LogFAQs > #932824881

#58 - Ash Tyler

Dissecting the problems with Discovery Season One led me to one utterly immutable conclusion - Michael Burnham is a character only as good as the characters that surround her. Ash Tyler existed only to ask the question of "Why is Michael Burnham so great?" and as such, he proved to be the single worst character in the first season. His appearances were nails on the chalkboard consistently. The revelations of his background only further infuriated me in the way that Discovery Season One had such a difficult time understanding what made Star Trek wonderful. Sappy romance plagues a show about the unbridled optimism of utopian futures and exploration of the unknown.

The solution to Tyler was to give him an entirely unconnected plotline in season two; this proved even more poisonous in terms of my opinion of the character. Now, a character that only existed to tell me how great Burnham was ended up separated from her, floating pointlessly in the overplayed Klingon plotline that I had desperately hoped was stamped out at the end of the first season. With no real motivation or even reason for being on my screen, someone I hated now did me the disservice of not getting to a freaking point, lingering like a bad taste in my mouth.

Very, very rarely do I just want someone to die on screen. Just never show up again. Tyler is that character for me. More than anyone else in the Star Trek legacy, I just want him to kill himself and rid me of his vapid story arcs and pointless, drawn-out, badly written dialogues.

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"It is too easy being monsters. Let us try to be human." ~Victor Frankenstein, Penny Dreadful