I'm pretty sure everyone's still treating it like a joke. It's going to be a forum running gag until he gets a name of his own.
Spoilers Is Morn in Season 3?
- Thread starter The Wormhole
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I'm pretty sure everyone's still treating it like a joke. It's going to be a forum running gag until he gets a name of his own.
Which means what, exactly? The whole reason "ops officer" exists is because Brent Spiner looked better in yellow than blue. Data did the science officer things as "ops officer" and on Disco they gave Michael as science officer. So what does Owo really do?
An operations manager is responsible for allocating shipboard resources and personnel to necessary tasks. Basically, after the captain decides what needs to be done and the first officer decides how to do it and assigns people to the task, the ops manager then supervises the nuts and bolts of actually getting it done. (Similar to the roles of director, producer, and first assistant director in filmmaking, respectively.) It's basically like a middle manager in business.
I suppose the reason that both TNG and VGR had ops officers functioning as de facto science officers is that Starfleet vessels are mostly science vessels, so the ops manager supervises the work of a bunch of scientists and thus is the person who allocates their tasks and reports their results to the captain.
A navigator determines the best route to a destination, which the pilot/helm officer then follows. You see this pretty clearly in TOS -- Kirk orders Chekov (or whoever's sitting there) to plot a course, then when Chekov reports that the course is computed and laid in, Kirk orders Sulu to engage at warp whatever. Presumably the navigator post was dropped in the TNG era because it was presumed that the computer did most of it automatically (like a modern GPS/satnav).
What did Harry Kim really do? After all, Voyager had a separate science officer Samantha Wildman. If Harry can be ops officer despite the presence of a science officer, why can't Owo?
Personally, I never seriously argued that Morn was more well-developed as a character. Morn wasn't really a character, he was a running joke.
What I said is I've watched modern serialized dramas with casts which are of equal or greater size which have done a much better job of fleshing out what their character's personalities and interpersonal dynamics were. Discovery has largely been bad at this, with most character interactions (particularly if Michael isn't involved) basically having to do with plot exposition.
Regarding past Trek series, of course DS9 got way, way more time to flesh out episodes, but consider a clip like this:
In one little 90-second clip - totally unrelated to the plot for the week - the major personality traits and dynamics of five of the main characters are referenced. Quark is a scheming grifter. Kira is high-strung, and really hates Quark. Odo cares about law and order, and enjoys needling Quark. Worf is easily angered and has little patience. Miles just wants to get back to work. I mean, we know this because we're fans, but I think most of this would be obvious to someone who knows nothing about Trek either.
There's just a ton - in contrast - we still just don't know about even the main characters of Discovery. As an example, how do Saru and Stamets get along? Beats me, because they've almost never been onscreen at the same time, and the few times this was the case Stamets has either been unconscious or Saru has been belting out XO dialogue while Stamets is belting out spore technobabble.
I'll always remember the good times with Morn. Hanging out at the bar, playing Cards Against Humanity, watching movies, my 30th Birthday, my 40th Birthday, camping out, parties where I'd always throw a different theme, and, of course, that one particular house party back in 2008 that I can't talk about for fear of embarrassing information about me leaking out.
Morn was a great guy. Is a great guy. Can't wait to see him on Discovery.
Morn was a great guy. Is a great guy. Can't wait to see him on Discovery.
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But that's common in a lot of TV shows these days, there are characters who never interact with each other. The Walking Dead can go entire seasons with its main characters split up and doing their own thing. Jack Ryan had a subplot devoted to characters who never even meet Jack or any of the other leads. IIRC, Game of Thrones had some characters who were there from the beginning and never shared a scene together until the final season. Even in Star Trek this is nothing new, in Voyager's first two seasons Tom Paris and B'Ellanna Torres only share a handful of scenes together before they start spending time together regularly in the third season leading to them developing a relationship.
And it makes perfect sense that Saru and Stamets don't spend much time together. Saru is the ship's second in command, most of his duties are on the bridge while Stamets is a fungus scientist who spends most of his time in engineering. It makes more sense than the same seven characters who work at different parts of the ship hanging out all the time with each other and solving the plots together without assistance from the staffs these officers are supposed to be in charge of.
