When Captain Burnham and the Discovery get assigned a red directive mission, she and Captain Rayner don’t quite sync up. But when Book is called in to help with The Chase, they track down the thieves and learn that this season’s MacGuffin was already opened by Fred. Why don’t more parents register for airline chair? What’s required to rent a shielded dirt bike? Which characters will season 5 be pivoting to full time? It’s the episode that wants a text before you call.
Something that jumped out was Adam’s very astute question; whether this season there will see “an effort toward finally creating an actualised character out of our main character”.
I realised that it’s a fascinating difference between Disco and almost all the other Trek shows. In TOS, TAS, TNG, VOY, ENT, and SNW we see the lead in a self-actualised state when we first meet them. With DS9 we see Sisko questioning his feeling of actualisation early on, but by the end of the pilot we see that conflict resolved. In LD we see 4 lead characters; three of whom seem actualised and one who has a core conflict; but this quite works as they are primarily comedic characters, and the lack of self-actualisation isn’t lingered on. PRO is an outlier as it’s about discovering who you are, which makes an awful lot of sense as the characters are ostensibly children. PIC muddies this by taking a very actualised character, in Picard, and confronting him with a world that’s not the one he last felt actualised in. Though by S03 he’s much returned to his TNG roots as an actualised character.
Now, self-actualisation isn’t a state that you reach and then hold onto forever, it’s a constant process, and we see that process interrupted for many characters in Trek, leading to terrific stories. And many members of the various casts have not been as actualised, which also leads to great arcs. But Disco feels to me to be one of the first and only shows where almost nobody feels self-actualised. Saru, Reno, and Dadmiral are about as close as you get.
I don’t know if it’s a perfect benchmark but I feel as though if you can answer “how would X handle this situation, with confidence, that character has probably been rounded out and presented as an actualised character.