'Star Trek: Discovery': Decoding the 1st Trailer of Trek's New Chapter

Space.com ^ | May 19, 2017 01:54pm ET | Elizabeth Howell

[Bender2]

'Star Trek: Discovery': Decoding the 1st Trailer of Trek's New Chapter

The first full trailer for "Star Trek: Discovery" hints at a complicated past for one of its main characters, while bringing in famous alien species such as the Vulcans and the Klingons.


"Discovery" is set about 10 years before the original "Star Trek" series that featured Capt. James T. Kirk, Science Officer Spock and other memorable characters.


As such, the trailer focuses heavily on Spock's father, Sarek (played by James Frain). You can see more series here from our sister site Newsarama. But let's take a close look at our first glimpse of Trek's new chapter to see what's in store fans in the final frontier. -SNIP-

[Rastus]

There was some highly-lauded fan series that featured Kirk officiating a gay wedding minutes into the first episode. I never watched a second past that.

[Vaquero]

[mindburglar]

Not even close.

[FredZarguna]

Two of Two notwithstanding.

Luckily, she had a strong back; The Two required extra support with, or without, standing. But I always thought her name was Thirty-Eight of Double Dee.

[TBP]

We liked Vioyager, and we liked Captain Janeway. Tough cookie.

But TOS is still the best.

[FreedomStar3028]

Babylon 5 tries to be too cryptic, and mysterious.

That’s really all it’s got going for it. But it’s also a weakness. The character relationships are really well done, like the Centauri dude and the Reptile guy. I can’t remember their names. But that’s about it.

[hoagy62]

That’d be Londo (the Centauri) and G’Kar (the Narn).

[FreedomStar3028]

Ya, I forgot their names. But I love those guys. Definitely favorite character is Londo. Sisko in DS9.

[Reily]

Never saw that one!
If I had seen it I would have done what you did.

[Impy]

Former Bond Girl Michelle Yeoh is the Captain

The first officer is also a chick, but with a dude’s name (ok ok there’s Michael Steele of the Bangles but weird choice).

One alien crewmember has a face that looks like a butt, at least it’s a new species I guess.

I’m not sure why the hell Spock’s dad needs to be involved and why’s he’s British.

I didn’t know it set before Kirk. I’m still POed how they bungled Enterprise, but the time it got decent, it was too late.

CBS suckered me into a free trial for “All Access” and I never cancelled it so, I’ll watch it.

[jalisco555]

The premise for Voyager was promising- how do you get a crew of former enemies to work together for mutual survival. But there was never any internal conflict. After the first few episodes it was all kumbaya.

[TBP]

Well, there was the arrival of Seven of Nine, teh battles between Tuvok and Neelix, and Tom Paris’s antics.

[fieldmarshaldj]

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out this is going to suck balls. Even one simple thing, why is the Captain of a ship not Enterprise and the crew wearing an Enterprise insignia set BEFORE TOS ? Every ship had their own special insignia. Two, and this is a big one, there should be no female Captains prior to TOS (except perhaps for early on, which presumably would’ve accounted for why Starfleet banned women Captains due to a higher hazard rate for their serving — to paraphrase James Brown, “This is a man’s universe.”).

Gay stuff shouldn’t be there. The ship looking ludicrously modern also shouldn’t, either. There are ways to accommodate a retro look, and should be pursued. I also believe there was a reaction at the time in the future against everything being “computerified” and a simplification of technology. Of course, there’s also the likely situation in the future that with technology, humanesque robots will be running the show (as mentioned in “Dune”, humans were reduced to atrophying because they were being “served” by the robots, and it led to a great war for humans to reassert themselves and their own “Prime Directive” forbidding robots to be made in the image of humans).

You’re also right about Sarek, he should have no role in this, no British accent (like the bizarre and false casting in Faux Trek), unless they happen to be at Federation HQ on Earth and bump into him serving as Ambassador.

I hear they also changed the Klingons’ appearance AGAIN. Klingons at or near Federation space at the time should resemble what they did in TOS, which was done for a reason, as there was an attempt to infiltrate and undermine the Fed from within using Human/Klingon hybrids (not having enough time or $$ for TOS to give them skull ridges actually enriched the potential backstory and made that “Tribbles” episode become a lot clearer).

[Impy]

The “no female Captains” things is totally implausible, the lib PC Federation would never do that, and I can’t even think of a reason why they would, what’s wrong with a female Captain? How is a “hazard”?

The writers of that episode may have indented that but so what, Janice Lester was nuts, she could have been rejected because she was unstable and in her mind chalked it up to sexism, that makes much more sense.

Why are the Klingons bald? They look stupid.

