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 Commander (making her a likely candidate for First Officer).
Which raises an obvious question: if our main character isn’t captain of the USS Discovery NCC-1031, 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.
