I don't mind being blamed. Wouldn't be the first time.
Spoilers Strange New Worlds General Discussion Thread
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I don't mind being blamed. Wouldn't be the first time.
Because they're not main characters.
Then they might as well have the ship be 90% automated.
Exactly like the bridge crew of Kirk's Enterprise during the original series.
TOS was 95% about Kirk and Spock, 4% about McCoy and most of the remaining 1% was assigned to Scotty. The fact we even knew Uhura loved singing and music and spoke Swahili and that Sulu was into botany and collecting archaic firearms were pretty generous considering all we ever knew about Chekov was his age, he was an only child and had a difficult, combative girlfriend at the Academy.
There is no reason they have to be main characters other than emulating shows from the '80s and '90s.
The main characters are ones who's names appear in the opening credits not ones who happen to have a seat on the bridge.
Most of the development of Uhura and Sulu happened in the first part of Season 1, before Gene Coon came on and they figured out the format, and were experimenting with it being a true ensemble show.
I don't think they were. A lot of those bits could have been assigned to the "crewman of week" like Riley.
And Riley got almost as much development as Chekov. And Riley was in just two episodes out of 80.
Well, you just jumped from one track to another there, looking for a rarionale to criticize the show. That doesn't work.
Well, when the Asian woman at the navigation console on SNW (Mitchell?) gets an episode to herself then maybe Trek will get out of the habits it's had since, oh, 1966 or even the two TOS pilots. There are a few SNW officers who barely get development and aren't just one-off background extras with given names.
Or maybe the formula works just fine both in the great Trek series and the "meh" ones?
Or maybe the formula works just fine both in the great Trek series and the "meh" ones?
Did anyone say that? The opposite is also true of a lot of minor characters. It's hardly "that's Star Trek".
Pretty sure, if the writers take a shine to a character or actor, they'll probably get development. Heck even some main characters on TV shows lack development if the interest isn't there from the folks writing.
I'm not saying it was serialized - it clearly wasn't, at all. But they didn't really know if they were trying to have a real ensemble or "Captain Kirk's adventure of the week."
It wasn't until the back half of the season they decided on "Kirk, Spock, and McCoy beam down somewhere, have an adventure."
Garak and Nog on DS9 became fan favorite characters because the writers liked what Andrew Robinson and Aron Eisenberg did with their early appearances and wrote more and meatier script material for both. They were intended as a glorified one-off or an occasional supporting character but with deft writing and the fun, tongue-in-cheek performances by those actors the writers ran hog wild with both.
If it does it won't be Star Trek.
There's nothing to apologize for. A show isn't required to develop minor characters. Doing so is just a creative choice. Some shows do it more than others. Both are completely valid approaches.
Also, almost no series ever deeply develops *every* minor character. I'm thinking of every show I've ever watched that had a truly richly developed set of secondary characters (sometimes a dozen plus of them) and every single one of those series also had at least one (usually more than one) secondary character who was not significantly developed at all.
It always comes down to the decision of the writers about who they want to focus on and who they don't want to focus on. It is never, ever the case that a story *must* focus on specific minor characters whether the writers want to or not. The writers of DSC chose to focus on minor characters like Sarek or Cornwell, not on minor bridge crew characters. They have the right to do that no matter how much you want them to focus on the bridge crew instead.
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