It’s a case of final frontier, schminal frontier as the first trailer arrives from Star Trek: Discovery, the hotly-anticipated and long-delayed reboot of the sci-fi TV franchise.
The first images were beamed across the world at last year’s San Diego Comic Con, showcasing a golden spacecraft and revealing a timeline set before the Enterprise had boldly gone with Captain Kirk at the helm.
But an awful lot has changed in the near year since, with the show dogged by a number of production delays and the departure of showrunner Bryan Fuller. The writer behind American Gods and Hannibal had promised a bold vision for the show, with diversity – in the form of alien species, gender and sexuality – all promised.
But within months of his announcement, Fuller had flown the coop, replaced by Gretchen J Berg and Aaron Haarberts. Fans of Bryan Fuller’s short-lived Pushing Daisies could at least take solace in the news that the new showrunners had also worked on that cult favourite.
The trailer establishes The Walking Dead’s Sonequa Martin-Green as the show’s lead, First Officer Michael Burnham, as well as her relationship with Captain Philippa Georgiou (Michelle Yeoh). But what is known is that Georgiou is the captain on the Shenzhou, so at what point things shift to the Discovery remains unknown.
Set a decade before the original Star Trek, Discovery will revisit the Federation’s past, pointing to a time when intergalactic diplomacy may have been a shoot-first-ask-peaceful-questions-later affair.
CBS has remained tight-lipped on the launch date for the new series, but Netflix has signed on to distribute the show around the world. All 15 episodes of Star Trek: Discovery should be coming at some point this year.
