Star Trek: Discovery show runner Bryan Fuller dropped into the yearly Television Critics Association panel on Wednesday evening and revealed a lot of new details about the forthcoming show, set to debut in January 2017, including that the show will be set only 10 years before the voyages of Kirk and Spock’s Enterprise.
Other admissions from Fuller:
- Star Trek: Discovery‘s lead character is NOT the ship’s captain! Instead, the focus will be on the perspective from a lieutenant commander. They have not cast this lead character yet, but Fuller confirmed that they will be female and non-white. Deadline has more info: “The story that’s fascinating for me is that we’ve seen six series from captain’s point of view and to see one from another point of view gives us a richer context.” The full cast will number around 6 to 8.
- Robots and aliens will be more integrated into the crew and the show than in any other Star Trek production viewers have seen.
- Star Trek: Discovery will “absolutely” have a gay character, according to Fuller, further admitting via Variety:
…he still has a folder full of hate mail that the writers received during Star Trek: Voyager (on which Fuller was a writer and co-producer) because of the rumor that Jeri Ryan’s character was going to be a lesbian; revealing that at the time, he vowed that if he ever got the chance to create a “Star Trek” series, he would include a gay character.
- The story of the first 13-episode serialized season will revolve around “an incident in the history of Starfleet that has been talked about but never fully explored.” This incident has been mentioned onscreen in the Original Series episodes. Fuller ruled out seeing the Romulan War with the Federation, but noted that tonally the event matches a Kobayashi Maru (i.e. “no win”) scenario.
- Although the time frame of Discovery makes it possible to encounter younger versions of iconic characters like Kirk and Spock, the show will not be doing so in its first season, choosing instead to establish its own characters, ship, and tone.
- Fuller personally wants to explore the story behind Spock’s mother Amanda Grayson, but doesn’t think that will quite fit into Star Trek: Discovery‘s initial season.
- Via Variety: When it was suggested that Lee Pace would make a great Vulcan, [Fuller] responded: “I agree.”
- Fuller is aware that the show acronyms out to “STD,” you guys.
- The design of the Discovery is indeed inspired by Ralph McQuarrie’s illustrations from the abandoned 1970s Star Trek movie Planet of the Titans.
What incident could Fuller be talking about? Set phasers to speculate in the comments!
Robots and aliens will be more integrated into the crew and the show than in any other Star Trek production viewers have seen.
I wonder if that means this series will tell a story of why they are NOT so integrated in any of the other Trek series. I could see the Federation having to deal with a robot uprising, perhaps? Or having to reaffirm a commitment to diversity in the wake of some resurgence of Terra Prime-esque xenophobia, which was defeated but managed to leave behind a climate in which Spock serving aboard the Enterprise was an outlier, and the Vulcans had to request their own ships (the TOS-era Intrepid was all-Vulcan, right?) Interesting.
Hmm… Battle of Axanar would be too obvious. :-)
Seriously, though, what about the implications of Pike’s visit to Talos-IV? If Discovery is 10 years pre-TOS, that should make it after the events of “The Cage”, albeit not by a lot. I’m just not sure where the no-win scenario fits in. (Speaking of “The Cage”, there is that battle on Rigel VII which immediately precedes the events of the episode.)
More off the wall, but interesting, would be something to do with the loss of the SS Valiant at the Galactic Barrier.
Great news, all of it! I’d rather have a post-Nemesis timeframe, but this will do too. And I think Lee Pace would make a great Romulan politician/diplomat.
Fuller also said the incident is not Axanar, BTW.
http://trekcore.com/blog/2016/08/bryan-fuller-reveals-long-awaited-star-trek-discovery-details/
@1 we can hope, but sadly it’s more likely that they just don’t care about consistency with TOS.
I’m a bit surprised they’re going with another prequel series, given how poorly the last one was received.
So, which timeline is this being set in? Are we in the Original Series Timeline or the new movie timeline? It has been a while but TOS doesn’t start with Kirk taking control? Curious as there is a ton of things that could be different in this series than any of the series before.
