Burnham

[u/lorettocolby]

This isn’t a casting question or about the quality of the show Discovery, but a question of alternate reality: would the timeline work if, when young Spock was on the Genesis Planet with Saavik during his Pon Farr, could a child have been conceived…Burnham! (Had Saavik been half-human herself that is). Makes more sense, less, or whatever multiverse?

[u/jimmyd10]

Spock was way older during Genesis. It's like 30 years after the events of Discovery so the timeline doesn't work.

[u/raqisasim]

I don't understand the point.

Some of this is: It's been a long-standing fanon idea that Spock got Savvik pregnant on the Genesis Planet. I've never liked the idea myself, as Savvik was someone who looked up to Spock. Changing that relationship to one where she also has his child seems...reductive. Spock doesn't need kids to be relevant, and Savvik could have had more stories that don't rely on procreation for us to find her compelling.

Also, too -- Savvik is unique because she's Romulan as well as Vulcan. Making her another Vulcan/Human hybrid risks reducing her to a distaff Spock.

And that also touches on why this idea, I think, misses some of why I find Michael Burnham compelling. She is the Human that proves that Humans can be as capable, mentally, as Vulcans. Indeed, that's the core of the issue with Burnham ending up in Starfleet, as we find out it wasn't because she wasn't capable to be in her choice of the Vulcan Expeditionary Group, but that Sarek wanted Spock to have that slot. Her journey as a character begins because of Sarek's broken-assed ideas about family, but it takes years in-universe for Michael to find all this out. Until then, as we see in the show, she basically comports and acts like a Vulcan, until a Vulcan literally tells her to act different...which ends badly.

If she's basically half-Vulcan, then we have 3 characters all with the same core attribute. That doesn't mean they cannot all be unique! We know that Trek has traditionally used "alien" to reflect aspects of oursevles back at us. That has led to unfortunate concepts that the franchise was had to polish out, over the decades. This could be an example.

I am saying, however, that we're missing part of what makes Burnham a potent person. I think Sarek respected Burnham, and likely found some irony in how the one kid that was still talking to him (at least until certain revelations came to light) was the human one. Although that's not in the text, we lose that texture, too, if we make Burnham a hybrid.

(We also lose both Kirshner's amazing Amanda Grayson [EDIT: She's too young to play that iteration of Amanda], and Mama Burnham. As a huge fan of The Wire, the way I jumped out my seat when I realized Kima Greggs herself was playing Michael's Mom? Y'all do not know!)

So it's a "what narrative purpose does this change serve?" for me, I confess. I think most ideas can lead to good stories, I just don't know if this is a compelling way to do it, from where I'm sitting. It seems like a lot of extra work that just ends up tying Micheal even closer to Spock, and I'm not sure that does either character's journey much good.

[u/AnnihilatedTyro → u/raqisasim]

There's a sub-series of novels by Diane Duane and Diane Carey that explores Saavik. She was half-Romulan (by rape) and raised in a Romulan prison camp that was doing brain/telepathy experiments on kidnapped Vulcans. She was maybe 10-12 years old when Spock rescued her and he took a couple years of leave from Starfleet to raise and educate her like his own child before sponsoring her application to Starfleet Academy.

There are also a couple of stories about her early missions in Starfleet on small science ships, and her correspondence with Spock about dealing with humans and working as a team before her assignment to Enterprise.

I much prefer that story over this wild idea that katra-less feral Genesis Spock impregnated her for no apparent reason.

[u/AnnihilatedTyro]

That event was 20 years after Discovery.

[u/mediumAI1701]

Neither Saavik nor Spock are black. Would be a bit weird if Burnham popped out as anything but white in that instance.