[timun]

Originally Posted by KTrain

I mentioned this before but it doesn't make a whole lot of sense that a military/exploration vessel would have so many anxiety ridden, command questioning and mentally unstable crew members. I get that it's supposed to make them more interesting characters but it makes me question the hiring practices of the Federation.

On TNG you believed any one of the main cast members could take over command of the ship if they had to. Some less successfully than others but if I were an ensign I wouldn't worry as much as I would if Tilly suddenly sat in the chair. Even Troi had her chance and did a fine job.

I guess it helped that they built each character up over many seasons so we knew that, while they had flaws, they were all capable officers.

Spoiler!

Originally Posted by timun

The fact that the Enterprise crew characters, particularly Anson Mount's 'Pike', were more interesting than the Discovery crew cardboard cut-outs characters is emblematic of the massive, massive problems of that show. Frankly it's just... dumb. It's a dumb show with terrible writing.

I look back on TOS, TNG, DS9 and yeah they had a lot of hokey moments, but they also had all these wonderful allegorical stories and morality plays. Some characters were better written than others, or more thoroughly fleshed out than others, but at least they were woven into a story wherein they were shown to be competent people. STD characters other than Burnham are pointless and stupid; their actions are irrelevant, they contribute essentially nothing to the story, they're just occupying seats on a bridge set. If they killed them all off and replaced them in the next episode it would be meaningless to the overarching story. TOS/TNG/DS9 had one-off characters who were better characterized than 90% of the main cast of STD. I feel sorry for the actors, as surely they didn't set out to be a part of something so tedious.

I re-watched a fourth-season episode of TNG relatively recently, one wherein Geordi Laforge is kidnapped by the Romulans and brainwashed into assassinating the governor of a Klingon colony fighting for independence. (A bit of an homage to The Manchurian Candidate.) At one point they discover Enterprise's cargo transporters were surreptitious used to send weapons to the rebels and the records have been expertly falsified, and Worf asks the engineers working on it "which members of the crew could have accomplished this?" Laforge says he could have, so could Data of course, and Chief O'Brien, and Lieutenant So-and-so.

Point being there were several subject matter experts on the ship, and they all could have done it. The ship was full of smart, competent people, and even this extremely difficult cover-up could have been accomplished by more than one person on the ship. We as the viewers know it was Laforge himself who did it, and it's the first clue Worf/Data have that it was Laforge because when asked for alibis: Data and the unseen Lt. What's-his-face were at their duty stations, O'Brien was with Keiko in a public place, and Laforge says he was in his quarters and has no alibi.

That story would never have happened on Discovery, because Michael Burnham is the only one who does anything anyway so of course it would have been her. Or it would have been one of the background characters with no plausible reason or explanation, and Burnham—and only Burnham—could have figured it out. (Whereas in the TNG episode it's Data who ultimately deduces that Geordi has been brainwashed, but Data wouldn't have figured it out nor stopped Geordi without Picard, Riker and Worf's help.)