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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 AthanasiusKircher on Sunday August 14 2016, @04:50PM
I'm assuming you're being sarcastic. But in case not...
Does anyone in the Star Trek universe do any work? These series have a lot of brass, but where are the grunts?
I think it's made pretty clear that technology has supposed to have solved most problems to the point that few people have to work. Some people still choose to work, because they value the "handcrafted" nature of what they do (e.g., Jean-Luc Picard's brother, who still insists on making wine the old-fashioned way by hand).
That said, there are plenty of examples in Star Trek episodes showing workers, particularly on distant colonies where presumably they don't have all the technology available back on Earth. This seemed to be a bigger issue on TOS than the newer series, where even distant colonies often have pretty good tech.
Is anyone in Star Trek not an officer? Is their entire military made up of officers and doctors?
Yes, the majority of the crew on the Star Trek series are made up of non-officers. They're mostly just referred to as "crewmen," though occasionally other ranks or designations are listed. (And you even have non-commissioned officers like Chief O'Brien. A stereotypical Irish non-com depicted as somebody occasionally annoyed at having to obey orders from young officers who technically outrank him.)
But you have a point about diversity here -- most of the Star Trek series, like most TV series in general, tend to focus on the "elite" or those in power, rather than the typical experience of the "grunt." You see occasional episodes devoted in some of the series to exploring the experiences of those who aren't at the top of the officer lists.