly do people not like about Burnham?
There's examples of having a show center on unlikeable characters. Walter White from BREAKING BAD, for instance. On the surface, he seems like a guy to root for: a high school teacher that has a cancer diagnosis. But he is honestly a bad guy in a LOT of ways. You can make a series star be unlikeable and still work, but that is an admittedly difficult thing to do.
I'm sure the intention was to make Burnham likeable from the start. Doesn't mean that was the result for a lot of people.
Speaking for myself on why Burnham is unlikeable...
1 - She was made out to be the end all and be all solution to everything.
2 - Her mutiny against her captain, which ended up not only getting her killed but caused a war to proceed.
3 - Even when she is shown to be completely wrong, she had to somehow also be right.
4 - She didn't really exude a captain or leadership presence. (She constantly needed to be reinforced with various crew going 'we're with you'. This could have been mitigated by more action than words... show, don't tell.) I don't get the sense that she can make the hard calls without some kind of backup to push her to it. (Nhan being present to make sure she gets Book, for example.)
5 - Her having breakdowns in the middle of a crisis. (This isn't exclusive to her, because this was a problem with the show itself. But as the lead, she DOES set the tone for the series, and her doing that multiple times just spotlights this issue even more with DISCO.)
6 - Her being Spock's adopted sister was a bad call... it was forcing the audience to say she is important by tethering her to essentially the face of the franchise, rather than allowing the character to stand on her own. (Precisely why TNG worked overall far better than DISCO... for the most part, that show and the characters were allowed to stand on their own without the need to use TOS as a crutch.)
7 - There were many times when she simply annoyed me. I never was annoyed by any of the other series captains: Kirk, Picard, Sisko, Janeway, Archer, Freeman, Pike.
There's other issues I have, but they are more episode specific than in general like the ones I listed above.
As I said upthread, #1 in particular for me. I think I could have liked Burnham enough on her own terms, but her feeling if not being so pivotal to all of the major events of the series makes me dislike her for reasons that I can admit aren't (or shouldn't be) innate to the character.
YMMV on this one, but initially it felt as though this might be a live-action "Lower Decks" played seriously...most of the primary characters were not the seniormost officers...but it turned out TPTB didn't have the collective will to carry through on that idea, much as PIC S3 ultimately turned its back on much of the initial premise of that series.
I'll add 8 - She gets to be captain of Discovery at the expense of Captain Saru, whose own character is weakened by willingly taking a backseat to her.
9 - While she and Book are on a hostile ship on a time-sensitive high-risk mission, she takes the time to talk about their relationship. Just...really??? It would have been great if a Breen had snuck up behind them and stunned the both of them at that point.
YMMV on this one, but initially it felt as though this might be a live-action "Lower Decks" played seriously...most of the primary characters were not the seniormost officers...but it turned out TPTB didn't have the collective will to carry through on that idea, much as PIC S3 ultimately turned its back on much of the initial premise of that series.
I'll add 8 - She gets to be captain of Discovery at the expense of Captain Saru, whose own character is weakened by willingly taking a backseat to her.
9 - While she and Book are on a hostile ship on a time-sensitive high-risk mission, she takes the time to talk about their relationship. Just...really??? It would have been great if a Breen had snuck up behind them and stunned the both of them at that point.
Completely agreed about #8. Saru was without question the real MVP of DISCO. He was more level headed, he exuded a good command presence, and was a very interesting character. Burnham was none of those things, yet she got to be captain of the ship over him? He really should have stayed as captain. (I do think that would have made his storyline with T'Rina quite different, and I did like them together. But I would gladly have taken a different or nonexistent relationship with T'Rina in favor of him staying as captain.)
Also completely agreed about #9. It was utterly stupid. I will give her credit for starting that conversation off with 'this might not be the best time to talk about this' (or words to that effect), which FINALLY acknowledged a huge problem with the show for years. Too bad it took them until the next to last episode to realize that. But the best thing they could have done to address this was NOT TO DO IT IN THE FIRST PLACE.
The institutional failure in the PIC era seems largely confined to Wolf 359 survivors. We don’t really hear about trauma from the Dominion War (tortured Changeling asides), and Romulans like Elnor openly join Starfleet despite Starfleet’s failure with the Romulan supernova. The synth ban is forgotten about rather quickly, once its discover the role the Zhat Vash played in it. And even Borg can join Starfleet. There aren’t even any badmirals in PIC, which was the norm in the TNG/DS9 era.
Burnham already fired the first shot when she killed the Torchbearer in self defense.
A problem emerges when Burnham wants to open fire because of Sarek’s advice, instead of considering that she already fired the first shot through the Torchbearer’s death. Thereby honouring Klingon traditions by allowing the Torchbearer to die in battle (as Vulcans would be aware of), and disregarding Sarek’s warning that it was unique to Vulcans.
