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Series is set 10 years before the USS Enterprise's five-year mission.
We still don't know much specific information about Star Trek: Discovery, the franchise's return to television after over a decade, but showrunner Bryan Fuller has dropped a few more hints during the Television Critics Association press tour this week.
According to TV Guide , the show's lead character will be a woman, but she won't be the captain of the USS Discovery. All iterations of Star Trek, especially from The Next Generation onward, have had an ensemble cast to some degree, but the commanding officer's perspective has usually been the most important.
"To see a character from a different perspective on a starship, who has a different dynamic [and] relationship with the captain and with subordinates, felt like it was going to give us richer context [and allow us to] have different types of stories with that character," said Fuller.
Discovery will be firmly committed to diversity in casting, a traditional virtue of olderTrek series (at least relative to what other contemporary TV shows were doing). In addition to the female lead, Fuller hopes to cast an openly gay character, and The Hollywood Reporter says that the rest of the seven-character cast will be rounded out by "a female admiral, a male Klingon captain, a male admiral, a male adviser and a British male doctor." Fuller also wants to have more aliens on the show and to have those alien races look more like aliens and less like humans in heavy makeup.
And we're getting a few more details on where Discovery will fit into Trek's vast fictional universe. Fuller says the show is set in the "Prime" Trek timeline—not the "Kelvin" timeline established by JJ Abrams' rebooted film franchise in 2009—and will deal with an event referenced but not fully explored in past Trek fiction. The show will be set a decade before the USS Enterprise's five-year mission documented by the original series, and while this opens up the door to original series characters that fans may already be familiar with, Fuller wants Discovery's first season to focus on establishing the new characters.
(Score: 2) by halcyon1234 on Sunday August 14 2016, @06:35AM
Because if it's the character, who cares about the actor's orientation? Or if it's the actor, why must the character's orientation match their own?
Original Submission [thedailywtf.com]
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Sunday August 14 2016, @06:43AM
Why not have both?
Cast Takei as Sulu's openly gay grand uncle.. :)
That actually is the only way I can see to pull it off with both humour and a nod to the community without being overly PC
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 14 2016, @07:03AM
Dax was openly gay, kissed a woman on screen, and fans sent hatemail. It's been done.
Dax initially assumed Pell was gay for Quark and thought that was perfect normal, until she learned Pell was a woman. Pell being a woman was more shocking to Dax than Pell possibly being gay.
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Sunday August 14 2016, @07:33AM
Dax was openly gay.
Did you watch the same DS9 that I did?
cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jadzia_Dax#Romantic_interests [wikipedia.org] and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezri_Dax#Depiction_after_the_series [wikipedia.org]
Or do you subscribe to some definition of "gay" [dictionary.com] of which I am unaware?
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 14 2016, @08:31AM
Did you read your reference?
http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Rejoined_(episode) [wikia.com]
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Sunday August 14 2016, @07:50PM
Kissing someone of the same sex doesn't make you "gay" any more than eating broccoli makes you a vegetarian.
At *best*, one could say that the character was bisexual, but given the circumstance even that's a stretch.
In fact, for all of the Dax character's hosts (leaving aside the whole "mirror universe" bit which was stupid in TOS and even more so in DS9), with the minor exception of Dr. Lenara Kahn, all of the character's romantic interactions were strictly hetero-normative.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Sunday August 14 2016, @04:06PM
Dax was openly gay.
Did you watch the same DS9 that I did?... Or do you subscribe to some definition of "gay" of which I am unaware?
"Dax" wasn't "openly gay" in the same sense as humans, since Dax was a symbiont who had been joined with both sexes and had relationships with box sexes. Dax most certainly could be considered "openly bisexual," whatever that might mean for a symbiont.
Anyhow, your own link notes the episode "Rejoined," where Jadzia Dax has a relationship with a FEMALE host of a former spouse of Dax (when in a previous host). The writers specifically changed the sex to female to address issues of homosexual acceptance, and the episode featured one of the first prominent lesbian kisses on television.
So, yeah, Dax wasn't "openly gay" in the human sense, but was a pretty prominent example of an early TV character open to gay relationships. (Note that the episode doesn't consider the gay relationship weird at all; the only "taboo" is the rejoining of two Trill symbionts in new hosts.)
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Sunday August 14 2016, @08:06PM
See my response to moronic AC above.
It's pretty clear that the "taboo" (interaction with a relationship from a former host) interaction with Dr. Kahn in "Rejoined" was, perhaps, a metaphor for homosexuality, but the Dax character, aside from this episode, was completely hetero-normative.
You captured most of the essence of the situation in "Rejoined". However, I was responding to the statement that the character was "openly gay."
Given the totality of the character's arc, calling that character "openly gay" is akin to calling someone who once baked a batch of cookies a "pastry chef."
I'm not sure why I'm continually so surprised that people are either ignorant of, or uncomfortable with, anything that can't be discretely labeled on the sexuality spectrum [wikipedia.org].
In my mind, that says much more about the person making that judgement than it does about the judged person's (or fictional character's) preferences or desires.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 14 2016, @04:13PM
Yes, same thing about race. So what if white characters portray all the other races.