More complaints about extras and minor characters not getting development? Yet not an issue when TNG and VOY has bridge crew extras in dozens of episodes who don't even have a name or barely speak. It's like the equivalent of them saying " TNG is horrible because we don't know anything about that ensign at helm that has been in more than 50 episodes. What does she like to do for fun? She sure isn't as developed as Kirk was"
You guys want to get caught up on these distinctions on whether they're starring roles or part of the main cast and count the number of lines these actresses had. You know for characters that people want to write off as glorified extras, the official websites of
Star Trek and Paramount+ seem to feel differently. And the fact that people have to basically write-off characters and actors that have been highlighted in the promotion of
Discovery to defend the dumb choices made for that series speaks volumes for how much the writing failed in making an impact with these characters.
Did the nameless TNG ensign at the helm get spotlighted in promotions like this?
From
StarTrek.com:
Emily Coutts made her mark on season one of
Star Trek: Discovery with her role as Keyla Detmer, cutting quite a striking figure thanks to the helmsman’s unique eyepiece and severe haircut. She was equally striking as First Officer Detmer on the
I.S.S. Shenzhou during the show’s time in the Mirror Universe. Viewers mostly glimpsed Detmer in the heat of the moment, initiating the spore drive, for example, or guiding the ship out of a gravity well. Coutts is currently shooting season two of
Discovery, but during her time at
Star Trek Las Vegas in August, the actress sat down with
StarTrek.com to chat about her career, her experience so far on
Discovery and her upcoming projects.
From
Paramount+:
There are no small parts on the
U.S.S. Discovery.
As we've come to know
Star Trek: Discovery's main cast over the course of Season 1—everyone from first officer-turned-mutineer Michael Burnham (
Sonequa Martin-Green) to the cautious Kelpien Saru (
Doug Jones) to the mysterious Captain Lorca (
Jason Isaacs)—you may have noticed a number of other Starfleet officers who comprise the bridge crew. Each day this week, we'll introduce you to a new member of the
Star Trek: Discovery bridge. Today, we're chatting with Emily Coutts, who plays Lieutenant Keyla Detmer.
My original point was that characters like Detmer and Owo wouldn't be afterthoughts if
Discovery's writing wasn't so dumb. A better show with better writing could have used the time that these characters have been on-screen to make them memorable, to make them where people on a website don't have to pretend they're nothing characters and were always intended to be in order to defend
Discovery.
Both Rom (Max Grodénchik) and Leeta (Chase Masterson) on
Deep Space Nine were not main characters or significant recurring characters, appeared occasionally (and in fewer total episodes than either Detmer or Owo), and yet the depth of the characterization for them, where you gave a shit about what happened to them and knew who they were and what they were about is light-years different than what we've seen from the writing team at
Discovery.
And when people want to argue that its unfair that
Picard season 3 gets away with things that
Discovery would get raked over the coals for, the primary difference is the depth of characterization where we care what happens. What I would argue is that the characters connected to the audience where when things people consider dumb happened (e.g., Borg DNA, long lost unknown family, etc,) the characterizations were able to pull the audience through that because they gave a shit what happened to these people. They cared about Riker's and Troi's relationship. They cared about Picard's connection to Jack. They cared about Data's future and for frickin' Spot (i.e., if you want an argument, let's argue whether the writing has been better for Spot or Detmer). The writing was able to build that with the audience in ways that
Discovery has failed in doing.
That didn't last long.
): "If we're going to be damned let us be damned for who really are!"