@5/Keith – TOS doesn’t start with Kirk taking control? No, it begins with Kirk in command of the Enterprise (or Pike, if you count “The Cage”). But since Discovery will be set aboard a different ship (and it only struck me last week that it shares the name with the ship in 2001: A Space Odyssey – cool!), maybe we’ll get to see Kirk take command. (Season 1 of TOS is set 13 years after the Enterprise‘s first visit to Talos IV, so I would presume 10 years prior, Pike would still be in command; but depending on how the creative team interprets the chronology, we might be able to see Kirk assume command somewhere near the eventual end of Discovery‘s run.)
I Don’t understand why they can’t move forward in the timeline. The last series was a prequel as well. Everyone wants to know what comes after TNG. Where did Riker go? What did the Crew of Voyager do after they made it home? I honestly don’t care so much for what happened before TOS.
@5/Keith: Reportedly, the show is set in the Prime continuity, like everything else except the Bad Robot movies.
“TOS doesn’t start with Kirk taking control?”
Nope. Shows in the ’60s didn’t routinely have “origin story” episodes. Some did, but plenty of others, including TOS, just started with the status quo already established. At the time, anthologies were the classiest dramas on TV, and without a lot of reruns or any home video or an Internet to let you learn about shows as whole entities, television was experienced more on an episode-by-episode basis. So the focus was more on making each individual episode a complete, standalone work with little if anything in the way of continuity ties to the larger whole. (It was even more rare for shows to have proper finales, as opposed to just ending abruptly. Route 66 and The Fugitive were two of the first shows to have finales that actually resolved their storylines.)
@6/MikePoteet: The Making of Star Trek said that Kirk was 34 years old and had been captain of the Enterprise for more than four years. Kirk was 34 in “The Deadly Years,” which would suggest that the first season was his third year as captain, i.e. that he took over in 2263. The Okudas’ Chronology conjectures this too. In the books, though, we’ve placed the start of his command in 2265, not long before the second pilot. After all, we know from Voyager: “Q2” that the TV 5-year mission ended in 2270, and in TMP Kirk cited “my five years out there” dealing with unknowns.
I like it that the main character isn’t the Captain for a change.
When I first saw TNG, over 20 years ago, my first two episodes were 11001001 and Coming of Age. The first was pretty much a Riker show. While the second one was more of a Wesley episode, the Remmick story was very much Riker-focused, given his reaction to both him and the crew being questioned. So naturally, I thought Riker was the main character instead of Picard. And I liked that difference from the Original Series where Kirk was unquestionably the protagonist, even with Spock around. Of course, I hadn’t yet seen more of Picard and Data.
Being an ensemble is definitely preferable. But I’m looking forward to seeing this new character. Obviously they couldn’t do another female Captain, especially given both Fuller and Menosky have already written plenty of Janeway scenes during Voyager’s run.
@9/Eduardo: Everyone seems to be forgetting that this isn’t the first Trek series whose lead wasn’t a captain. Ben Sisko was a commander for the first three seasons of DS9, not becoming a captain until the start of the third-season finale.
Although I guess this is different because Sisko was still the commanding officer of his posting. It sounds like there will be a captain above the lead character, making it more along the lines of something like Stargate SG-1, where the lead characters reported to General Hammond, or a cop show where the lead detectives answer to the precinct captain. I’ve actually thought for a while that that would be a good way to set up a Trek show, as a way to avoid the cliche of having the captain lead the landing parties. I’ve always liked David Gerrold’s idea from his 1973 book The World of Star Trek, that there should be a regular set of “contact team” characters, separate from the bridge crew, who handle the landing-party duties.
As for Riker, originally the idea behind TNG was that he would be more of the action/romantic lead, the Kirk surrogate, while Picard would be more of an elder statesman and mentor figure. But Patrick Stewart was so much more powerful and charismatic an actor that he ended up becoming much more central — and over time, he pushed to make Picard more of an action/romantic lead in his own right.
