Showrunner Bryan Fuller has revealed a number of new details about the upcoming Star Trek: Discovery, which will stream on CBS All Access in early 2017.
Speaking at the Television Critics Association summer press tour, Fuller revealed the new Star Trek series will take place ten years before the five-year mission of Captain Kirk’s Enterprise crew in Star Trek: The Original Series. This places the show in the midst of an ongoing cold war with the Klingon Empire. It also places the show contemporaneous with the rebooted Star Trek movie, set in a parallel universe recently dubbed the “Kelvin Timeline.”
Since Star Trek: Discovery is set in the “Prime Universe” of the TV series, characters from the movies could theoretically play their parallel dimensional counterparts, without any conflict between the continuity of the films and the series. And while Fuller said he was not currently planning on featuring bridge crew members from Star Trek ’s Enterprise, he left the possibility open. That means we could get Chris Pine’s Kirk (depending on the exact stardate Kirk was either finishing up Starfleet Academy or serving aboard the USS Farragut as a phaser gun crew member) in a cameo. Or the show could bump into the Enterprise itself, at this point helmed by Captain Pike (played by Bruce Greenwood in the 2009 movie) and staffed with junior science officer Spock (Zachary Quinto).
Still, that’s all speculation. But there is one Star Trek: The Original Series era character that Bryan Fuller will likely have appear in Star Trek: Discovery . Fuller is interested in having Amanda Grayson, Spock’s human mother, make an appearance. “She’s not a central part of the show,” Fuller said, “but we love the character.”
Fuller described one of the primary themes of the show as the main character learning to get along in a universe full of aliens and alien ideas. “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,” Fuller said.
While the main character will be a Lieutenant Commander aboard the Discovery, Amanda Grayson, who abandoned Earth for the alien culture of Vulcan, would be the perfect person to help our Star Trek: Discovery lead on that journey into the ideological unknown.
Could this mean the return of Winona Ryder to Star Trek (she played Amanda Grayson in the 2009 movie), hot off her hit Netflix show, Stranger Things? That’s just one of the many tantalizing casting possibilities opened up by the new Star Trek: Discovery timeline.