Random aside: Does anyone know where I can find images of all the original DS9 relaunch ads? I've looked on Google a couple of times but just get covers. Perhaps I'm searching the wrong terms (usually "DS9 relaunch ads" or similar)
I have them all stored on my Flickr page:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/therinofandor/albums/72157630971156924
Thank you!!
Saru and Stamets not really spending time together would be more defensible if Discovery had a larger cast. I mean, Game of Thrones Season 1 had 18 actors officially listed as "starring." Not to mention the main narrative pretty quickly split between four different locations. Discovery, in contrast, has mostly taken place on one ship, and has focused on that ship's crew. Further, the decision to treat much of the bridge crew as extras (though that changed a little bit in the second season) means there's just not that many people for the mains to interact with.
The first season in particular was very extreme because of how narrowly focused it was on Michael. I saw a blog post someone did tracking conversations through the first season. One of the main reasons why the characters barely interacted is most of the time there was a conversation it was between Michael and someone else. When two non-Michael characters did talk, it was basically just to move the plot along via exposition or otherwise engage in bridge babble.
Regardless, my main point is that Discovery has a relatively small main cast, and we know startlingly little about them considering we're two seasons in. I chalk much of this up to the showrunners being afraid to put in many of the kind of scenes you see in shows like Game of Thrones or The Expanse. Basically scenes where two characters just shoot the shit with one another, agreeing or coming into conflict. These scenes allow us as a viewer to understand the point of view of the characters, and understand the underlying dynamic between them. There were some more good examples of this in the second season - particularly in the Michael/Spock interactions, but also some of the Stamets/Reno bickering in the lab - but there really wasn't enough of it, because the show remains too overplotted.
It's worth pointing out that Deep Space Nine also treated much of its "bridge" (ops) crew as extras and focused heavily on characters outside the traditional command structure. Heck, at least Discovery actually has named characters occupying those posts, as opposed to the way DS9 contrived lame excuses to put characters like Odo, Garak, and Nog on the Defiant bridge. I'd call that an improvement.
And the upcoming animated series Lower Decks is literally named after its focus on junior officers instead of the bridge crew. There's nothing wrong with shifting focus away from the bridge officers. There's no law that a Star Trek show has to duplicate TOS or TNG's approach. Indeed, Enterprise was criticized for copying TOS's cast structure too closely.
Are you implying that it makes no sense to have pretty much the entirety of the command of DS9 go gallivanting about in the Defiant for extended periods of time despite the fact that say, being the commanding officer of a space station in an extremely important linchpin position is a full time job you shouldn't be able to vacate for long, is somehow weird, contrived, and makes no sense in-universe?
(One of the worst offenders is Children Of Time, where the Defiant gets stranded with Sisko, Kira, Odo, O'Brien, Dax, and Worf. Who's in charge back at the station?! Or For The Uniform, where Sisko just takes off with most of the command staff on a dangerous mission with no set end date. Okay.)
To be clear, I'm not saying that a Trek show has to focus on the bridge crew. I'm saying that the combination of Discovery going this route and the small main cast (6 in season 1, 7 in season 2, and apparently back to 6 in season 3) mean there are a relatively small number of plausible regular main cast interactions. Of course when you bring in others like Georgiou and Reno there's a bit more flexibility, but basically you end up mostly seeing the same interactions over and over again, which can get stale unless two characters have great chemistry together. So if you want to bring out in an episode an unexpected side of Stamets, it's going to be harder if he's always hanging with Culber or Tilly and Reno in the lab. You need to find some excuse to have him spend time with someone else on the ship, or maybe a guest star of the week.
Well, TOS's main cast was only three people. Everyone else was recurring. But they managed.
I assume they just did what my parents used to do to deter burglars when we went out for the evening, leave the tv and some lights on.
The whole Home alone routine, yeah? They have a cardboard cutout of Picard in Sisko's office to make people think someone's in there.
