ALL SCI-FI

[ralfy]

"The 2017 'Star Trek' TV Series Won't Be Set On The Enterprise And That's A Good Thing"

http://moviepilot.com/posts/3874185

"Star Trek Needs a Complete Reboot Because Sixties Futurism Was Pathetic"

https://www.inverse.com/article/16802-star-trek-needs-a-complete-reboot-because-sixties-futurism-was-pathetic

[Robert (Butch) Day]

Star Trek Comic-Con Panel: Actors From Every Series Promote New Show

http://variety.com/2016/tv/news/star-trek-comic-con-panel-hall-h-new-show-enterprise-voyager-1201808685/
_________________
Common Sense ISN'T Common

[Robert (Butch) Day]

Netflix To Beam New CBS STAR TREK Television Series In 188 Countries Around The World

http://lrmonline.com/news/netflix-to-beam-new-cbs-star-trek-television-series-in-188-countries-around-the-world
_________________
Common Sense ISN'T Common

[ralfy]

Comic Con trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cxba2WjlN90

[bulldogtrekker]

Everything the Discovery Can Tell Us About the New Star Trek Show
by Katharine Trendacosta, I09



CBS merely announced the name of the upcoming Star Trek TV series, and gave us the briefest glimpse of its titular ship, the Discovery. What could it possibly reveal about the show? Well, if you're a Star Trek nerd like we are, it can tell you a lot, in
cluding when in the timeline the series might take place.

The Discovery is pretty obviously based on Ralph McQuarrie's design of the Enterprise for the never-made Star Trek: Planet of the Titans. Here's the Discovery:




And here's McQuarrie's design:



Star Trek: Discovery executive producer Bryan Fuller was asked how much the Discovery was influenced by this design, and his answer was that it was --to a point that we can't legally comment on it until we figure out some things. So maybe the design of the ship will change between now and when the show actually comes out?in fact, executive producer Heather Kadin has said that this design isn't final.

But, assuming the ship stays the fundamentally the same, there are some interesting details to note. First is that there were actual models produced based on McQuarries designs. And, even though Planet of the Titans was never made, the models have shown up in Star Trek.

According to Memory Alpha, the Star Trek canon wiki, one of the models turns up in Star Trek III: The Search For Spock, docked near the Enterprise. Another one made an appearance in the Next Generation episode Unification I. Both of them are supposedly also in the rubble of the Borg attack at Wolf 359 in Best of Both Worlds, Part II.

That does make is possible that this flatter, more angular design was prevalent in Starfleet during the time of the movies, and that maybe the ships seen in The Next Generation were older ships. Another option is that the design is a class of ships that was made during that period. Either way, this might support the rumor that the show will be set in the period after the Undiscovered Country and before The Next Generation.

(UPDATE: A rumor that Bryan Fuller has denied.)

This is further backed up by the fact that the Discovery is registered as NCC-1031. There's no canonical reasoning behind the numbers, but the Enterprise is NCC-1701, the Defiant from Deep Space 9 is NX-74205 (NX denoting experimental or prototype ships), and Voyager from Voyager was NCC-74656. All the later ships have five numbers. The Discovery, with four like the Enterprise and without a letter like the later Enterprises, might be older. Assuming that Starfleet does the logical thing and numbers its ships in production order, the Discovery might even be older than the Enterprise..............


LINK: http://io9.gizmodo.com/everything-the-discovery-can-tell-us-about-the-new-star-1784257704

[ralfy]

"Why "Star Trek: Discovery" Will Be the Next "Game of Thrones"

https://www.inverse.com/article/18749-why-star-trek-discovery-will-be-the-next-game-of-thrones

[bulldogtrekker]

BREAKING: Star Trek: Discovery To Be Set 10 Years Before TOS, Will Feature Female Lead, Gay Character
August 10, 2016 | By: John Duchak TrekMovie



In a panel presented today at the Television Critics Association summer press tour, Bryan Fuller announced that DSC will bridge the gap between Enterprise and The Original Series, with the new show set ten years before Kirk's five-year mission. Fuller teased that there was an event in the history of the Federation that had been discussed, but not explored. When asked if it was set during the Romulan War, Fuller said "close, but no cigar." Fuller also denied that the show will revolve around the battle of Axanar or Section 31, but he hinted that the clandestine Starfleet organization will pop up in DSC.

