'Star Trek: Discovery' Plot: Could New Series Steal The Sheliak Corporate From 'The Next Generation'?

Star Trek: Discovery will be set 10 years before the Enterprise’s five-year mission dramatized in the original Star Trek . And while we know the plot will be serialized — showrunner Bryan Fuller called Season 1 a “novel” with the 13 episodes each comprising “a chapter” — it’s not yet clear what will be at stake. Asked at the Television Critics Association summer press tour whether it would involve the war with the Romulans, Fuller replied, “close, but no cigar.” It’s widely rumored that Klingons will have a lot to do with the plot, with opinions varying on whether they’ll be combatants or if we could be seeing the very first overtures of peace between the United Federation of Planets and the Klingon Empire (though the cold war wouldn’t end until the signing of the Khitomer Accords in 2293, nearly 40 years after Discovery is set). Some have even speculated that the USS Discovery NCC-1031, with its hard diagonals reminiscent of a Klingon Bird-of-Prey, could be a joint mission ship with Klingon officers.

While it’s likely Klingons will have a major role in Star Trek: Discovery, the timeline Bryan Fuller gave for the show’s setting could suggest a much more obscure and alien conflict: the negotiations with the Sheliak Corporate.

Fuller has given us two hints about the plot of Star Trek: Discovery . First: “There’s an incident, an event, in the history of Starfleet that has been talked about, but never fully explored.” Fuller also gave us a window of time, saying, “it’s set 10 years before Kirk.” This has been widely interpreted to mean 10 years before the events of Star Trek: The Original Series.

So what incident or event happened in 2255? The most popular guess is that Star Trek: Discovery will be set in the aftermath of the Battle of Axanar, though it’s unclear who the combatants were or even what year it took place (though a tabletop RPG of questionable canonicity has it as a battle against the Klingons in 2251). It’s certainly plausible. But there’s another, more minor, event in Star Trek history that fits the criteria perfectly.

In 2255, ten years before Star Trek: The Original Series , the United Federation of Planets signed the Treaty of Armens with the Sheliak Corporate after a brief skirmish. The highly legalistic alien race so loved legal jargon that the treaty took 372 Federation legal experts and 500,000 words to secure peace (thanks Memory Alpha!).

Not mentioned in Star Trek: The Original Series, the Sheliak Corporate comes from an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation (“The Ensigns of Command”), when Picard made contact with the reclusive alien race and was forced to revisit the treaty in order to protect Federation colonists from extermination by the Sheliak.

So the timeframe is right, but is there any other evidence that Star Trek: Discovery could be about the conflict and subsequent treaty with the Sheliak Corporate? There is, in fact. It fits quite neatly with what Fuller describes as the main themes of the new Trek show. Describing the journey taken by the lead character, a female Lieutenant Commander who has yet to be cast, Fuller said, “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.”

Now that could certainly fit the Klingons, whose warrior culture has been a source of exasperation and miscommunication for Federation officers in every Star Trek series. But is it really “so completely alien”? Maybe not, but the Sheliak Corporate certainly fits the description.