Well, the world premiere of Star Trek: Discovery came and went. Cast, crew, and high-profile fans of the CBS’s latest iteration of Star Trek gathered on September 19th to promote Discovery and recall their favourite Trek memories. Attended by Star Trek personalities past and present, it was truly a Trekkie’s who’s who.
Sonequa Martin-Green, Discovery’s lead, said that she’s excited that “the secret is out of the can” in terms of Discovery’s plot. This comment likely had Trekkies the world over madly googling terms like “Discovery plot” and other permutations of the same theme. But, as one of these aforementioned Trekkies, I was glad to find that the producers are still relatively tight lipped about the show’s premise.
Star Trek: Discovery Premiere – Sarek Dearest
Aside from revelations that Discovery will tell its story serially over the entirety of its first season and that Martin-Green’s character Michael Burnham is a human raised by Spock’s father Sarek (James Frain), there isn’t much else to go on. We also know Discovery will focus on a cold war between the Klingon Empire and the Federation, but is it just me or did everybody basically know all this already? Based on descriptions of the show’s main characters and the trailers released prior to the Discovery premiere, most attentive Trekkies had probably already guessed these plot points.
Star Trek: Discovery Premiere – Unconventional Lead?
Another tidbit that keeps popping up in CBS’s promotional material is that Discovery’s lead will not be a captain of a starship. Instead, the plot will follow Cmdr. Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green). This might sound different from previous versions of Star Trek, but any good Trekkie knows better.
Even the original Star Trek, which focused a lot of its time on Captain Kirk, basically featured an ensemble cast. Star Trek featured the insurmountable triumvirate of Spock, Kirk, and McCoy with a generous helping of Sulu, Chekov, Scotty, and Uhura on the side. And, Star Trek: The Next Generation probably had as many Data-centric and Riker-centric episodes as Picard-centric ones.
This same practice carried on throughout the other spinoffs: Star Trek: Voyager took a lot of time fleshing out Neelix and other characters, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine showed us what life on Ferenginar was like, and the penultimate episode of Star Trek: Enterprise, maybe the most Captain-centric Star Trek show to date, spent a fair amount of time focusing on the deterioration of Trip and T’Pol’s relationship following the death of their cloned daughter.
Star Trek: Discovery Premiere – Wait and See
Either way, anxious Trekkies won’t have to wait much longer. Star Trek: Discovery premieres to us regular Joes in a mere three days, four if you live outside of North America. So, we’ll have to wait and see what the creative team has in store for us. Based on interviews with the show’s stars and creative team, we can expect the show to have a thought-provoking and socially progressive message — unlike the recent Star Trek movies — and, according to one of Discovery’s writers Kristen Beyer, Discovery will be surprisingly current considering the show is set in the distant future. Make it so.
