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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 rleigh on Sunday August 14 2016, @09:14PM
Definitely. And I think sci-fi should also be subtle. When I read Iain M. Banks' The Player of Games (which is BTW an absolutely great book), the protagonist is black. There's no mention of it in the book other than in one or two brief descriptions which are purely incidental when describing a situation. The point being, in that society (Culture) skin colour long ceased to have any relevance and wasn't even worthy of mentioning. It describes a future where race issues don't exist, and it does so not by being in your face about it, but by barely mentioning it at all, which I feel gives it even more meaning and significance.
Star Trek did a similar thing with, for example Uhura. While it was groundbreaking at the time in the real world, in the trek universe it wasn't particularly noteworthy. I think there may have been a comment or two about it (or women working on the bridge) in the scripts, but it was perhaps deemed necessary to be more explicit at that time. And when we come to La Forge, Sisko etc., it's even more downplayed. These are regular (OK, actually very talented!) people doing their jobs and living normal lives. Actually the only time I felt they got that wrong was when Sisko refused to go to Vic's on the holodeck because "our people weren't welcome" back in the time period. Given that it's set several hundred years in the future, where such things long faded into history, it seemed a little out of place and unnecessary. They previously had to travel back in time to experience discrimination, and even then it was no longer racial but economic.
I do hope if they do introduce a gay character (it's not new in the star trek books), it will also be subtle. Hopefully they won't be scripted to be a cringeworthy caricature. Will it paint the character into a corner in terms of what the writers can do with the character, or will this be their defining attribute? It could be done as subtly as occasionally seeing them with their partner in the mess hall or wherever, rather than being in your face about it. If it's no big deal in that future setting, then there's no need to be over the top and in your face about it in the scriptwriting. It's just part of the normal background.