I don’t get the logic of the suggestion that they couldn’t do another female captain after writing Janeway. Joe Menosky’s also written for Picard; would that disqualify him from writing for a male captain too? Is a given writer only allowed to write one captain of a given sex? How does that make any sense?
@10/Christopher: I didn’t mean to imply these writers were disqualified from writing a female and/or male captain. Far from it. This isn’t about gender. What I meant to say is had they announced a female captain as the lead character, viewers and fans alike would have instantly drawn up Voyager comparisons in protest. I’m sure Fuller, Menosky, plus Coleite and Meyer, are well aware of the pitfalls of producing yet another Trek series while not repeating old patterns and story elements given the massive amount of established franchise material and the undeniably high expectations from fans and viewers. I assume most writers wouldn’t want to repeat what’s been done before, them included.
And yes, I included Sisko while well aware he started as a commander (and was a Lt. Cmdr. during Wolf 359). I meant commanding officers as the main character for each respective show.
@11/Eduardo: The protests would only have been from foolish or sexist fans, people who think of women as a single, narrow category rather than half of everybody. And who cares what they think? Hell, there was a horrifically misogynistic response toward Janeway from some circles of fandom — the same crap we saw in response to the Ghostbusters remake — but the makers of the show didn’t let that bigoted idiocy affect how they chose to tell their story. So if they’d wanted to make their female lead a captain, then they should’ve damn well done so and dared the idiots to come at them.
And it’s ridiculous to say that just having a gender in common with a previous captain is repeating a pattern. Nobody said that about Kirk, Picard, Sisko, and Archer. Nobody ever complains about a character being male, because they’re used to fiction featuring enough diverse male characters that they don’t expect a shared gender to take away from that diversity. But women are far too often reduced to the position of being just “The Woman,” the only female character in a film and defined primarily by that fact, and because of that lack of diversity in female portrayals, too many people unthinkingly default to the assumption that just having a woman in a given role is “repeating a pattern” as if that were a character’s only trait. It’s a double standard and it makes no sense.
Hell, we’ve had four male Trek captains and only one female. That’s the pattern, a systemic bias toward men. So the idea that they should somehow be afraid to have merely a second female captain, that it’s somehow wrong for them to want to try to balance the scales, is outrageous and offensive.
We did have two female first officers, though: T’Pol and Kira. Three, if you count Majel Barrett’s Number One.
I don’t think they’re avoiding a female captain though. I think they’re avoiding putting too much focus on the captain, period. By making the lead someone not at the top of the chain of command, you can tell Lower Decks-esque types of stories, and therefore avoid making these characters too archetypal.
@13/Eduardo: But I don’t think it matters so much whether the character is the captain. She’s still the lead character of the series, and that’s sure to outrage the misogynistic-idiot contingent just as much as Janeway or Starbuck or Jillian Holtzmann or Hillary Clinton outraged them. And you’re right — I’m sure the last thing Fuller and his team are motivated by is a desire to avoid offending those idiots by giving this female lead a different job title than the previous female Trek lead they hated. On the contrary, it’s pretty clear that Fuller is eager to offend the bigots in the audience. This is a guy who said years ago that he wanted to make a Trek series headlined by Angela Bassett and Rosario Dawson. Sisko offended the racists, Janeway offended the sexists — now Fuller wants to offend them both at once, and bring in a gay character to give the homophobes fits as well. And that’s exactly what Star Trek should be doing.
They haven’t asked me, but, if I had to choose, I’d vote for a female captain and female first officer simply because it’s a combination we’ve not seen before. I really don’t have too much invested in the gender of the captain (or the lead character, for that matter) so long as he or she is a rich, well-written, well-acted character.
I confess I actively disliked Janeway, but I truly and sincerely believe it was not because she was a woman; I found Kate Mulgrew’s acting style overly “stagey” for television, just as I did Scott Bakula’s in Enterprise. But I should add that, having rewatched a lot of TNG in recent years, it’s a very “stagey” show, and my dislike for VOY and ENT may be more a consequence of those series not keeping up with changing tastes in television. (DS9, I don’t remember having so much of a problem, although I often found Brooks’ delivery pretty stiff and stilted, but I now think this was a deliberate character choice, and want to reevaluate that.)
