Star Trek Discovery is a perfect example of how to build wonderful support characters and ideas, but have terrible main characters and story execution.

Literally all of the supporting characters, like Saru, Tilly, Staments, Culber, Reno, Adira…they’re fantastic characters.

Burnham, and by virtue nearly every character she frequently interacts with, are tainted. She’s a Mary Su, fixer of all things, get out of writer’s block free card. Even when they “kick her down”, she still comes back as the solution when the writers run out of ideas. Even when she jumped into the future, the writers just couldn’t fucking help themselves with the prions and making her immediately say “I’m smart and the best. You should do this” to an admiral with an entire swath of doctors and advisors available. Somehow she’s jumped hundreds of years into the future and is supposed to be out of her depth, but is the expert? Fuck off.

Saru and Tilly somehow comes out mostly untainted, but Georgio, Booker, etc. all get overshadowed by her shit character design by virtue of being joined at the hip with her story.

Also, the stories always build up to some “grand reveal” that is utterly stupid. Dilithium exploded because feelings. DMA “oops our bad” aliens. Shitty Klingons. An AI that never heard of backups.

The most interesting arcs are the Emerald Chain, Ariam’s sacrifice, and Zora. Like…Ariam’s sacrificial story was AMAZING. Why tf didn’t they do stories like that the rest of the time???

If they had spent less time making Burnham the solution to everything while promoting her shit self to Captain and written things that built to a satisfying conclusion, it could have been a good show.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t a good show.