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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: 3, Insightful) by jmorris on Sunday August 14 2016, @07:51AM
Remember Janice Lester,
Yea, so much for continuity. Kinda hard to get a female Admiral without her first being a Captain. And a seven member primary cast with a Klingon captain (not said if Star Fleet or not but Lt. Worf was supposed to be the first Klingon to make Officer nearly a century later and kinda hard to be a regular if not Star Fleet) and a pair of Admirals. And if the protagonist isn't the Captain then there has to be one of those around somewhere too assuming there is a ship.. or does an Admiral command a single ship now? Sounds like they are a bit top heavy, all Chiefs and no Indians. I guess on their timeline not only does everyone get a trophy, they staff their ships with no rank lower than a Commander, except they might have a few Lieutenants mucking out the reactor core?
Doesn't sound like I will be missing much by not subscribing to CBS All Access.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 14 2016, @08:42AM
Why not staff a ship with nothing but captains. There was an episode of Enterprise when Phlox was sleep-deprived and was calling everyone captain. Hand me that scanner, captain.
(Score: 2) by quintessence on Sunday August 14 2016, @08:56AM
Why not staff a ship with nothing but captains.
Division of labor/knowledge which makes running something as complex as a starship possible. Not to mention in a tense, time sensitive situation, you need a single source to make decisions. Democracy may work well for government, but is absolute suicide in the military.
There's a reason why too many cooks spoils the soup is a saying.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 14 2016, @09:40AM
Oh please. A starship is so heavily automated a single captain can run the whole thing. The rest of the crew is there to do science experiments and make friendly with the locals.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Sunday August 14 2016, @11:59AM
AC has a dramatic point but note that over time "admiral inflation" has been a thing in Navies. The USN has roughly 300 ships and 200 admirals. Admittedly plenty of shore leadership positions have an admiral, so only maybe half the ships are led by admirals right now. This always struck me as rather optimistic that the Enterprise as the pride of the fleet wouldn't have a rather aged admiral in command.
A couple hundred years etc and much like grade inflation everybody on a starship is going to be an admiral. Sure they'll be one old dude appointed in charge, but they'll all be admiral flag rank.
(Score: 2) by jimshatt on Sunday August 14 2016, @09:49PM
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Sunday August 14 2016, @08:55AM
You seriously believe that there were no women captains in TOS? Or that there were no women on the bridge until "The Cage"?
As for regulars not in starfleet, not convinced that Quark was in starfleet. Or Neelix. Or Wesley (when he was a regular), or TPol. And that was in te days when most regulars appeared in all episodes, and all regulars appeared in most, and there was one location to follow the action. Modern TV isn't like that, regulars may rarely meet each other.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 14 2016, @09:10AM
You seriously believe that there were no women captains in TOS? Or that there were no women on the bridge until "The Cage"?
There were no women captains in TOS. Number One was not a captain. I can believe that Starfleet went through a period of sexism during which women were not promoted to captain and the uniforms of the time required women to wear skirts.
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Sunday August 14 2016, @07:23PM
Your argument is that in 2269 there's no starfleet captains, despite
Your world of starship captains doesn't admit women
Is ambiguous at best, what exactly is the "world of starship captains"? We know for a fact there were female captains in 2154 (Hernandez) and 2286 (The Saratoga Captain in STIV), and this doesn't state that there's no female captains, just like someone who's having serious mental issues might state "your world of network engineers doesn't admit women" because they didn't get a job (despite not knowing one end of a cat5 from another)
However a much stronger argument comes from "The Cage"
Number One: She's replacing your former yeoman, sir.
Captain Christopher Pike: No, she does a good job, all right; it's just that I... can't get used to having a woman on the bridge.
[Number One gives him a look]
Captain Christopher Pike: No offense, Lieutenant, you're... different, of course.
Pike's statements may show that starfleet in 2254 had only recently re-admitted women into it's ranks, implying that they had vanished sometime before Pike had started his career - probably around 2225-30. Perhaps the same event that meant the captain's log was recorded on paper in that era.
In the Post-Kelvin era there were female captains in 2259 (STID), and the Kelvin event and timeline split occurred in 2233, when Pike would be graduating from the academy.
If you take "The Cage" at face value, but then there's plenty of contradictory statements throughout trek canon. People justify what they can and ignore the sillier points.
However from what I read about Discovery, nothing contradicts your statement:
I can believe that Starfleet went through a period of sexism during which women were not promoted to captain and the uniforms of the time required women to wear skirts.
As the lead will be a Lt Cmdr, not a captain.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Sunday August 14 2016, @08:08PM
As the lead will be a Lt Cmdr, not a captain.
I didn't raise an issue with her, because I too have seen _The Cage_. My problem was with a female Admiral since that implies a previous Captain with a command unless she is strictly a career base commander. The Star Fleet of Kirk's era didn't seem so degraded that it would put people without line experience in charge.
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Monday August 15 2016, @01:31PM
Yet McCoy became an admiral and it's unlikely he'd have captained a starship. Sticker was a commodore without having captained a starship, so even if you take Lester's statement as "no women captain starships" and take Pikes view that women don't serve on the bridge, except for Number One apparently, that still leaves open room for an admiral having been promoted like Stocker.
However that's all rather silly as there is more evidence in canon that betazoids can mind read ferengi than there is for some anti-women move in starfleet.