As we've known for some time, the first season will be serialized. Fuller confirmed again that the 13-episode season will feature self-contained stories that contribute to the larger arc but wrap themselves up by the end of the episode.

First gay character for Trek on TV
Fuller confirmed that DSC would feature a gay character, more aliens than any other Star Trek series, and robots.

"Absolutely we're having a gay character," said Fuller.

Fuller remembered working on Star Trek Voyager and noted that he kept a file full of hate mail that he received after it had been rumored that Voyager would have Star Trek's first gay character.

"We've come a long way since then. I feel like actually gay rights have come a lot further in that time that race issues and women's issues."

Discovery to have female and male leads
Fuller announced that DSC will have a female lead who has yet to be cast. Fuller hopes to cast a minority actor for the role. Commenting on the female lead, Fuller said that DSC will, "explore a woman's journey that will teach her to get along with others in the galaxy." Fuller believes that for a protagonist to truly understand something alien, she has to first understand herself. However, Fuller noted that the female lead would not be the captain of the U.S.S. Discovery.

According to Entertainment Weekly, the female lead will have the rank of lieutenant commander but with "some caveats".

"We've seen six series from the captain's point of view," Fuller told the audience. "To see a character from a different perspective on the starship —it gave us richer context."

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Discovery will feature 7 lead characters as diverse as we have come to expect from Trek since The Original Series.

"Star Trek started with wonderful expression of diversity in its cast: a Russian, a black woman, an Asian, a Vulcan" we're continuing that tradition and our lead of the show is going to be subject of that same level of who is the best actor and what can we say about diversity in every role we'll have on the show," he said, noting there would be a few more aliens in its fleet than previous incarnations of the franchise. "We wanted to paint a picture of Starfleet that's indicative of encountering people who are much more different than we are."

TVLine is reporting that one of Discovery's original alien characters will be named Saru.

Discovery on CBS All Access
Commenting further on DSC, Marc DeBevoise, president and COO of CBS Interactive points out that he expects Star Trek: Discovery to get about 15 million viewers for its series premiere on CBS. He noted that Star Trek TV shows tend to average 2-to-5 million viewers for their first two years as reruns on Netflix. "We think this is a pretty good bet for us to make to grow our subscriber base next year," he said.

CBS confirmed that All Access will have advertisements, but those ads will constitute a "limited commercial load", which equates to roughly 25% less that what is seen on broadcast television (or about 12 minutes of ads per hour of show). When asked why viewers have to pay for CBS All Access when there are advertisements, DeBevoise said "the value is the depth and breath of the service that you can't get anywhere else."

LINK: http://trekmovie.com/2016/08/10/breaking-star-trek-discovery-to-be-set-10-years-before-tos-will-feature-female-lead-gay-character/

[Bud Brewster]

________________________________

A damn fine post, BDT! Thanks for sharing this!
_________________
____________
Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[bulldogtrekker]

'Star Trek: Discovery — Cast: Captain Garth Of Izar, Maniacal White Dude, Fits The Facts Nicely
iDigitalTimes.com By Andrew Whalen

There are just enough tantalizing clues about the setting and characters of Star Trek: Discovery to enable all sorts of delicious speculation. In short, we know that Discovery will be set in the Prime continuity about 10 years before Star Trek: The Original Series and will have a female lead (likely a minority woman modeled after astronaut Mae Jemison). But the biggest divergence from past Trek shows is that Star Trek: Discovery will not focus on the ship's captain. Instead, the lead will be a Lieutenant Commaner (making her a likely candidate for First Officer).

http://www.idigitaltimes.com/star-trek-discovery-cast-captain-garth-izar-maniacal-white-dude-fits-facts-nicely-551002

Which begs an obvious question: if our main character isn't captain of the USS Discovery NCC-10321, who is?

