Off the top … this is my personal opinion and take … it’s a hot topic and from the start, I’ll apologize if I get anything terribly wrong or if I offend anyone.

After several of you encouraged me, I went and binge watched the entire series over about two months. The start was exciting and I was happy to see so many new ideas and story lines created for the show. As a person of colour (I’m Indigenous Canadian) I was also happy to see characters of varied colour, backgrounds, species, orientations and sexualities in the show … it made sense because a future open world won’t just be a cast of uniformly identical individuals everywhere. A uniform group of individuals that all look, act and present in the same way are always painted as villains like the Borg, so why would civilization aspire for universal conformity?

I loved the characters and potential for growth of their individual stories like Tilly, Saru, Owosekun, Detmer, Reno, Nahn … or the couple of Stamets/Culber, and Adira/Gray

I enjoyed Burnham at first and I loved the idea of a female woman of colour taking a lead of the show … but to me, they went overboard with her storyline and her personality. In the TOS series, Captain Kirk played a part in events in the galaxy … he didn’t become central in the fate of the universe. I think the problem they had was that Burnham almost became like a God-like character that was central to the future of the entire universe. I like making characters important … it just gets difficult when you surround the entire universe around one person because then the stories all become the same … the universe is in danger because of one person, so it can only be saved by one person. And no matter what is going to happen in the future, you know that it will always revolve around that one person.

All the other Star Trek leads were passive participants in a greater story (I’ve only ever watched TOS, TNG, VOY and some of DS9) … Kirk, Picard, Janeway, Sisko mostly played roles where they were part of events in the galaxy that involved them but their survival didn’t hinge on the fate of entire galaxy or universe … their stories are usually stories of survival that would have been resolved whether or not they lived or not. Burnham is different … all her stories revolve around her and the fate of the entire universe hinges on just her, which was exciting the first time … but lost it’s suspense every other time it happened.

But about the most disappointing thing for me in the series was a lack of seeing the character JET RENO. I would have loved to see Reno square off with Stamets more often in engineering and the science lab.

I would love a spinoff show that centred around Engineering with Reno … and maybe an episode where they could bring together all the Star Trek engineers … Scotty, Laforge, O’Brien and all the other engineer characters and even throw Data in their too in some time warp multiverse event that unexpectedly brings them all together for a brief moment.

I think that was my favourite part of Discovery … the potential for more … the potential to see more of a story from each of the characters that made up the show.