I do have to admit...out of all the secondary/background crew...Detmer is far and away my favorite. If they were going to move one character into the primary cast in S4, she’d be my choice.
Yet I seem to remember seeing them in promotional material and in convention interviews and panels... How does it not make sense to highlight the bridge crew?
I think it has more to do with, Star Trek has never really "highlighted" the bridge crew. In TOS they weren't even part of the main cast, they're only considered "main cast" today by people who view TOS through the prism of the Berman era and because they were the ones brought back for all the movies. The Berman era did make the bridge crew the main cast, but as those shows went on, you could tell this was merely "going through the motions" and believing the ship's bridge roster had to automatically mean main cast. This resulted in characters like Harry Kim or Travis Mayweather, characters with no presence who get no development at all and in the case of Mayweather can go whole episodes without dialogue but are a part of the main cast because "the main cast is supposed to consist of bridge officers." Disco realized that just because someone has a seat on the bridge doesn't mean they need to be listed in the opening credits sequence.
Well, "main cast" is a pay grade issue. But a bunch of people (or cute props like R2D2 or Rhys) seen together from week to week is main cast in a more concrete sense. It doesn't follow that we should learn anything much about said people: even the very lead of a successful show may be a blank slate, a mysterious lone rider whose main characteristic is that he or she has absolutely none. DSC made a call in having stories about Michael Burnham, with the supporting characters of Saru and Stamets and Tilly and a number of speaking roles to further support the supporting roles. Might have been the right call, or then not. But it's what Trek always does, with an obvious lead and then a long process during which the rest of the team gets distilled into additional leads and the rest (TNG being the most blatant example). What DSC tries to do slightly differently is not giving top fictional rank to the top character, which is fine - but then erring in hiding some high-ranking characters (that is, not having them) even though they are essential to Trek style storytelling. Lower Decks has the characters, and merely sidelines them to give the center stage to the factual leads. Timo Saloniemi
This is an oft repeated absolute myth. Pure retroactive BS about Trek just being about a few characters to try make DIS fans points but its only true of TOS
I don't agree with that at all. And I don't think it's something fans say just to try and prove a point. I think it's absolutely true. For example, you could argue that certain Bridge positions really have no business being mainstays of the series format. I think Mayweather is a great example. There comes a point where you realize that the "helmsman" / pilot really doesn't have much utility rather than...you know...flying the ship. So you either need to make up hackey reasons to get this character into the missions and have relevant contributions...of you just have them featured in "the Mayweather episode of the season" which is usually also uninteresting and lame because...I don't really care about this generic guy who doesn't contribute anything else valuable on a weekly basis. In a different example, TNG understood the potential for having the security chief as a main character (where TOS did not). But, they also added this as a bridge character who was also in charge of tactical. JUST to get that main character on the bridge. Same with the ship's counselor position...which became more and more obvious that this person really should't be omnipresent on the bridge. I do think, in absolute fairness though, that DSC created some characters on the complete other end of the spectrum. While more traditional Trek (Berman era I guess?) was overly concerned with making sure the bridge crew were all main characters which resulted in generic characters of limited growth and utility....DSC created very specific and overly-specialized characters in a lot of cases who were also fairly limited. Stamets- His role was tailor-made for Season 1, where the spore drive was still under development and his involvement in it was key/critical. Now that we've progressed out of this stage with the DASH drive...his role has become more generic and less well-defined. Tilly- Again, I think she was more tailor-made for Season 1. She was Burnham's "only friend" and they had an interesting dynamic as two "outcasts" who gravitated toward each other. Now that the "outcast" factor is long past, the writing team has had a much harder time finding natural and organic utility for Tilly. She basically has no real defined role. Ash Tyler- Another tailored S1 character, who had to essentially be re-tooled and shoehorned into S2 in a way that barely made any sense. I like him a lot....but I'm going to be very honest in saying that he was obviously jiggered into the mix for S2. Even Saru's fundamental character traits and components have been completely retooled. A key part of his alien composition was that "prey fear instinct" element, that went away mid-S2. That would be like suddenly stripping Spock of the fact that he was dedicated to logic and non-emotionalism...or making Data human. So...I don't disagree with you to "defend DSC." DSC has some messy character designs that clearly resulted from the series being built only to support the S1 arc, with no long-term plan for how they'd fit in. But, I absolutely agree wtth @The Wormhole that the TNG era characters were often shoe-horned to fit "traditional Star Trek bridge roles" and that had a similar effect on limiting the character's utility and growth. Or- like in the case with TNG, they created unique characters and then arbitrarily sat them on the Bridge...either way, I agree 100% that it was limiting and bland.
