And I think the implants will become less important after the trauma is addressed. Honestly, I think this is one place where taking it slow works in its favor. I think the implants will eventually be removed but it will be more symbolic representation of her healing. Just removing them and saying "There! You're fixed" comes across as cheap.
I wasn't speaking for anyone. I was only giving my opinion on what Detmer's injury was likely supposed to be representative of, if anything. I realize you are not "speaking to me" in this comment...but I believe it requires some specific clarification. I don't think anyone was claiming to know how anyone else might feel. Certainly not me. I was simply raising a guess (which I believe is a fairly good one) as to what the intent is.
It gives the character a distinct look. It shows a character who has suffered an injury and has a prothesis operating an accepted member of the crew.
Dark Speculation from First time poster: Detmer's implants do not replace just an eye and part of her skull, but part of her brain. It does language processing, explaining her reluctance to speak in earlier episodes, and why they are not immediately replaced in S3. Her mind is partially running on the implant, Detmer is injured at the beginning of a war Starfleet is losing. Six months later she has blatantly obvious implants and a promotion. Detmer did not consent to implants, did not choose the style, and was not given adequate time to adjust to implant before being sent back to war. Admiral Cornwall(?) or Captain Lorca may even have had her forcibly augmented despite checking no on the "Do you consent to augmentation" question when she joined Starfleet.
Just to nitpick, it actually seems the war first goes in the Federation's favor: there are basically zero casualties after the initial clash at the Binaries where some 8,000 people died. Yes, this is basically the writers fucking up the numbers, but we can live with that. Plotwise, the Klingons are hesitant to fight at all first: they disperse after the Binaries. Kol manages to get the war going again by stealing the secret of cloaking from Voq and L'Rell, six monts into the not-fighting; even then, casualties on the UFP side are minimal, only ever rising to 10,000 or so before Lorca takes the ship to the other side of the Mirror for nine months. This doesn't mean the assorted implants and headgear and wheelchairs we see would not be the result of rushed patching up of UFP war wounded. Starfleet couldn't know the war would go on a back burner; OTOH, they would not have the guts/tradition to press on with an aggressive campaign that would quickly end the war once the Klingons chose not to fight much. Postponing "proper" repairs of personnel could well be a thing. Also, those not fit to serve otherwise could be assigned to a science vessel that was never supposed to see combat... Starfleet just wanted them to do 300 parallel experiments to find a war-winning formula, while Lorca wanted them to complete the spore drive, but Lorca also pressed the ship into combat against everybody's wishes. He'd not care if his helmswoman didn't have A++ health rating on Starfleet scale, as long as she was sufficiently badass on Lorca's scale. Timo Saloniemi
I'm surprised they kept some kind of headpiece for the implant. I assumed they'd just have her wear a contact in the one eye that resembled LeVar Burton's and that would be it. Suppose some kind of appliance looks cooler.
Lorca is an ass is the most likely in universe explanation for the silence on the Bridge. Detmer also seems reluctant to speak elsewhere. Memory Alpha even highlights her "choice" not to speak to Burnham after her injuries. Is Detmer shown having animated conversations when she is in the background? Remember cognitive complexity. The gist of most of her lines 1st season are "helm not responding" . She may be lying to save Face when her implant won't let her read her console, and occasionally, telling Lorca "Go Fuck Yourself, Sir".
As already pointed out in the thread for the season 4 trailer, Detmer is apparently getting new implants in the season, so that's that.
What makes you think that what the implant does isn't more advanced than what it could do internally or biologically? Obviously, the change was made to facilitate the makeup procress.
It would give the other characters a reason to weep sweet tears of empathy and togetherness for five minutes. There's always plenty of time for that, no matter how irrelevant or unlikely.
