And at this point, the extended crew of the Discovery was thoroughly sidelined: Burnham’s personal relationships took priority over everything else.
This is the part that I’ve never got on well with in Discovery.
In TNG, it’s not a show about Picard, or Riker, or any of the other individuals. It’s a show about the crew. I’ve even seen it said that the actual star of the show is the ship.
Whereas, with Disco, it’s a show about Michael Burnham and everyone else has a bit part. That always felt weird for a Star Trek show. I want to see how the crew works together to solve problems and overcome things with everyone on an equal footing regardless of their rank in the show.
And I think that’s why there was such a warm reception to season 3 of Picard. It brought the crew back together. Picard alone isn’t satisfying enough. What we wanted was him as part of the crew.
Yeah, I agree in part with your points. Any Star trek show should be an ensemble effort, and that’s why, of the newer shows, Lower Decks is much more my bag.
FWIW, I thought the Burnham focus worked in season 1 as our POV into the war setting and previously unseen Trek periode. We got to know the crew through her as she worked her way back into Starfleet. But yeah, past that the “it’s all about Michael” approach became a detriment to the show. There was literally a whole crew to explore like they did, only somewhat, with Saru.
With Picard, I expected the new crew of La Sirena to crystallise around the main character and become a new constellation — but no. Season 2 turned into a strange Gothic exploration of Picard’s past, and one that actually contradicted what we know about the character. If Chabon hadn’t left the writer’s room, I think we would have seen a more compelling story.
I did enjoy parts of the final PIC season, but it felt like it was written by somebody who didn’t really get what TNG was about. The old crew felt two-dimensional, like clichés of themselves, showing up for a cameo and dropping a quip. But I’m already veering way off from the Disco focus of my post 🙂
I feel like that would have worked considering that Burnham starts the show kind of as this hotshot. If the character development focused on the move from being an individual who thought she could do everything and needed no one else into someone realizing that she couldn’t live without the crew, it could have been a good show. There were glimpses of that in the show (the Mudd episode, for example where it literally took everyone to bring him down) but they always went back to everything is about Michael. It felt very similar to how I feel getting sick of how Star Wars can’t get away from the Skywalker family. Every story can’t always be about one character and their immediate family. It gets old.