I do have a pretty strong preference that the lead character in any Trek production be human, since Star Trek is “the human adventure.” I would not be interested in an alien captain unless our lead/viewpoint character is human, as it appears will be the case in Discovery – so, bring on a Vulcan or Andorian or Deltan captain, or some new alien altogether (although, being set only a decade before TOS, that might raise questions of “Where has this species been all the time?” — unless, like Spock, she/he/it is an outlier, the only member of its/his/her species in Starfleet or something, or the “last of its kind”….). Much as most of the Doctor’s Companions on Doctor Who are human to allow us an easy way into the strangeness of it all, I think we need a human viewpoint character in Trek. (Even Spock, a viewpoint character for so many fans, was half-human.)
@15/Mike: I would like to see a female captain too! When Enterprise was new, I was really disappointed that its captain was male, white, and had an English name. It felt as if the writers had thought, okay, we did all the fancy stuff, now let’s have someone normal again. Whereas I had expected them to come up with e.g. a Chinese female captain. (T’Pol was great, though.)
I also hope that they’ll change the male-to-female ratio of the main cast. For some reason, it’s always been 2:1 since TNG. Shouldn’t it be 1:1?
Concerning new alien races, I don’t think that’s a problem. As Kirk said to Zefram Cochrane, “We’re on a thousand planets and spreading out.” I imagine we haven’t seen all the alien species there are in his time. Perhaps we haven’t even seen all the alien crewmembers on the Enterprise.
@16, they could always go the Kelvin Timeline route and have loads of different alien species and treat it like its no big thing. I think I’d actually be ok with that, although it would match up with the Prime Timeline. As long as they’re well written characters, I don’t really care what gender they are. The best written characters tend to be the one’s I gravitate toward. Kira was awesome, not because she was a woman, but because her character had a lot of meat to the role.
Is it just me, or do people seem to not WANT new Star Trek??? Between comments here and on startrek.com, it seems that way. Every time someone comes up with a new idea, people are all like “Well that does it…I’m not a Trekkie anymore because this is going to ruin it forever” before they even see it. Granted, stuff like that has been going on since the beginning of TNG, but come on…give it a chance before you write it off. People didn’t want to give Beyond a chance, and it was awesome. At least watch it a couple times before you decide it’s not worth your time.
@17/Jason_UmmaMacabre: What they did in the Kelvin timeline reminded me of Diane Duane’s novels, where the Enterprise also has a multi-species crew, and it isn’t treated as anything special. It felt perfectly natural to me. I hope they do something similar in the new show.
Concerning gender, I agree that a great male character is better than a mediocre female one – I’d take McCoy over Beverly Crusher any day. It’s just that they always have that same ratio. It looks as if they do it on purpose, as if it were the normal thing to do. Of course, compared to the number of Asian or gay characters, one third females is still pretty good.
Don @18…that’s just people being people. And I think some people(or maybe this is just me!) are put off by this only being shown on CBS’ streaming platform and not actually being shown on air. I am super excited and can’t wait to see the premiere on CBS but some people(ok, this is most definitely only me) don’t have internet access at home and/or don’t want to pay for this “All Access” deal. That’s at least put a bitter taste in my mouth. I’d love to have a Star Trek show I can watch on TV at home!! Sadly…I can’t do that here.
But really, the main reason people are being all negative is just because people like to complain.
@18 Yes I want new Star Trek. However new Star Trek done wrong is worse than no Star Trek at all. Right now, with the current tv fashions and the current crop of show runners… No, I’d rather not have New Star Trek right now. I could wait another five-ten years.
@20/Sonofthunder: The show will premiere on All Access, but it will presumably be available on DVD/home video within a few months thereafter. Last year, the Powers TV series that debuted exclusively on the Sony PlayStation network was out on DVD just five months later. So shows that debut on streaming networks do usually become available through other means before too long. (The only exceptions I know of are the Netflix Marvel shows, which still haven’t come out on DVD.)
