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Star Trek: Discovery writers come up with great email passwords that they can never successfully enter because they can only ever remember two or three characters.
In fairness to Discotreque, when you make a show that's centered on someone who's not the captain it's harder to do a true ensemble. TNG didn't need to have Picard do everything or even have him really do *anything* in every episode, he was still the captain.
But making a show about Michael Burnham means that the show is going to follow Michael Burnham in a way that command-centered Star Treks didn't follow a single character, so you get a tighter focus on the cast she most interacts with.
Buuuut I think this would be less apparent if they had, like, two or three more episodes a season that were there to help develop other crew members for reasons other than to generate pathos for when they're immediately killed off.
Have an episode where our viewpoint character gets seconded to a task with Detmer. Have an episode where she gets stuck in a shuttle with someone. Have an episode where the main actors get a day off from shooting and we get a reverse Lower Decks episode.
They just... did a really great job on character design and we basically learn nothing about these people. Detmer's whole role in the first season is to use her face to tell us what the crew thinks about other characters.
But anyway. It's the combination of tight character focus (and I love Burnham, it's her show, don't de-center her) *and* tight serialized storytelling without the kind of wacky time-wasting nonsense that lets ancillary characters breathe.
Just give me two, three filler episodes to make the ship and its crew more real and the whole thing will be richer. The story impacts truer. The character connections more organic.
(And I know, it comes down to money. If they had the money to do some episodes for "color fill" they'd do them.)
I'm hopeful that season 3 might be better in this regard as I have a hard time imagining Burnham is not going to be the second-in-command on a ship with a somewhat reduced crew? The more central she is to the ship's operations, the more crew are adjacent to her plot bubble.
Off hand, the only Short Trek I can think of that focused on a Discovery crewmember focused on the well-developed character who is Burnham's roommate/best friend and assistant to another main character. They fill in other parts of the universe, mainly. https://twitter.com/JEBeck00/status/1291433040632320007
And I do actually enjoy the main cast. I loved Tilly's Short Trek. This is me being greedy about something that, as I acknowledged, costs money.
90% of this is me wanting to know more about Detmer. Like is that haircut *strictly* prescription, or dot dot dot question mark
