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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 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.