Best new Star Trek characters of the Paramount+ era
By Marc Kick
The Chief Engineer on the USS Discovery is no stranger to thinking outside the box
As Chief Engineer onboard the USS Discovery – an experimental ship equipped with a spore drive that uses the mycelial network to “jump” from location to location in space – Paul Stamets often needs to be extremely creative in how he approaches the engineering issues that the crew of the USS Discovery often face.
Case-in-point, prior to truly understanding exactly how to navigate the mycelial network, Paul figured a way to use a tardigrade they named “Ripper” as a navigator, and when it was realized that by using the tardigrade, every jump injured the creature, he injected himself with tardigrade DNA and made himself the navigator. Thus, injuring himself, but in the end, it got the job done. Later on, he would perfect the whole process implanting cyborg augmentations in his forearms. That’s just one example of Paul’s scientific know-how, and his willingness to expand on what is known, which has been littered throughout Discovery’s 4 seasons.
The Paul Stamets character also explores what it is to be an openly gay man in the Star Trek Universe. Naturally, in Gene Roddenberry’s accepting future, all sexual orientations are welcome and though this may be a new thing on a Star Trek show, it’s just another of many barriers that Star Trek has busted down in it’s almost 60 year history. Of course, the actor playing Paul is openly gay in real life, so it’s not so much of a stretch for him, but it certainly is a refreshing quality for all the characters on the show to not make any deal of it whatsoever. The real world could certainly learn a lot from this idealistic future.