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J!! wrote:

BunBun299 wrote:Like the security officer in this STD episode. Nobody cares that she died. She showed up, had some lines, did something stupid while attempting to appear all badass, and died, having served her purpose to the plot.

so, basically, she died just like any other red-shirt.

Eeyup. More dialogue than a typical red shirt. But I think that was basically to help her to fulfill her true roll in the story. To make Michael look good by comparison.

BunBun299 wrote:

J!! wrote:

BunBun299 wrote:Like the security officer in this STD episode. Nobody cares that she died. She showed up, had some lines, did something stupid while attempting to appear all badass, and died, having served her purpose to the plot.

so, basically, she died just like any other red-shirt.

Eeyup. More dialogue than a typical red shirt. But I think that was basically to help her to fulfill her true roll in the story. To make Michael look good by comparison.

Ain't that just about the role of every character?

PlasmaHam wrote:

BunBun299 wrote:

J!! wrote:

BunBun299 wrote:Like the security officer in this STD episode. Nobody cares that she died. She showed up, had some lines, did something stupid while attempting to appear all badass, and died, having served her purpose to the plot.

so, basically, she died just like any other red-shirt.

Eeyup. More dialogue than a typical red shirt. But I think that was basically to help her to fulfill her true roll in the story. To make Michael look good by comparison.

Ain't that just about the role of every character?

Not really. Tilly's turning into a total badass. Saru is becoming a captain on-par with Kirk. Sarek verbally pwnt the Terran Emperor.

If anything, the other characters are starting to make Michael look more and more like an overemotional, while emotionally stunted, loser. I don't know if Vulcan has an analogue to Nikelback...but I'm pretty sure she'd listen the heck out of that.

J!! wrote:

BunBun299 wrote:Like the security officer in this STD episode. Nobody cares that she died. She showed up, had some lines, did something stupid while attempting to appear all badass, and died, having served her purpose to the plot.

so, basically, she died just like any other red-shirt.

Wasn't there some red shirt that showed up in one episode then died the next time they appeared? I remember Chuck commentating on it that it was the shows lame attempt at having side characters (pretty sure it was Voyager but might have been Enterprise).

GandALF wrote:Is this episode really that "dark" or "cynical"? It's fits with Roddenberry's initial space western idea for TOS before he became completely obsessed with utopian claptrap.

People often forget that in TOS, almost every other Starfleet captain we met besides Kirk was either insane (Matt Decker), amoral (Ron Tracey), or both (Garth of Izar). Discovery's just showing us what a ship skippered by one of these madmen might be like. Lorca's not remotely Garth-levels of sadistic pomposity, but he's still in the overlapping section of the Venn diagram between Decker's survivor's guilt and Tracey's "by any means necessary".

(And who knows how stable those guys in "Court Martial" were? They never really talk. But it makes Commodore Stone's statement in that episode all the more illustrative:

Not one man in a million could do what you and I have done. Command a starship. A hundred decisions a day, hundreds of lives, staked on you making every one of them right. You're played out, Jim. Exhausted.

It's no wonder so many of them snap.)

There's a reason military tours are limited and typically have mandatory downtime. Really the idea of a 5 year mission with seemingly the same crew for most if not all of it is insane.

There are tons of downtime in between missions and assignments in Star Trek. The episodic organization makes you forget it, but it still takes weeks to months, to get from one place to another. Time during which nobody really has anything to do at all, especially the entire command staff. Outside of some scientists who lock themselves up in their laboratory, Kirk has all the time he needs and could want, to chase shortskirts around the ship day in day out, while Spock plays his lyra and Bones contemplates on his horrible fate of having to treat whatever STD Kirk brought aboard and spreads this time around.

Madner Kami wrote:There are tons of downtime in between missions and assignments in Star Trek. The episodic organization makes you forget it, but it still takes weeks to months, to get from one place to another. Time during which nobody really has anything to do at all, especially the entire command staff. Outside of some scientists who lock themselves up in their laboratory, Kirk has all the time he needs and could want, to chase shortskirts around the ship day in day out, while Spock plays his lyra and Bones contemplates on his horrible fate of having to treat whatever STD Kirk brought aboard and spreads this time around.

I've no doubt there's more recreation than on a modern navy ship but travel between places is very much not downtime. There's tons of work that goes into the day to day running of a ship, and if that wasn't true for the starship's in Star Trek they wouldn't have as large of a crew as they do. You know what Kirks time is going to be spent on? Managing his 400+ crew. Which at a minimum is going to require hours of paperwork a day, and that's assuming a well organized chain of command that prevents unnecessary paperwork going up. (starfleet's organizational structure is a mess)

There have been a few cases where we've seen the Enterprise can be run with a crew of less than ten people ("By Any Other Name . . ." comes to mind, where some aliens decide that all crewmembers outside of Kirk, Spock, Bones, and Scotty are non-essential).

Fianna wrote:There have been a few cases where we've seen the Enterprise can be run with a crew of less than ten people ("By Any Other Name . . ." comes to mind, where some aliens decide that all crewmembers outside of Kirk, Spock, Bones, and Scotty are non-essential).

WITH the modifications they made, mind you. Plus the rest of them and their super-duper Andromedan selves.

...Hoping someday future Trek will follow up on the Kelvans.