My understanding is that traditionally, Star Trek series are developed without a particular story arc or progression or use in mind for their characters; rather, they focus on making some characters with interesting hooks and personalities and then seeing where that goes.

Sometimes when you do that it works and a niche and a story for each character emerges; DS9 was great about that. TNG was okay. Voyager was bad-rising-to-okay-sometimes. I think Enterprise was just straight up bad at it. TOS is bad at one part of it (people don't really get multi-episode story arcs or ongoing character development in TOS) but amazing at other parts (regularly giving people major things to do within an episode that fit their character and are interesting to watch.) And it was being made in the 60s, so the part they're bad at is forgivable.

I very much hope that Discovery is being developed from a standpoint of "why is everyone here, and what are we doing with them over the course of many, many episodes" and not simply "we need a guy on helm, because this is Star Trek and there's a guy on helm. Try and make him interesting, and we'll figure him out later."

-Merc
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