Heck, it’s the same thing that was done with pay cable shows in the past. Showtime’s The Outer Limits and Stargate SG-1, for example, were available in first run only to Showtime subscribers, but their episodes were syndicated on regular commercial television a year later (albeit with the adult content in TOL and the SG-1 pilot cut out, or with more PG-rated alternate takes filmed specifically for the commercial version). It’s possible the same thing could happen with Discovery, with reruns becoming available on commercial TV after a wait.
Alternatively, you could just wait until the 13-episode season is over, then get a trial subscription to All Access and binge the whole thing in a matter of days. You don’t have to renew your subscription afterward unless you want to. The folks behind All Access are hoping that people will try it out to watch Discovery, then get drawn in by all the other current and classic CBS programming the service offers (including a couple more original shows, and no doubt more being added over time), and decide to stick around. But, as with any subscription service, you can cancel anytime.
@21, Just out of curiosity, what do you have against the showrunners and writers that they’ve got lined up? You may have mentioned this earlier, I didn’t reread the earlier comments.
And presumably there will be a DVD release at some point.
Frankly, I am fortunate that $6/month is not going to feel like a big burden. I spend (too much) more than that for my morning coffee run each week. My suspicion is the fee is not an insurmountable barrier for most people. And, as Christopher points out, there’s free trials available if you can wait a while.
I’d rather they make the episodes available for download as well as streaming, so I can watch them easily on my commute when I don’t have consistent WiFi or Internet access. I don’t have a streaming subscription to anything, but I gather downloading something you’ve paid for is not an option (as it is, say, with Amazon Video?)
@15 – MikePoteet
The galaxy is a big place, we only saw a handful of starships and places during TOS, bringing in a new alien species that ” was always there” posits no problem at all.
@16 – Jana: Looking back, it’s a bit disappointing that every human main cast member on ENT besides Hoshi were Anglosaxon men (and all white but one). Yes, they did have, in later seasons, a Hispanic female captain, but it would have been nicer to have a more diverse human crew as the main cast.
@17 – Jason: I agree, they should just have aliens everywhere and treat it as commonplace. TOS didn’t do that because there was no budget for it, but as soon as they could (in the movies), there were aliens lurking in the background everywhere.
@18 – Don: Keep me out of your comment, I’m eager to have a new trek show! Also, the negative opiniones are always louder than the positive ones. A lot of people won’t comment if they think everything looks good, while a vocal minority will comment if they have complaints. I, myself, always comment even if it is just to say “This looks awesome!”.
@25/MaGnUs – You’re right, of course; but if the series introduces some “major player” alien species, portrayed as real movers and shakers in the Federation, or something, the questions might come up. Then again, it only took one live-action appearance of Tellarites and Andorians in three seasons to ensconce them firmly in Trek lore, so…! I guess I had in my head Zeb on Star Wars Rebels as an analagous situation: We are meeting his species for the first (and, so far, only) time, and it’s explained in-universe that the Empire slaughtered most of the rest of his species. But, logically, no, I guess there’s no reason they’d have to go a route like that.
@26/MikePoteet: “Journey to Babel” was not the only appearance of Andorians and Tellarites in TOS, though it was the only one where they had speaking roles. There was an Andorian thrall in “The Gamesters of Triskelion.” Garth had an Andorian and a Tellarite (without the sunken eyes) as henchmen in “Whom Gods Destroy.” And the dead Memory Alpha staff in “The Lights of Zetar” included two Andorians and an alien that may have been intended to be a Tellarite, but lacked the nose appliance and three-fingered hands (maybe a Tellarite-human hybrid?).
And there’s nothing new about a Trek series or movie retconning a major species into existence when we’ve never seen them before. See the Denobulans in ENT. Or the Trill, who according to DS9 were involved with the Federation as early as the 22nd century. Not to mention the dozens of background aliens who were introduced in one series or movie and then ignored by subsequent ones.
