10 Dumbest Things In Star Trek: Discovery
9. Turbolifts
A simple device again born with the 1964 pilot that Discovery took that little bit too far. It's best to get the ones staring viewers in the face out of the way before we focus on some of the more questionable and less-screamed-about decisions.
The function of turbolifts themselves has never come into question, and they've been the setting for a few classic moments. Riker and Shelby in The Best of Both Worlds, Picard with his crew of children in Disaster or Odo and Lwaxana in The Forsaken from DS9, as just three examples. Yet Discovery wanted to do something different, but forgot spatial awareness in the process.
Season three's finale, The Hope That is You, Part II, makes the deck numbering of The Final Frontier look like a minor glitch in the timeline. Gone are the traditional turbolift shafts, replaced by what can only be described as a TARDIS-esque void within the heart of the Crossfield Class starship. Just where the crew spaces have all gone is a mystery, as suddenly it looks as though the entire ship's internal space has turned into a giant airport baggage carousel.
The lifts themselves aren't confined to a set path, it seems and given the length of the hand-to-hand combat sequences here, the Discovery has also expanded by a couple of miles in length and height. Star Trek has dabbled with "bigger on the inside" before, notably in Enterprise's second season, Future Tense, where a shuttle-type craft is revealed to have a much larger interior than first appears.
But in Discovery, size has been established, and while the ship has had a makeover into Disco-A, there's no reasonable explanation of why or how its interior became ridiculously expansive.