Story on the Brain

As I keep thinking about character, I keep coming back to Kira Nerys on Star Trek DS9. She wasn't my favorite character. I was in love with Bashir and wanted to BE Dax, obviously! But Kira is one of the greatest examples of how to write a character of all time, so I wanted to talk about her in more depth. Kira is a guerilla fighter at the end of a horrific war of occupation. As her enemy finally retreats, a new power steps in to keep the peace. She's understandably a little intense and she doesn't trust these new people, the Federation, any more than she trusted the Cardassians who just left.  That is A LOT to have preloaded in a character. And we learn it instantly in the first episode, the first minute we meet Kira. We can tell from how she behaves that she's on a hair trigger at all times and has no patience with any softness or nonsense. She gets along with Odo because he was fair and neutral during the occupation. She doesn't like or trust Quark because he'...

The season started out strong, with Michael Burnham making decisions and doing things, which sounds funny to say, but the season suffered greatly from a whole lot of nothing going on. And by that I mean, entire arcs that were about nothing much at all. Adira, who is a zero as a character anyway, leaves for a while and it doesn't matter and nobody cares. They showed up again and people were like, "Were you gone?" Stametts actually said, "Oh, you're back." Tilly, someone we loved, suddenly leaves the show, everyone is sad for literally thirty seconds, then nothing. Dr. Culber gradually realizes he is upset over legitimate things like BEING DEAD and decides to be allowed to be upset. This takes many scenes over many episodes. It reveals nothing. It shows no growth. He was lovely to start with and lovely to end with. Nothing changed in his behavior or choices because of it.  There is no CHARACTER in any of these characters. Imagine trying to explain one of them ...

Season Two went fine, though the actor playing Ash Tyler developed a bizarre speech effect from bad dialect coaching. It will sound farfetched, but he sounded exactly like Nick Blood did when he suffered from bad dialect coaching on Agents of Shield. British people! Just let them be British! If they're not good at an American accent, don't make them try to do one. Oh boy was that distracting. It was even hard to understand him, which by the way it would not have been in his native accent. The character of Ash Tyler was a problem the whole season long. He was thrown here and there like they had no clear plan for him. The guy with severe PTSD and major identity issues who had like two hours of training to join Section 31 ended the season being head of it. More nonsense. This was the beginning of the make it up as you go along problems that became unmanageable in Season Three.  Also L'Rell had a bizarre CGI face at the beginning that threw me out of the story entirely. And I d...

I'm just starting to catch up to the modern iterations of Star Trek. After all of those, I'll catch up on Star Wars. The last Star Trek I saw, not counting the movies, was when I tried to watch Enterprise (hated it) and before that Voyager (hated it) and before that DS9 (loved it, lived it, breathed it, obsessed about it). So I am relieved but also I suppose a little disappointed that I neither hate nor love Discovery. I like it! I like it just fine.  And I have many things to say about it, because when I watch something, I think about it constantly, to the point where I can't sleep after watching. This is sort of a problem, actually. I mean I was up most of the night. I was confused about why it was so bright outside my windows, until I realized that was morning starting to happen.  Not sure what the solution to that is. "Don't think about it" has never worked with me. SPOILERS ABOUND. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED. Discovery! It's fascinating to me that it's ...