What if the captain of the Discovery is legendary hero of the Federation, Garth of Izar?

Hear me out on this, it actually fits the facts we know about Star Trek: Discovery quite nicely.

Discovery showrunner Bryan Fuller has made it clear that diversity is an important component of how he sees Star Trek and it's something he'd like to push further than previous Trek series. That means more minority characters, more women, a gay character and more aliens on the crew. "Star Trek started with a wonderful expression of diversity in its cast," Fuller said. "We're absolutely continuing that tradition."

Diversity will also play into the plot for the first season of Star Trek: Discovery. Here's how Fuller described the journey taken by the main character: "In order to understand something that is so completely alien from her, she must first understand herself. That's part of our journey on this planet, to get along, and that's part of our journey in this first season."

If the protagonist isn't the captain, perhaps that means the main characters will stand in opposition to the captain. The most obvious foil for a show about the virtues of diversity would be a rigid white man, the archetypal main character that's defined so much of television for so long, literally pitting a new, more diverse paradigm against ossified character models. This was a sub-theme of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine as well, which confronted racism head-on with episodes like "Far Beyond the Stars," about a black sci-fi writer in a society that won't accept his vision of a space station commanded by Benjamin Sisko, a black man.

But still, this hardly points to Garth of Izar, until we consider the time period and plot of Star Trek: Discovery. "There's an incident, an event, in the history of Starfleet that has been talked about (in previous Star Trek shows), but never fully explored," Fuller said, describing the origin for the plot of Star Trek: Discovery.

It's been widely assumed that Discovery will deal with the ongoing cold war between the United Federation of Planets and the Klingon Empire, which didn't end until nearly 40 years after the events of Star Trek: Discovery . One of the pivotal moments in the hotter stage of this conflict was the Battle of Axanar (perhaps, the presumed backstory behind the Battle of Axanar is of questionable and confusing canonicity), during which Garth of Izar saved the Federation.

The fan film Axanar , which has been at the center of a contentious lawsuit, pegs the Battle of Axanar as taking place in 2245, a decade before Discovery and 20 years before the Enterprise embarked on its five-year mission in Star Trek: The Original Series. During the time of Star Trek: Discovery, Garth of Izar would have been the ultimate war hero, a decorated officer whose record was second-to-none.

But then everything went wrong for good ol' Garth. Sometime in these intervening years he suffered a horrible injury, was cured by aliens, went mad and ordered those under his command to conduct genocide against those same aliens. His crew refused and Garth was carted away to an insane asylum on Elba II, where Captain Kirk would encounter him in the Star Trek episode "Whom Gods Destroy."

Everything we know about Garth of Izar is vague, since most of what we know comes from Kirk's hastily sketched backstory, establishing Garth as a hero just before making him the shapeshifting villain of the one episode in which he appears.

But we know that Garth of Izar was a central character in a pivotal incident "in the history of Starfleet that has been talked about, but never fully explored." Just as the Battle of Axanar has never been developed at length in a Star Trek series, neither has Garth of Izar's sad downfall from Federation war hero to maniacal inmate.

So we have a famous white male captain, ordering a diverse crew to more and more horrific acts against an alien race in the midst of an ongoing conflict, until his crew (and his Lieutenant Commander) have no choice but to rebel. Such a story would fit the time period, the themes" everything we know about Star Trek: Discovery.

Moreover, it fits a powerful and oft-explored Star Trek narrative mold. Star Trek is full of Starfleet officers who have seen the dark side and struggled to return to the light of peace and the rule of law offered by the Federation: Commodore Decker (TOS: "The Doomsday Machine"), Captain Benjamin Maxwell (TNG: "The Wounded") and even the villain of Star Trek Beyond, Balthazar Edison.

