Stick with me just a second while I am pedantic. It looks like a nice day and there will be wind and my daughter has been wanting to fly a kite she won at a party. I played "The Kite" from "You're a Good Man Charlie Brown" on Alexa and the recording they chose was Anthony Rapp. His character on Discovery just wouldn't ever make me think he was a Broadway guy. I don't think that's really unknown. He was in the original cast of Rent and in the movie. Broadway has mainly been his career.
I started thinking about what his job is on Discovery and I am not looking it up, but I just don't know. He feels like the Chief Engineer, but he was billed before the show started as being an exo-mycologist and that stuck with me. Certainly to invent the spore drive, he would need to know a lot of engineering, but my starting impression was always that his role on the ship was running the Spore Drive experiment that he had invented. The ship has Impulse and Warp Drive and the whole compliment of ship systems that I didn't think (at least originally) that he was responsible for. Discovery has a markedly different storytelling scheme than Star Trek that came before. There is a whole set of bridge officers that look familiar when I see them, but I don't know their names or generally their jobs. I know the lady with the cybernetic implants is the pilot. They have talked about that enough. I remember just from recent dialog this season that the black guy is communications. I don't know his name. I don't know any of their names. There is an asian guy and there is a black lady that is really good in a fight. So she might be tactical? Security?
I feel weird about it. The model has always been that the characters of the show were the bridge officers, the doctor, and the engineer. But on Discovery the characters are:
Michael - The Science Officer, the prisoner consultant, the first officer, the Captain
Stamets - Exo-Mycologist, Inventor, Now Spore Drive core (weird that he invented the spore drive, wrote a business case, got 2 ships built at a cost in the billions, got 2 crews hired, and then eventually found out that his co-inventer must have discovered that the reason the whole thing didn't work was because it needed a living component and they never realized that). Maybe he is in charge of all engineering on the ship, I don't know
Culber - Doctor and trying to become counselor, sometimes dead.
Book - Courier, Boyfriend, Roustabout
Saru - First Officer, Captain, First Officer, Ambassador who generally steals every scene as far as I am concerned
Grudge - Doesn't do a lot, but I know her name because she gets mention in every episode.
Tilly - Ensign whose job I was unclear on, helper in engineering who just knows all the science I guess
Adira - Castaway?, Liaison that understood future tech, ....engineering flunky?
Reno - Castaway, steals the other scenes because never in shot with Sara, engineering flunky?
This show is heavy on scientists, which is actually.....what Starfleet is supposed to be about, but Star Trek has never made it look that way. After Season 1 was Tilly reporting to Stamets as a junior engineering officer? It definitely looks like Adira and Reno work for Stamets. He definitely looks like the chief engineer at this point. Maybe always was? I have no idea what anyone's rank is other than Michael and Sara and the new First officer. Is Adira an officer now? Was Reno a chief engineer on the broken ship who was just like "Oh, I'll work anywhere"?
I was going to say the pedantry was over after the first paragraph, but then I wasn't sure. It is done now.
Can anyone name all the bridge officers with their jobs without looking it up? Bonus points if you can say their ranks without looking them up. All on the honor system, because I won't know if you looked it up.
