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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: 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