Yes, this is very much a guess. Perhaps there's some minor point of canon I missed in formulating it. But for now this feels like a great fit for the evidence, tying Star Trek: Discovery into both hardcore canon and some of Trek's most resonant themes. We'll see whether any of this speculation came close when Discovery premieres in early 2017.

[Gord Green]

The use of Garth of Izar makes sense as a character as well as the First Romulan War as a backdrop. This may explain some of Paramont's resistance to the fan produced Axanar project.

[ralfy]

"Star Trek: Discovery" Writers Say "Lower Your Expectations" For The New Show"

http://sciencefiction.com/2016/09/06/star-trek-discovery-writers-lower-expecations/

[bulldogtrekker]

New Discovery Launch Date -- May 2017
StarTrek.com Staff

Star Trek: Discovery will now launch in May, 2017,(it was January 2017) it was announced ...by CBS All Access. The new premiere date is driven by the creative team's belief that this will give the show the appropriate time for delivery of the highest-quality, premium edition of the first new Star Trek television series in more than a decade.

"Bringing Star Trek back to television carries a responsibility and mission: to connect fans and newcomers alike to the series that has fed our imaginations since childhood," executive producers Alex Kurtzman and Bryan Fuller said in a joint statement. "We aim to dream big and deliver, and that means making sure the demands of physical and post-production for a show that takes place entirely in space, and the need to meet an air date, don't result in compromised quality. Before heading into production, we evaluated these realities with our partners at CBS and they agreed: Star Trek deserves the very best, and these extra few months will help us achieve a vision we can all be proud of."

Star Trek: Discovery is coming to CBS All Access in May, 2017, following the premiere on the CBS Television Network, and will be distributed concurrently on Netflix in 188 countries (but not USA) and through Bell Media in Canada.

- See more at: http://www.startrek.com/article/new-discovery-launch-date-may-2017#sthash.W61ueemL.dpuf

[Eadie]

Trouble in paradise?

http://www.aintitcool.com/node/76597

[bulldogtrekker]

BREAKING: Michelle Yeoh Reportedly Cast as Captain Han Bo of the U.S.S. Shenzhou in "Star Trek: Discovery"
By: John Duchak, TrekMovie

Following yesterday's report that Star Trek: Discovery writer/producer Nicholas Meyer said Michelle Yeoh had been cast in the new series, her casting has been confirmed by two additional sources, and Yeoh herself has commented. Deadline claims that she will play Captain Han Bo of the U.S.S. Shenzhou, a ship key to Discovery's first season.


Yeoh Reportedly Playing Han Bo, Captain of the U.S.S. Shenzhou

Deadline today has allegedly confirmed that Michelle Yeoh has been cast in a role as a Starfleet Captain in Star Trek: Discovery. Specifically, Deadline's sources state that her character's name will be Han Bo and she will captain the U.S.S. Shenzhou, a vessel that will "play a big role in Discovery's first season."

Variety has also confirmed the casting, but report no information regarding Yeoh's role.

Asked about the casting rumors while appearing on the red carpet at the Singapore International Film Festival, Yeoh responded:

"Well, I think CBS will make their own announcement. But we all grew up with the Star Trek generation, so of course I'm a big fan."

Lead Apparently Yet to Be Cast
Variety also reports that the show's search for its lead, a female Lieutenant Commander, continues after three months of casting. Discovery's producers are reportedly not in the market for a big star for this role, but rather a younger (relative to Yeoh) fresh face. The show's producers are apparently looking for an African-American or Latina actor. While Discovery has reportedly had a difficult time settling on the perfect person for the part, Variety notes that several names have been "floating around" for some time.

CBS is not confirming or commenting on any casting news at this point.

LINK:
http://trekmovie.com/2016/11/23/breaking-michelle-yeoh-reportedly-cast-as-captain-han-bo-of-the-u-s-s-shenzhou/

[Eadie]

Article at http://www.aintitcool.com/node/76821