[fieldmarshaldj]

If you consider being a Captain of a starship to be the most sensitive and hazardous of duties, it isn’t hard to imagine that women might be barred or not meet the criteria for that sort of command. I could surmise that they may have been allowed to command early on, but that the higher rate of disaster (say, loss of ships) amongst female Captains provoked the decision (controversial, to be sure, but there it is). As an example, let’s say 25 ships are sent out, 18 are commanded by men, 7 by women. Of those commanded by men, 3 meet a fatal end, but all 7 of those commanded by women are destroyed. What conclusion and decision would you make if you’re in the Admiralty ?

Of course, there’s also a contradictory version presented in the pilot episode where the female Number One was clearly “in command” during the kidnapping of Captain Pike.

[Galactic Overlord-In-Chief]

The series' central character isn't even the captain this time. It's actually the first officer, supposedly to offer a different perspective on what goes on the ship. But this is pretty dumb, IMO, because the captain is the prime instigator of the action in the first place. By definition, the captain is going to be the more compelling character. That's why Trek fans love to debate who the best captain is. (By contrast, how many people debate Spock versus Riker? Chakotay versus Kira?) The rest of the crew are going to be more reactionary even if they are part of the senior staff.

Putting this on CBS All Access is also strange. Why not stick it on the Sci-Fi Channel and get a bigger audience? Why not go back to first run syndication? I know Viacom owns Paramount and CBS, so synergy is obviously at work, but they're still needlessly narrowing their audience by sticking it on a digital channel.

I think the powers at be in control of the Trek franchise would just as soon forget the no-women captains thing ever existed.

As for the Klingons, they look like the Narns from Babylon 5 if they got a major suntan:

[fieldmarshaldj]

I just don’t see how this incarnation ends up anything less than a fiasco. That photo looks like some nightmarish Gothic alien caricature. If they didn’t identify them as Klingons, you wouldn’t know they were. I similarly detested when they started to add Klingon-style bone structure to Vulcans and Romulans’ heads out of the blue back during TNG.

[Impy]

but all 7 of those commanded by women are destroyed. What conclusion and decision would you make if you’re in the Admiralty ?

Even if such an unlikely event happened (I don't believe women couldn't competently Captain a starship and I'm not even a lib, we have chicks commanding stuff nowadays, are they all failing miserably?) the PC LIB Federation would never draw that conclusion and make the decision to outright ban vaginas from the Captain's chair, even a more common sense orientated government would be unlikely to do that.

And as you say any woman who's an officer is in the chain of command and could end up in charge of the ship. It just doesn't make any sense.

Do we really want that to be canon because of one line from one silly (but enjoyable) episode? All of the things that might be wrong with this show I don't know why that would bother anyone.

There are 2 choices, take Janice Lester's statement at face value and try to make a ban on female Captains fit into the narrative (I can't make it fit for me) or do a very soft retcon chalking it up to Janice being nutso, and she WAS seriously nutso, so that's an easy choice for me.

[Impy]

Making the First Officer the protagonist is interesting, they could do some interesting things with that.

But it’s a *major* departure, I don’t know if it will work.

Hopefully a competent First Officer won’t implausibly decline promotions repeatedly ala Riker to maintain the status quo on the show. So maybe she’ll be the Captain by season 3 or something, if the show lasts.

Since I already have CBS All Access, I’m fine with it being there, glad even, get something for my money. I stopped watching “The Good Wife” halfway through but I watched “The Good Fight” on All Access, good show, benefited from the lack of network TV censorship (you can say F).

But does it make sense to have it there? If there goal is to have max viewers, obviously not, I guess there goal is to entice more people to subscribe. It’s also gonna incite massive piracy of the show.

The Klingons look kinda like the Klingons from “Into Darkness” I guess. They also look kinda look like the “Remans” from “Nemesis”. What they don’t look like is Klingons.

DJ, I don’t know if watched “Enterprise” but they did a strange explanation for the foreheads (rather than go with original plan of “they were always there but TOS didn’t have enough in the budget for makeup), Klingons tried to use Human Auguments (like Kahn) to make super Klingons via a virus, it didn’t go well, virus spread, took away forehead ridges for victims and their descendants.

A botched scheme to make Klingons look more Human to infiltrate would have been better, instead the lack of ridges was only a side effect.

[fieldmarshaldj]

It’s possible the ban was made with respect to top-of-the-line starships (Heavy Cruisers and Dreadnoughts) and that it was a ban “reviewed” every so often (or perhaps even a “glass ceiling” thing where women COULD conceivably serve, but never qualified).

It would be curious to see where Commander Chapel (Number One’s) went from the Enterprise. She might’ve been promoted to serve as a captain of a lesser ship (Scout, Destroyer, Light Cruiser, Frigate). One could even envision that she made the breakthrough and was the cause for officially removing Dr. Lester’s cited “ban.”