Oh, duh, of course. I forgot. Haven’t had my morning tranya.
But come to think of it, where were all the Denobulans in the 23rd and 24th centuries, hm….? ;)
@28/MikePoteet: Where were all the Andorians and Tellarites in the 24th century? Where were the Deltans and Saurians and Zaranites and Rhaandarites we saw in ST:TMP, or the Caitians and others we saw in TVH, or the Efrosians we saw in TSFS and TUC? Star Trek is frustratingly full of aliens who appear as Federation members in one production but are completely absent from the others, because each show’s writers and makeup artists want to create their own aliens rather than picking up on undeveloped species introduced by their predecessors.
To a degree, you just have to assume that it’s a big galaxy and we’re only seeing a very narrow sliver of it in any one series, rather than a uniformly representative view of the entire population of the Federation.
It was a rhetorical question, Christopher. ;) (This is why I don’t write comedy!)
Even so, you’re right, and I agree. That’s one thing I liked when I read Ex Machina, that you brought back the Rhaandarites and others. At least the unintended benefit of all those alien races being left scattered around is giving creative tie-in writers like yourself plenty of puzzle pieces to fit together for us readers’ enjoyment!
A prequel to TOS has aliens on board? When on TOS Spock was supposed to be the first alien on a starship! A female captain? When on TOS it was made clear that women had not previously been allowed to be captains! Klingons that look even funkier than those on Next Generation and beyond when on TOS the Klingons looked more like greasy humans!
Does no one care that they have taken everything from TOS, Next Generation, DS9 and Voyager and turned it all tipsy turvy just to appeal to a new generation of pre-pubescent sci-fi nerds? Why not just continue the series AFTER Voyager, it would be a bigger hit and would gather both a new audience and honor the existing one. Seriously!
@31/Klaus: I can’t tell if you’re being satirical. I hope you are.
I’ve often wondered where the myth that Spock was the “first Vulcan in Starfleet” came from. It was never stated in canon, and the closest statement in The Making of Star Trek — the book that was the source of a lot of non-canonical conventional wisdom — is that Spock was currently the only Vulcan on the Enterprise, and that Sarek saw Spock’s joining Starfleet as a defiance of Vulcan tradition. But of course there’s a whole crew of Vulcans on the Intrepid, so clearly not all Vulcans shared Sarek’s opinion. I’ve certainly never heard the myth generalized to the extreme of “first alien on a starship” before (and of course that’s disproved by T’Pol and Phlox). Plenty of tie-in novels and comics over the decades have depicted other aliens in pre-TOS Starfleet, such as Nano in Marvel’s Pike-era Early Voyages comic, numerous members of the Endeavour and Sagittarius crews in the Vanguard and Seeker novels, and various characters in my own Rise of the Federation novels set in the first decade of the UFP, and nobody’s ever objected as far as I’m aware.
Plus, of course, Discovery is reportedly set a year after “The Cage,” so it’s not before Spock’s time in Starfleet anyway, it’s during it.
Christopher, there is a LOT to say here. Your points are valid, maybe I am being too true to the original series BUT ………..
found this comment from another serious trekkie: The USS Intrepid during the TOS era was crewed completely by Vulcans and was a Starfleet vessel – the inference is that all of the Vulcan crew had attended the academy and were Starfleet officers. This does not conflict with the often stated claim that Spock was the first Vulcan in Starfleet – bear in mind he had been in Starfleet for 20 years or so by the time the original series started.
as for T’Pol, the writes of Enterprise conveniently created all alternative time-line to allow a Vulcan and other aliens to exist on a previous Enterprise. no different from the writers who changed the time line to make changes to the characters of the recent Star Trek movies. including, if you can believe it, a blue eyed caucasion playing Khan in one of the movies. that alone put me off the rebooted Star Trek movies, seriously!
during TOS there is no mention of other aliens to confirm if others exist on other starships or not, but since we NEVER SEE other aliens on board other ships the conclusion most trekkies come to is that there were no other aliens serving on starships at the time ot TOS, except that the Vulcans had their own.