Despite this information, Georgiou chooses a solution that she has to know would irritate the Klingons into firing on her ship and Starfleet. Anderson also tries to broker peace during the battle, and gets killed. Both ignore that Archer never actually brokered peace with the Klingons, and the farmer shooting Klaang as precedent as to what Burnham is talking about, and basically had peace with them. How do they miss that in their textbooks?
And if they know this, then they know, through events seen in ENT, that Klingons will open fire regardless. They’ve opened fire many times on Archer, and it did not result in war. The Battle of the Binary Stars could have just been another skirmish with Klingons if Starfleet retreated once the immediate battle was over. It could have been avoided altogether if the Shenzhou crew followed Saru’s advice and retreated then and there.
There's also the fact that Burnham (and the audience) are gaslit about no previous encounters with Klingons, despite unremitting hostilities with the Klingons being ongoing for over 30 years by this point. And we never get a reason as to why Captain Georgiou says that.
Following that, Georgiou okays Saru’s plan that could have martyred T’Kuvma and been the start of the war then and there. While ignoring Burham’s offer to sacrifice herself after Burnham explains her reasoning for her mutiny, which sounded no different from what Kirk would say. Burnham is also the one who wanted to avoid war by capturing T’Kuvma, which she them fails, because of her emotional response to seeing her captain die. Though, I'm not sure how anyone can fault Burnham, since she was showing signs of mental distress beforehand through her mutiny and should not have been greenlit for that mission.
Even Detmer leaves Burnham out to dry, as she’s witnessing this collapse in the command structure in real time. And Burnham being thrown under the bus.
It's not the common narrative, but Captain Georgiou wanted the war as badly as T’Kuvma did. And Saru, for whatever reason, went from advocating for retreat to aligning his goals to be in line with hers. Which set Burnham up to fail.
The only thing Burnham can be accused of it having a mental breakdown, and should have been referred to the equivalent of Counselor Troi in her era. But she was abandoned and used as a scapegoat.
She's hypercompetent to the point that not only does she have a solution for everything, she’s often the only one offering solutions. And her viewpoint is accepted, often without pushback. It also did not help that she was Spock's adopted sibling. It suggests that the character is not strong enough to stand on her own without ties to legacy characters
I think the reason I soften my view of her was because of the Season 3 opener, where she had to adapt to her surrounding for a change.
Though Burnham easily fixing 32nd century technology later on in the season despite only being there for a year, while those around her struggled, seemed like a return to the way Burnham was originally written. Despite the writer's intentions, it does not come off as helpful. It comes off as making her seem overpowered.
Well, they didn't really fail other than in the sense of not saving Romulus, and in the opinion of the Picard writers, the Hobus star was Romulus' actual sun, so how could they not fail?
Not Star Trek, but Stephen Donaldson created an entire series around the most unlikable protagonist imaginable. Speaking for myself, I couldn't even get through the first book because Thomas Covenant was such an asshole. When I reached the **** scene I put the book down and never looked back.
They did it with The Sopranos.
Sopranos was an HBO drama, much different beast than Discovery. I didn't look at Sopranos but I got the impression that the main character was some in the audience did like, despite his crimes.
Also wanted to add that I doubt very much Burnham was intended to be an unlikable character. That was the reaction from some (not all) viewers. Whereas, I think the Sopranos lead was conceived as, if nothing else, a complicated character, a morally gray one at best. So, I think it's apples and orange when it comes to Burnham and Soprano. Now, if we wanted to look at Emperor Georgiou and Soprano, that's a different conversation. But even there, by the time we get to the Section 31 movie, Emperor Georgiou was supposed to come across as merely an edgy, no filter, libidinous, charming rogue, and not a tyrannical mass butcher.
Missed the mention of Walter White before. I would argue that White starts off as a sympathetic, likable character that has a villain's journey and becomes despicable by the end. That was what the writers intended to happen. With Burnham, the reaction from some was not intended. The writers heaped praise on the character and gave her great feats because they wanted the audience to see her that way, not the opposite.
I would argue that no franchise series has been built around an unlikable-by design-character. That's not what this franchise has been about. Even Emperor Georgiou was toned down and redeemed before the Section 31 movie.
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I saw plenty of complaints about lorca's actions.
The internet will always be the internet. A hang out for the social dregs of the world. They should never be taken as a majority or an opinion worth serious consideration.
Guess you never hung around Star Wars forums when TPM came out. Tons of people had problems with the chosen one angle for Anakin. I know I roll my eyes every time the trope is used.I dont recall Burnham being a chosen ,but then again I stopped watching around S2. If that came later then Im definitely not watching again because that trope was tired even back in the 90s.
Wow. That has got to be the most insane viewpoint I have ever read about Uhura. Especially the whole "this is what viewers were thinking."
Think about what you just wrote. The first time we see Captain Kirk on screen he is having a friendly game of chess with Mr. Spock, not trying to mutiny and be the cause of so many innocent lives lost. Im suppose to like this person and follow her journey. Really? I dont think so.
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I don't think you are.
The journey following will depend on what one finds compelling about a journey.
