Wait, why is that character dead again..? And other Discovery questions

So I just finally was able to start watching Discovery recently, and now I am on season 2, and in the episode

Spoiler

"Daedalus"...why is Airiam dead? She was wearing a spacesuit when she was ejected. A very smart spacesuit. Shouldn't the suit have detected it was in space, and activated that Iron Man helmet...? And what about ship's transporters...couldn't they beam her on board once she was ejected...?

And I am pissed that they finally give one of the most interesting looking and mysterious background characters some screen time and a backstory...then kill her off in the same episode. WTF!?

Also, in the episode before that, in the flashback to Vucan's Forge...I do with that had been a Le-matya chasing Michael, and not just some random CGI monster. Wasted opportunity - especially in an episode were there are so many other call backs to TOS and that era.

Oh well.

EDITED TO ADD: And I think that character's fate would have had much more meaning to me if I'd actually got a chance to get to know the character and care about them...

 

S1 had twice the number of such questions, so maybe S3 will make sense

 

Seriously? Damn. Like, no one on the writing staff went "Wait...isn't she wearing a spacesuit...?"

Maybe they figured she *had* to die, because her programming was corrupted, and she would ALWAYS try to destroy humanity...?

But that's not consistent with how the crew have acted in the past when they would fight like hell to save a character, even if it meant putting everything on the line.

 

Like most disco episodes, they try to force some major emotional reaction in a rush, and in the end, it all makes little sense. Previous Trek allowed the required buildup for such things, and never exaggerated them. Let's hope S3 continues the show's maturation.

 

TOS used one and gone characters that we cared about all the time.

 

Yeah, I think it's because they only have like 13 - 15 episodes a season...where if they had 22 like the older series, they would have more time to develop characters and not rush story arcs.

Plus maybe then we could have a few stand-alone episodes. Story arcs are fun for a while...and it's nice to see episodes have continuing connections, which I didn't always feel with TOS and rarely with TNG. Stuff would happen, and then never be mentioned eve again. But story arcs are so over used in TV now days.

And where an episode that is a stand alone can be a fun rewatch (I mean, how many times have we all re-watched our favorite episodes of TOS and TNG)...but when an episode is just part 5 of 13...I don't really enjoy going back and re-watching them anymore. Not without having to rewatch everything before it and after it.

 

Spoiler

It was explained. Simplifying the body of Airiam there were two personalities of Airiam and Control. It was Airiam's personality that made it impossible to turn on the helmet after it had been thrown out of the lock to prevent artificial intelligence from being updated with sphere data. For this reason, there was no other solution either, because if Control had fully taken over the Airiam body, then she would have pursued the plan.

 

Spoiler: ...More of the same

Heck, even after they recovered the body, they went to extra trouble to kill it a bit more, because that was the only way to be sure.

Saving Airiam was never an option or a goal, as the necessity of killing her was specified by hers truly even before the heroes knew there was saving to be done. Killing her was, with her full consent and desire.

Timo Saloniemi

 

Why are you using spoiler tags? That's completely unnecessary.

 

Oh, it did not. Three examples just from Voyager off the top of my head:

- The bright, vivacious Lindsay Ballard, Harry's long-time friend, makes her miraculous return from the dead, and we have an episode built around her struggle to fit back in. She was never mentioned in the previous 135 episodes, and was simply retconned into continuity.
- The Doctor gets a holographic family. Cue daytime soap melodrama.
- Joe Carey gets brought back after years of absence, gets given a hobby and a wife - all to try to create a modicum of interest before he's killed off.

It may have been a brief build, but Discovery did more to make me care about Ariam in one episode than other series did about some of the main characters in their entire run.

 

I never saw that as a deeply emotional arc, since she was dead already and people had moved on, and even Harry found it a little odd. Not a tragic sudden loss of a beloved character.

I don't see how the holo adventures of a realistic family simulation compares to losing a bridge officer that we never cared about and suddenly should.

Was his death the emotional focus of the episode? I don't remember.

What I meant was the tragic and well-prepared impact of losing Tasha, Dax, Edith, K'Ehlyr, Spock, Data, Kirk...

 

According to concept art and the script, that WAS a le-matrya chasing Michael...

 

tasha's death was shocking, cause we knew her cruel past, her admiration for the other main characters, her romance with data, and because her death was meaningless and unexpected. edith was built as this angel of a person with a remarkably accurate vision of a better future, kirk and her fell in love, and then she had to die for the greater cause. one of the most powerful scenes in tos. data and kirk were of course built through many episodes and movies. k'ehlyr was struggling with worf, then admitted her feelings, she was the only one worf had, she had a kid! then she was murdered by a coward for investigating his father's crimes, and her last act was placing the kid's hand in worf's. powerful!
then we have a random bridge officer who never said more than a few words before, suddenly we see bits and pieces from her past, then she dies. very rushed buildup to a death I couldn't connect to as much as to the others.

 

Edith and K'Ehleyr appeared in one and two episodes respectively, they did not get more or less rushed build up than Airiam and your descriptions are very selective, you intentionally write about Edith's and K'Ehleyr's personalities, pasts, dreams, what they did on the show, how they related to other people and Airiam gets "bits and pieces from her past". Your bias couldn't be more obvious.


I can do that too:

Airiam was a woman who married a man named Stephen, he died in a shuttle crash, she survived but needed cybernetic augmentations, as a result of this she had to manually delete or archive memories, through this we learned what was important to her, the memory of Stephen but also the memories of her friends on Discovery. When she was infected and partly taken over by a malevolent AI she managed to keep it in check by sheer willpower to give her friends the chance to kill the AI and let them survive, she sacrificed her own life for her chosen family.

Edith was some chick from the past, we saw bits and pieces of her life and political leanings, then she was run over by a car.

 

I don’t blame Discovery for not fully developing all the supporting characters. If they had 26 episodes a season full of mostly standalones, more development would be mandatory. But with most episodes having main arc tunnel vision you can’t blame them for letting characters develop naturally in the story without jamming anything in.

 

This. And I'll raise the stakes: we are to feel bad that a one off character in "Balance of Terror" who had just gotten married died. There is a whole coda wrapped around his widow. What did we know about either of those characters? Did that matter?

It's such an odd thing to me that in a show where characters can come and go and die according to the needs of the plot that there is this expectation that all deaths must be perfectly planned out, and require appropriate build up in order to feel something.

 

I think that people hold DIS to a higher standard when it comes to plot elements having the proper buildup and fallout because it's explicitly a serialized show. No one ever expected anything better from TOS, TNG, or VOY because they were totally - or almost totally - episodic adventure shows.

Personally, I wouldn't have needed that much more buildup of Airiam in order feel her death was properly laid out. Just actually including the scenes with her casually chitchatting with Tilly and the others around the table in the earlier episodes would have done it. There was a tiny bit of foreshadowing that she was compromised of course, but it came across that they basically decided to humanize her/develop her more or less on a whim (which is almost certainly the case).

I mean, it's better than the alternative, which would be for her to go straight from bridge furniture to plot device. But a bit of earlier legwork would have made it feel less artificial.

 

Nothing about Airiam’s death felt like redshirting.

I like that Discovery is the kind of show where characters can just die as quickly as you can in war. They don’t overdo it the way a show like 24 does. They strike just the right balance between always having jeopardy and suspense but also not devaluing the characters lives or punishing investment.

 

Exactly this. I don't need all these little moments to know a character. She was present, apart of the crew, and had sufficient interaction for me to know enough about her to be along for the ride.

Mileage will vary, but even in serialized shows I don't expect every single character to get the same level of development. That doesn't make their deaths less impactful, at less for me.