The Klingons seem to be targeting ships and the infrastructure for an interstellar nation, not the member planets. The average civilians life is largely unaffected, because this isn't Total War. The 8000 was all Starfleet, an organization made up of explorers and scientists, not hardened soldiers, and everyone in Starfleet knows someone who died. I maintain that Starfleet is losing the war. The low casualties can have many in universe explanations. Starfleet Propaganda to maintain morale and recruitment numbers. Starfleet retreating from battles it can't win, which is most of them. Klingons allowing the evacuation of space infrastructure before destroying it. A warrior race has little reason to kill support personnel on stations and resource extraction sites it destroys, and even less to kill noncombatant civilians. Discovery's repeated success in battle is down to Mirror Lorca having more combat experience than anyone in Starfleet and how he was able to grab a mostly intact, but blooded, crew assembled by Captain Georgiou. A crew already used to dealing with an eccentric, even erratic First Officer, so they can still function under Lorca.
Yes, the implant has a different external appearance. Those missing pieces may have not been essential to her mind and personality, only used intermittently or something. It could be a mix of old and new. Updating to a new implant could have been a slow, meticulous process, involving building an alternate 32nd century implant alongside the existing one, and "convincing" her brain and mind to use the better tech so the old tech can be removed safely. The artificial look of her eye is now Detmer's own choice. She could even have a human eye now, and wears a weird contact as a fashion statement.
At the early stages of the war, yes. But amusingly, it seems they aren't achieving much even against Starfleet's assets. The death toll from the very first clash seems to be exactly what Burnham's not-quite-cellmate accuses her of six months into the conflict, even though said accuser clearly is blaming the whole war on Burnham. Burnham's accuser would by default hold a different viewpoint yet agrees with the figures, erring in favor of Burnham if anything. Even to her, only the Starfleet dead appear to matter, giving all the more support to the interpretation that this is a war for Starfleet rather than for the Federation. And, incidentally, allowing Carol Marcus to think that Starfleet has "maintained peace" for a century as of the 2280s - by keeping all the wars in outer space! But we then need some other definition of "losing", such as territorial losses, and we never really hear of such. There are alarming Klingon intrusions into UFP space, but perhaps mirrored by Starfleet forays to restore the balance. There is no concern yet over dwindling resources or mention of a shortage of starships that would not be matched by similar shortage on the Klingon side. The ambiguous maps on the walls don't establish increasing or decreasing dominance for either player. We would at a minimum need a character express the sentiment that Starfleet is losing, or perhaps winning; we instead get platitudes of good fighting going on and good people being lost, as if the war were a far less bloody version of the WWI stalemate. But even the fights Discovery fight only start those six months into the war, and seem to be a handful, when enumerated at the start of "Choose Your Pain". They are also rather directly credited to the use of the spore drive. Basically, it seems that both sides sit in their WWI trenches (but don't kill millions in idiotic charges) while waiting for the penetrating tank to be invented - and Starfleet knows it has already invented the tank and now waits for it to be mass-produced, i.e. DASH installed aboard actual fighting ships. In the meantime, Klingons do nothing, lacking this all-important ability to deploy a "ghost". Then comes Kol, and suddenly his ships are ghosts, ambushing individual Starfleet vessels six to one and scoring easy victories when the victims have no warning and the only help that can arrive in time is the weakly armed (if determined) science vessel. And yet we get hardly a casualty added to the initial total, by the time of "Magic", and people seem to share a belief that Klingons just might call it quits if getting to publicly gut and eat Burnham, and everybody could go back home by Christmas. And then, apparently, Kol manages to expand his power base by bribing a lot of Houses with cloaking capability, and suddenly those Houses begin competing in the categories of "Most Spectacular Massacring", "Most Glorious Looting", and "Most Harebrained Suicidal Strike Against Powerful Target". All result in casualties - but an indirect result would appear to be that territorial gains also finally enter the picture. Sure, when Klingons defeat a starbase with 80,000 people aboard, they apparently lose tens of thousands themselves, there only being a pitiful occupying force of less than 300 subsequently. But after a victory like this, the Klingons don't retreat; they become a presence, no matter how frail. Might not be what Kol wanted. Certainly isn't what T'Kumva or Voq did. But now the Federation is losing, and losing so spectacularly that Saru at a first glance mistakes the loss for total, even though a status quo apparently is easily established in the end after all. Clearly something about the situation 15 months into the war is drastically different form what Saru saw six or even seven months into it, even when we later learn it factually matters little. Timo Saloniemi