There’s been a lot of news lately regarding the new Star Trek series, Discovery. With the first trailer being released, and the premier date announced, it seems the P.R. machine is starting to kick into gear. Here I’m going to go over my thoughts on some of the latest news from CBS and the Star Trek team.
Roddenberry’s “No Conflict” Rule
Gene Roddenberry created a rule for when The Next Generation was being created. He was adamant that the Starfleet crew not have any interpersonal conflicts with each other. Nothing that wasn’t resolved right away at least. He’d say that humanity had evolved past the petty conflicts of today. And that’s a great ideal, and I certainly hope we get there. But it sure is hard to make a TV show under that kind of restriction. All conflict and drama has to then come from outside the main cast.
Now we’ve got the news that the showrunners for Discovery are throwing that rule out the window, and I feel that’s a good thing. It opens the gates up for story opportunities that wouldn’t be possible otherwise. And also, even if we go by what Gene set down for Star Trek, the no conflict rule wouldn’t apply in the time period that Discovery is taking place anyways. That was for TNG onwards, whereas Discovery is back slightly before the time of The Original Series.
Jonathan Frakes coming to direct
Of course we all know Frakes, AKA Commander William Riker! And I’m sure many know that after Star Trek he’s mostly been focused on his career as a director, including directing Star Trek: First Contact and Star Trek: Insurrection. So I’m quite excited to learn that Frakes will be returning to Star Trek to direct at least one episode of Discovery. Can we get some of the other alums of the Star Trek Directing School on board as well?
General thoughts so far
I’m very, cautiously hopeful regarding Discovery. Honestly, the trailer didn’t do much for me, and I can’t say I’m a fan of the US release being initially only on this CBS All Access service that I’ll have to sign up for. I get why that is the case, but I don’t like it.
The visuals are certainly impressive so far. Discovery apparently has quite the large budget so I’m also happy about that. It’ll be interesting to see what they do with it. We’ll see come September 24th.