What I find telling about how useless it is to have the helmsman in the main cast, TNG actually realized it as they never bothered to make the helmsman a regular character after Wesley left. And the show got by just fine. Voyager and Enterprise suddenly felt the helmsman must be in the main cast, though at least on Voyager they were able to do some good character stuff with Tom Paris, but Mayweather? If he weren't on Enterprise, we wouldn't have noticed at all. One area I feel Disco went the wrong direction in this regard was their decision not to include a chief engineer or CMO. With the spore drive such an integral part of the show and engineering being a standing set, there should have been a chief engineer. Maybe not as main cast, but a chief engineer still should have been present. And since Culber has always served the narrative purpose of the CMO anyway, I really don't get why they inserted a silly line of dialogue stating he was not in fact the CMO.
Yeah, but even then, Reno is not the chief engineer. In the second season she talks about having a conversation with the chief engineer, and in the third season she's for some reason taking orders from Stamets, despite outranking him.
...If anything, Reno seems to be a slacker, doing her own thing unless somehow coerced into working for the good of the vessel. We have little idea why she even returned to the Discovery in the first place. She rather apparently left after "Brother", presumably to help untangle her patients from the jury-rigged hoses, and only returned along with the equally absent Nhan for "Obol for Charon". But why return? Yes, she was now in on the secret of the spore drive, an exclusive position of sorts. (And on the Red Signs business, but it's still damned difficult to figure out how that could be a secret when the Signs were supposed to shine brightly enough to alarm everybody everywhere!) But many people in Starfleet would know about the spore drive and still not be needed aboard the ship. Every episode that makes us ask "Now who was the Chief Engineer again?" highlights the absurdity of the situation. The ship is on the brink of destruction every time the heroes can't decide who really calls the shots. Sure, eggheads like Tilly and Stamets end up devising clever tricks that save the day - but who keeps the ship together in the meantime? And who gets to deconflict the fantastic ideas so that the ship doesn't blow up from the amperage or voltage or cochraneage requirements of those? Back in the days of Lorca, it was fine for the answer to "Who is in charge?" to be "Nobody - and that's the way Lorca loves it!". A flying lab can easily work that way. A warship can't - and a warship stranded in the future and flying special-ops missions really, really can't. Timo Saloniemi
I don't recall Reno or Nhan leaving after "Brother." For practical purposes, Tilly, Adira, and Paul are sharing the narrative role of "science officer" and Paul and Jett are sharing the narrative role of "engineer."
Nhan was specifically introduced to the top officers at Pike's Ready Room table at her return in "Obol", establishing her absence as having happened in-universe rather than merely on screen. In that same episode, Number One briefly popped up, bringing news from the Enterprise and Spock (these relating to whatever dockyard held the ship, and to Starbase 5 which had the dirt on the half-Vulcan). And it was with this same episode that Reno returned to the ensemble, even if she subsequently went unseen a lot. The implication and logical in-universe interpretation is that the ship visited a location that hosted Nhan, Reno and Una all. Or then received a visit from a courier asset that carried all three. But there is a pronounced time interval between the appearance of Nhan and beaming onboard of Una, which would make the skipper of the courier pretty mad: "Why can't they all offload at the same time so that I can move on?!". So the ship briefly docking with a starbase would be a more satisfactory solution. Perhaps with a base at Earth/Sol, rather than with SB5, so that Reno's patients and Una's ship would be getting the best possible care*. The heroes are sort of idling currently anyway, having no new leads on either the Signs or Spock, and Pike doesn't yet have a reason to steer clear of the rest of Starfleet. Of course we fail to get any exterior visuals, since DSC was so cheap on them during the first two seasons... Which works to our advantage here by allowing us to believe in just about any setting. When the heroes crash on The Colony in S3, Reno quips about this place being no Terralysium, as if she had been present during the "New Eden" adventure. But she would have had no excuse for not being absent back then, what with those patients of her to care for. And it's not as if she really can tell anything relevant about the crash site anyway. So she's just quipping for quipping's sake, much like Chekov recognizes "corbomite" in "Deadly Years" despite by all story logic having been absent during "The Corbomite Maneuver". The characters do share stories... (Even if Chekov doesn't talk to Terrell about Khan much.) Timo Saloniemi * Barring, of course, the possibility that SB5 is at Sol. If the hospital is Spock's first choice, it may have been Reno's, too. Possibly the 23rd century center of excellence for Division 14?