Spoilers Star Trek: Discovery 1x15 - "Will You Take My Hand?"

Definitely not in the first season, especially with his obsession with getting home. That was a defining a characteristic from all the other people wanting to get home.

Also, of interesting note, Season 1 of VOY only had 16 episodes. But, DISCO sucks with shorter seasons...

It's a joke...I do that.

 

I doubt the writers had that in mind when writing the character. They didn't sit the writers' room saying "lets make Harry go nowhere a person, that will be so realistic!"

 

Naah. I think she'll join forces with Mudd and together they'll form the 23rd century equivalent of the Maquis .

 

Jammer's review is up, you guys. It's a good read.

 

Occasionally swapping might not be a bad idea. One presumes the writing team can spell. And the SFX guys probably watched a lot of Trek.

 

Forgive us, we don't speak American.

 

From what I've gathered in watching the After Trek program, they actually use quite a few effects houses all at once, so that would explain any inconsistencies in quality. Hopefully, since the next season won't be until 2019/2020, they'll have more breathing room to engage in better quality control.

 

Enjoyed reading that, I think that's a very fair review of the finale and the season as a whole.

 

Whenever the question of characterization comes up in the context of DSC, I notice many people make comparisons between its main characters after 15 episodes and TNG, DS9, VOY main characters with 7 seasons worth of character development behind them. If I had to make a character assessment of Julian Bashir after his first 20 episodes, I would've dismissed him as an overeager, annoying douche who had nothing interesting about him and he basically was only there because they needed a doctor... of course, in his case it's just as much a question of character development as fleshing him out. But still, after a mere 15 episodes, I wouldn't expect to know everything about my characters already.

As for Piller Filler, those were always hit-and-miss for me in earlier series. DS9 managed to do them skillfully, as can be seen in the Quark scene linked before, but it had the advantage of having well-crafted characters, as these slice-of-life scenes often don't add any additional depth to the characters involved. We see Harry Kim playing the clarinet... okay, how does this make him any less of a cardboard cutout? My main problem about these scenes in TNG, VOY and ENT was that they often seemed nothing more than attempts to make the characters seem like real people because other than this they, with a few exceptions, only served as static devices through which the story could be told, serving their purposes, nothing more (I mean, did learning that Travis Mayweather grew up in outer space add anything to his character?). We might have not yet seen much breadth added to DSC's main characters but most of them feel much more like real people for me than Harry or Travis ever did.

Basically, what bugs me about Piller Filler is that when they're used, they're meaningless in terms of adding to the character, and when they would work well, they're not even necessary. Of course, they enrich a series greatly when they work well, like it was with DS9.

 

By the end of series one, we knew Harry well enough to know that now, in DSC, Tilly is more or less the same character archetype. Except Harry had made more friends, revealed more personal info, and had a job that put him where he was because of what he does well at. We knew most of these things about him by the end of Caretaker. We knew more about the entire Voyager senior staff by the end of Caretaker than we do about DSC characters by the end of series one. We knew more about bloody Neelix than we do about most of the DSC crew.
I like DSC plenty, now it’s progressed a bit, but pretending they are more ‘real’ based purely on what we actually see on screen, is a bit of a stretch. We know that in the old days, characters had full bios planned in many cases, even if they were altered further down the road.
We know of two characters with actual hobbies in DSC, and boating Ash only turned up in the last episode. By the end of Caretaker, we know about Paris Family and Academy background, Janeways dogs and relationship, Harry being the new boy, Tuvok working as a spy...by the end of series one, possibly half of it, we know Harry is a musician and has overbearing parents, Chakotay has his New Age Shaman stuff, B’Ellana is a Starfleet drop out and engineering genius, Neelix is a traveller with a shadowy past, Kes likes botany and is essentially curious about everything, Paris is a roguish figure...there are hobbies, likes, dislikes, history (we get two bits of character history unrelated to plot in DSC...boating Ash and When Stamets Met Culber.) things that shape the characters. For a range of characters. We can point at things and say ‘Tom episode’ ‘Neelix episode’.
This is in addition to publicity at launch giving those bios (and Jeri Taylor’s Mosaic and Pathways novels, a bit down the line.) meaning we know about B’Ellana being half Klingon etc.
In DSC, much as it is good, we still barely know over a handful of characters names, let alone why they have metal in their skull etc. The characters we do know about, it’s all plot, and they are mostly gone. It’s all about Burnham.

Travis...meh. I dropped out of ENT pretty damn fast. But those other shows? Particularly VOY? Much much more character work. The EMH never ever gets a name, but he gets more revealed about his character than flipping Saru does. (Is grumpy. Is prey. Is riddled with self-doubt. Same as day one to day 13.)
Is this a failing of going serialised? It’s certainly a failure of the writing this year.

 

What is Tilly's job? Work on calculations? Is she leaving the ship?

 

BY the end of Season 1 of Voyager, we also had 26 episodes, not 15. The story must come first when telling it in a more compact time frame. And what of young Ensign Harry Kim at season 7? Has he changed much from young Ensign Harry Kim from season 1?

 

he was 7 years older, so, middle aged Ensign Hary Kim at that point

 

We had 16 episodes by the end of Voyager season 1.

 

Kirk was convicted on one charge (disobeying orders, I think) and sentenced to a reduction in rank to Captain.

 

Nope, 15 episodes. 16 if you count Caretaker as a two-parter. Voyager was a mid-season premiere in January 1995.

It is tied with DIS as the second-shortest season.

 

And Kirk also didn't have a lawyer, but probably had public opinion on his side.

 

Spock had the business card for Burnham's attorney but left it in the Mark V on Genesis.

 

Again though, you're talking about what they did, not who they are (at least with Saru and Stamets). These are two different things.

I agree that all of them are much more enjoyable to watch than Harry Kim. This is in large part, however, because they are all played by actors an order of magnitude better than Garrett Wang. Basically, it's similar to how Patrick Stewart elevated Picard as a character in the first two seasons of TNG, despite the lines he was given often being trash and his characterization being paper-thin. Writers, directors, and actors all play a role in how characters are portrayed onscreen. We can really only credit the writers with what is said, not with what is shown.

You're right, I was not being charitable enough. There was some character development of these three characters in the show. However, it was essentially entirely limited to episodes 4 through 8. This was when we got great scenes like Stamets brushing his teeth with Culber, Tilly and Burnham jogging around the ship and arguing with the computer about burritos, and Ash, Tilly, and Burnham just hanging out casually in the mess hall. This was also the period of the show, in retrospect, I liked the best for exactly that reason.

In contrast, by Act 2, characterization was basically thrown out the window. Saru degenerated into the XO who XOs the XO stuff (and occasionally had lines about being a Kelpien). Only Doug Jones's performance elevated it. Stamets role devolved into a plot device which occasionally spouted technobabble about the spore drive (I mean seriously, he had two fucking lines in the last episode). Tilly did whatever role on the ship was needed that week, however unlikely a cadet would be involved (although she at least remained true to her characterization).

I don't think you can use a short season and serialization as an excuse for why there aren't enough character moments. As I've said in other threads, look at Season 1 of Game of Thrones. It has roughly the same run time (10 episodes, but most were longer than Discovery - 53-59 minutes long), and roughly the same budget. Yet it managed to develop 19 main cast members and a host of recurring characters as well. Part of how this was done was fully embracing serialization not insisting on some sort of "plot of the week" to occur. Lots of the episodes were focused around nothing except character development - people talking in rooms. Yet it became an incredibly popular show - a show which wasn't binge-watched a season at a time like modern Netflix dramas, but one that people tuned into week after week.