as for a female captain being in the new series Discovery when in the episode Turnabout Intruder it was stated that women were not allowed to be captains in Starfleet. so what will they do? create ANOTHER alternative time-line? same with Klingons who have ridges on their heads when in TOS they didnt, where-as we can suppose some genetic change happened to allow them to grow ridges between TOS and the first star trek movie.
anything can be pre-supposed in the world of SCI FI, alternative time lines, re-writing history, but no sloppy writing? I mean, Chekov was not part of the crew on TOS when they first encountered Khan but Khan recognized Chekov on the movie The Wrath Of Khan???? like I said, sloppy writing.
I am old-school trekkie fan, I don’t much care for prequels that are geared as I already stated to draw a new generation of fans, while dishonoring us existing ones, they could have achieved BOTH, by moving forward and doing a sequel to Voyager. NOW that would have been exciting!
It was my impression that during the TOS at least Starfleet was made up of member system’s fleets and the Enterprise was part of Earth’s contribution to the fleet. The Intrepid was not the only ship manned by Vulcans – though it may have been the only constitution class vessel, and there were other ships with other member planet majority crews. Spock seems to have attended Earth’s Starfleet academy and that’s why he’s assigned to a majority human ship. There are probably other individuals who attend another species academy for various reasons and end up serving as minority crewmen on those ships.
By TNG Starfleet is clearly more unified and mixed crews are becoming normal though one species still seems to predominate.
Chris, don’t bother. :)
@33/Klaus: “[…] in the episode Turnabout Intruder it was stated that women were not allowed to be captains in Starfleet”
Not quite. The exact wording was: “Your world of starship captains doesn’t admit women”, and the character who said that was somewhat unstable. So there’s no need for an alternative timeline. You can simply assume that either Lester mistakenly believed that she had been rejected because of her sex, or that she doesn’t mean that at all, she means that Kirk wasn’t interested in her because he was too much into his work.
If you look at TOS in its entirety, Starfleet is a good workplace for women. They can be first officers (“The Cage”), doctors (“Where No Man Has Gone Before”, “Dagger of the Mind”), lawyers (“Court Martial”), engineers (“The Alternative Factor”), scientists (“Space Seed”, “Who Mourns For Adonais?”, “Return to Tomorrow”), IT experts (“The Lights of Zetar”), or security officers (if you include TAS). It’s a weird notion that this same employer would make a rule against female captains.
I too am disappointed that it’s yet another prequel. Obviously the producers have done their research and think that setting it in the era near the movies and mainstream characters (many people who’ve never seen any ST have heard of Kirk etc, unlike Sisko or Janeway) will be most profitable. I assume that’s why the movies are featuring these characters and probably we’ll never see continuation of the ST universe in live action format.
Well, at least due to my utter lack of interest of the original 1960s ST I am pretty clueless about that era. So that’s good. Also, apart for the timing, what I’ve heard so far sounds promising and with modern film technology this is promising to be a fun Sci-Fi.
@36
I always interpreted it as Lester being all hurt that Kirk chose being a Captain over her rather than anything else. I mean she is bugfuck crazy, with a massive streak of narcissism, so which sounds more likely to her ego? That Kirk just didn’t want to sleep with crazy, or that he is obsessed with starships and being a captain which has excluded her. I mean one world view means she might be the problem in their relationship and the other places the blame on Kirk and implies he is the one who is unstable or otherwise screwed up. It is easy to see which explanation Lester’s ego is going to choose.
Kirk doesn’t argue with her, true, but the scene implies this is not a new argument they are having and there is only so long you can keep arguing with crazy before just rolling your eyes and moving on. It is nowhere near as cut and dried as people make it out to be. In-universe at least, the episode being written by Gene Himself does mean out-of-universe he probably was just going with standard sexism. Maybe not deliberately being sexist, but still at least running on unexamined prejudice. In-universe though it is open to multiple interpretations.