The Tragedy of Tilly

How Discovery squandered one of its breakout characters

My main travel reading for our trip to Mexico City was the tail end of the A Time To… series. On the flight home, though, I finished more quickly than anticipated and was thrown back on the resources of the random assortment of Star Trek novels that my Kindle had seen fit to download. I let My Esteemed Partner make the selection, and she chose Una McCormack’s Discovery: The Way to the Stars, which might be more accurately entitled The Tilly Novel. I found it to be an unexpected pleasure. McCormack’s tie-in fiction is always much better than it needs to be, with a confident and witty narrative voice and a good ear for making the characters “sound right.” Perhaps best known for her work on the Cardassians — and especially shines whenever Garak is the point of view character — here McCormack captures the alternating frustration and arrogance of a smart teenager trying to find her way through life. Tilly’s relationship with her mom is so fraught that it verges on being toxic, while still leaving room for Tilly (and the reader) to gradually come to understand her perspective. The handling of the dynamics of divorce and shared caretaking duties with extended family is sensitive and convincing. And Tilly’s initial unsuspected success at making friends at her demanding boarding school only makes her alienation of her peers all the more heartbreaking. When I messaged McCormack to compliment her on the novel and remarked that it was surely the only Star Trek tie-in to be told from the perspective of a sixteen-year-old girl, she replied that she tried to write the book she would have liked to read at that age. Despite the gender difference, I think that—as a smart kid facing some version of the same challenges Tilly did—I may have benefited from reading it at that age as well.

The uniqueness of the novel highlights the uniqueness of Tilly as a character. In the often super grim environs of Discovery season 1, she was a breath of fresh air — at once comic relief and emotional center. This naive, even awkward young woman would have fit right into a normal Starfleet ship but finds herself bunking with a mutineer under the command of a Mirror Universe imposter. With pluck and determination, she makes the best of the situation, setting herself for an eventual command.

When the show’s trajectory was disrupted by its bizarre leap into the future, Tilly’s own character arc was abruptly accelerated as well, as Captain Saru picked the young ensign to be his first officer. When push came to shove, though, Tilly was not up to the task, allowing the ship to be captured. And in subsequent seasons, her character was sidelined to the point of basically being written off the show. In her absence, Adira becomes the brilliant young up-and-comer and awkward comic relief. The in-story reason for this shift was that Tilly discovered a passion for teaching and wanted to help reinvigorate Starfleet Academy, and many fans assumed that the Starfleet Academy series would be a vehicle for her character. But she has been sidelined there as well, demoted to a “guest star”—not even a regular character. (The last sentence has been corrected due to reader input.)

What happened? We have no chance of knowing for sure any time soon, as everyone involved is still presumably bound by NDAs and the desire to maintain good relationships to support their career. But from a story perspective, it’s clear that Tilly was sacrificed to the Iron Law of Discovery: always center Michael Burnham. This applied not only to Tilly, but to the most universally loved character from the series, namely Saru. When he got his chance to be captain in season 3, the purpose of the exercise appeared to be to humiliate him and make him submit to the superior leadership of Michael Burnham. Again and again, he is shown making bad calls he never would have made in past seasons. The appointment of Tilly as first officer is symptomatic—the only reason you would pick someone so young and underqualified is out of insecurity. The experience then kills Tilly’s confidence, setting her up to retire to teaching at the tender age of 23 (or whatever).

All of this paves the way for Michael Burnham’s destiny to be fulfilled, and once she becomes captain, no one else is allowed to save the day or even have a good idea independently of her. The one possible exception is Stamets, whose unique genius allows him to have some insight apart from Michael. But no one else is allowed to achieve escape velocity. Hence, perhaps, their decision to copy Tilly’s main character traits onto the much less charismatic and dynamic Adira, who is redefined not only as Stamets’ protégé but as his adopted child and therefore never fully develops as an “independent” threat to Michael’s dominance.

Again, we will never know exactly what went on here. It could be that the writers and producers misguidedly decided that any decision that could be read as sidelining the first Black female lead character in Star Trek history would be “not a good look.” It could be a dynamic similar to the rumors that The Good Wife’s Julianna Margulies was threatened by breakout star Archie Panjabi (Kalinda) in a way that poisoned their relationship and led to Kalinda being severely sidelined. It could be that other career opportunities simply tempted Mary Wiseman away from the role (as suggested by a Bluesky correspondent). Or it could be some combination of the three!

In any case, it’s a shame—and a clear example of all the ways that Discovery approached its development exactly backwards. Where every previous Star Trek series had gradually discovered what it had to work with in terms of characters and their chemistry, Discovery’s breakneck pace and its tendency to reboot the show every season made the writers and producers err in favor of cutting off possibilities rather than letting them organically develop. Many of the complaints about Discovery come down to this bizarre procedure, but to me the demise of Tilly’s character—the fact that they couldn’t find a place for a funny, optimistic audience stand-in—is the biggest testament to their failure.