10 Star Trek Characters With Wasted Potential

Star Trek: Discovery made the choice from the beginning for one character to be the driving force behind the majority of its plotlines: Michael Burnham. Whilst this isn't inherently a bad thing, and we have gotten some solid character development for Burnham over the years because of it, it hasn't left much room for us to really get to know the rest of the crew. Plus, there are only so many dithyrambic daily logs we need to hear to get the point!

There have been a LOT of characters on Discovery, and a fair few have been rotated in (and out) or even gone the way of the airlock. By the time other series in the franchise had four seasons under their belt (and naturally before this point for The Original Series), we felt like we'd already gotten to know our characters, the whys and the wherefores of their actions, and could probably cite a litany of facts and figures about them. It would be difficult to make the same argument for Discovery in which the bridge characters, most notably, seem all too often relegated to mere background players. Case in point: Lieutenant Commander Airiam.

An intriguing character, present on screen as soon as the Discovery was in the third episode of season one, Airiam was the spore drive ops officer. Visibly a cyborg of some type, surely ripe with potential for development by this fact alone, we learnt little-to-nothing about her until season two when she was infected by Control's future AI and died soon thereafter as a result. Even what we found out about Airiam during these episodes felt tacked-on and stripped down to the bare minimum for the sake of the overarching plot.

The character's backstory itself could arguably have filled at least an entire episode. The dramatic and tragic circumstances that led to Airiam's need for such cybernetic enhancements – a shuttlecraft accident that killed her husband on the way back from their wedding (!) – were underplayed in a wasted chance to further the character. An opportunity was also missed to explore her human-cyborg nature more widely, and the ways in which the technology that was part of her could have benefited the crew and the mission.