Star Trek is a wonderful franchise, filled with beautifully written characters, compelling storylines, and incredible concepts that get brought to life. Across weeks, months, years, and decades, Star Trek has delivered some of the best writing that not only science fiction has ever seen but entertainment has ever seen. Some of the best stories that you can find in this world happen in the run time of a Star Trek property.
That's made possible thanks in part to the dynamic and enthralling characters that make up this wonderful little universe of ours. Yet, they don't always get it right from the jump. Sometimes plots fall apart, characters don't get over and entire concepts fall asunder.
The issue with that, usually, is a poor starting point. Getting it right from the beginning matters. Trying to create a dynamic character, while making them unique and still familiar is hard. It's so hard that sometimes the character comes out undercooked. These are three characters who started with a bad foundation and became hard to like as time went on.
Kes - Star Trek: Voyager
The inspiration for this list, the character of Kes was doomed from the start. With a lifespan of only seven years, Kes was an Ocampan. A race of aliens was found on the other side of the Delta Quadrant. Due to her short lifespan, her character was always going to be an issue. She was just a year old when she joined the show and was already dating a man in his late 30s. That's just a weird sentence to type out. Which is the biggest issue with the character.
Not only that, however, but the character was just boring to a rude degree. She lacked any creative aspect of her character that would warrant anyone paying attention to her in Kes-centric storylines. Her episodes were always "must-skip-TV". Replacing her for Seven of Nine was the right call.
Michael Burnham - Star Trek: Discovery
It's a shame that Michael Burnham qualifies for this list due to her beginnings, as Sonequa Martin-Green is truly a spectacular actress. Yet, everything about the character just felt "try-hardy". Her name, her shoe-horn adoption and subsequent sibling of Spock, and her general Vulcan-like attitude towards things. No one wanted a human cosplaying as a Vulcan to be the star of a Star Trek show. We haven't even mentioned the mutiny yet, and how she got her captain killed and started a war.
When you look at all of that, it's not hard to see why so many fans were turned off from her and the show she starred in. Unlike with Kes, Discovery did get better, thanks in part due to allowing Martin-Green. Giving her a more fleshed-out character, allowing her to embrace her complicated dynamic, and expressing her emotions changed things for the show. Unfortunately, it was too little, too late.
Wesley Crusher - Star Trek: The Next Generation
Wesley Crusher is the first character that comes to mind when you think of poorly developed characters. An uber-smart young man, who wants to join the Federation and work on the Starship Enterprise, yet is constantly being spoken down to by Jean-Luc Picard. Fairly or not. He'd eventually enter the Academy, where he would continue to showcase some poor decision-making despite his genius aptitude, and would eventually just disappear into the either. Future installments have done him better, but Crusher was the first meme-character to ever come out of Star Trek and it's hard to distance yourself from that.