One of Star Trek Discovery’s greatest strengths is that it focuses in on a main character and branches out into only a few side characters, typically in a way to expand that character’s relationship to our protagonist.
This doesn’t stop Discovery from having a huge cast of background characters who, for all intents and purposes are over-glorified extras, albeit extras who are there in every episode.
I challenged myself to name as many characters as I could from Discovery that weren’t from other Trek franchises and here’s what I got:
- Burnham
- Georgiou
- Saru
- Tilly
- Stamets
- Lorca
- Tyler (I can’t even remember his Klingon name)
- L’Rell
Am I aware of other characters? I am, here’s how I remember them:
- Doctor “Stamets’s Husband”
- Busted face blue eye lady
- African helm lady
- Robot head lady
- Asian bridge man
- Black bridge man
- Alien face with mouthpiece security lady
Other than Stamets’s Husband (Hugh, by the way, if I thought harder I would have remembered it), none of them have any characterization. They are nothing more than their physical descriptions. This isn’t a terrible thing. Previous Trek series had background extras, some of whom were in multiple episodes, and were never named. But as soon as they were named they were given a character and something distinct about them beyond the physical or cultural (See Miles O’Brien).
So we have a real problem on our hands when we’re suddenly meant to feel for one of these characters who, up to this point, has had maybe ten lines of dialogue and isn’t regularly even called out by name.
This happened tonight. Lieutenant Airiam, who I thought was some kind of android, gets all kinds of exposition shoehorned into a very short space. And then she is disposed of and everyone is really broken up by it. It’s all filmed very well. It would be super emotional, and very heart wrenching, if I knew who that character was before.
It’s not impossible to introduce a character, or even many characters, in the course of an hour long TV episode, make the audience feel for them, and then have them suffer a tragedy. Trek has done this a lot (see TNG S5E25 The Inner Light). The issue is when that character has been on screen for hours and hours and hours doing absolutely nothing distinct and then all of the sudden we’re told (not shown) that this person is everyone’s best friend… oh and this character has a tragic backstory. Oh? And why has none of this come up before?
All they had to do was give Airiam something distinct to do in the previous episodes. Call her by name a lot. Have other characters comment on her remarkable “cyborg brain”. Ok… she’s human, just has cyborg parts. Interesting. Have one or two brief conversation scenes where someone (probably Tilly because she’s awkward) tries to bring up how she ended up with a cyborg head. Airiam can politely decline to answer, or maybe she comes up with an excuse that they need to get back to work. Ok, it’s something tragic and painful.
THEN on her final episode you reveal her tragedy and off her. Now she’s more than just a cool looking background player.
All I gotta say is if Asian Bridge Man is next to go the show will just be too painful for me to continue watching. My heart will be broken.
Armchair Screenwriter 