Star Trek: Discovery

Exactly—it’s letter not spirit, and on another level it just doesn’t make much sense—like if Star Wars restarted with Rogue One rather than The Force Awakens (which probably would have worked, but imagine if Star Wars was a couple of orders of magnitude less popular).

There are so many cases of aliens visiting Earth in the distant past, so sure. This video has a pretty thorough breakdown (and, of course, they could just create their own unrecorded event as most of these events are unrecorded in history:)

Roy Batty's Pet Dove Trust me; they'd change it. People lost their minds that Enterprise wasn't called Star Trek: Enterprise and eventually that did actually happen.

So it should be THE Star Trek: Next Generation

I'm guessing that's when they'll roll everything out, but there may be some weird CBS/Paramount turf wars, given that Beyond comes out right after SDCC, so they might wait until the 50th on September 8th, or thereabouts.

Apparently the CBS/Paramount stuff is why this show won't come out until 2017. They specifically are proceeding from the idea that advertising another Trek product is a kind of brand confusion, so it can't even air until six months after the latest film.

There are, of course, the possibility of leaks and shots from the set occurring between now and then. Not to mention a drip-drip-drip of information - CBS has confirmed that, although Star Trek will be released online, it will be on a weekly model.

I consider that good news - hopefully, even if the show has a degree of arced content (almost obligatory on TV these days), a weekly schedule suggests it may tell episodic stories, and I think Star Trek is very well suited to that.

Of course then again shows that are essentially pure arc, like Game of Thrones, are also weekly, so I won't read too much into it.

(There's a Star Trek convention in New York this September that CBS could use if they wanted to, though none of the current guests are related to the new series in any way.)

Sounds like they were going for a Star Trek VI sort of feeling in the music when passing by not-actually-but-hell-I’ll-call-it-Praxis-anyway.

A new rumour about the universe the series is in - this one suggesting it'll be in continuity with the Abrams films, for - among other reasons - to avoid confusing viewers.

(I would again note the only official comment about universes suggests that the new show is one that is "existing outside of the mythology charted by previous series and the current movie franchises," which would seem to suggest neither rumour is true and the series is functionally set in a new universe.)

Probably worth noting here how similar the teaser was to the end credits to the Abrams films:



Frankly, were it not for the tension between CBS and Paramount, I'm sure this is the series CBS - or at least Alex Kurtzmann, who helped create the Abramsverse - would want to make, as it makes sense to try and tie in to the most recent, popular iteration of a franchise, and the first of Abrams films did the biggest business for a Trek movie since The Voyage Home.

But given that tension I'd be surprised if the new show could actually use anything specifically from those movies (like the Kelvin-type starship, in the same way non-Enterprise models from the original cast films became default Starfleet starships on Next Generation) so I'd have my doubts.

Ben Grimm

CBS All Access wouldn't be successful if it was only hardcore Star Trek fans subscribing. They are going to have other exclusive content and are clearly trying to position themselves as an alternative to a Amazon Prime and Netflix - Star Trek could be seen in that context (or how Sci-Fi junked making a BSG show for hardcore fans for one with a broader audience focus to notable success.)

Regardless of whatever universe it's in CBS obviously want a show that's accessible; even though they recently made a fairly nerdy hire for their writers room (Kristen Beyer, who has been writing the Star Trek: Voyager novels for the past few years - this makes her the third person to graduate from Star Trek novelist to Star Trek staff after the two Reeves-Stevenses in Enterprise's fourth season - previous Trek novelists like Diane Duane and David Mack have co-written episodes but not as staff) they'll almost certainly want something you can watch independently from Star Trek's long history.

Given they've said the show has a new mythology, and Nick Meyer's interview has suggested the same thing, and their promo has hinged on the same idea, I'm still most liable to assume that's the direction they want.

Ben Grimm Everything that's happened in the last couple of years suggests that CBS and Paramount are not getting on at all well, yeah; equivalent to the divisions of the Battlestar Galactica license (Sci-Fi only had the TV rights which is why the TV movies based on the series had to be deliberately named as such or the long gestating attempt at a new BSG film series maybe with or without Bryan Singer unconnected to the Sci-Fi show), the Hannibal license that posed a bit of a bother for Bryan Fuller when he was doing that show - or, indeed, the myriad Marvel comic licenses. These divisions were why J.J. Abrams own effort to start a Star Trek series got nowhere (he kicked off like four or five unrelated TV shows during his time with the Trek films) and why they have to wait six months until after the movie to release the TV show.

This video is a pretty fun summary of many of the Star Trek shows that never were for the record:

That's my understanding. It will have the CBS/Viacom/Paramount back catalogue, but it's not clear to me how many people will sign up for it for that.

Big new news about the show. They've hired two new writers. One is some guy who wrote for Heroes and I guess people who watched Heroes have an opinion of him, the other one is JOE MENOSKY.

Yes, that Joe Menosky. One of the many writers who joined Star Trek during Michael Piller's run as executive producer of the Next Generation - like Ronald D. Moore, Ira Steven Behr, Jeri Taylor and yes Brannon Braga - who would have a significant impact on the franchise. Menosky came up with the running joke of the number 47, he wrote and co-wrote countless Next Generation and Voyager episodes (with a brief detour into early Deep Space Nine.) What distinguished Menosky at least to me among Trek's writers is a fondness for kind of odd stories that could have I guess a peculiar cerebrality - like his swan song on Voyager, "Muse," which recalled ancient Greek theatre with aliens putting on shows about our heroes, but far more obviously, "Darmok," an episode that can be fairly called one of the best Next Generation episodes and one of the best Star Trek episodes period.


Menosky is the highest profile writer from the 'Berman' era of Star Trek to be attached to this show; Bryan Fuller also got his start on TV and Trek in this period but he was a fairly junior Voyager writer at the time.

HOT DAMN, my hype train just left the station with this news. Well, the Menosky bit. No idea about the Heroes writer.

I read a post by her with her about the episode once (it was in reply to Wil Wheaton's review of it) and the long and the short of it was it was rewritten quite a bit from her initial idea and she hated the episode as is.

Roy Batty's Pet Dove He meant to say "Where No One Has Gone Before," which is a season one episode of the Next Generation unrelated to "Where No Man Has Gone Before."

Edit: It occurs to me that the increasing size of the writer's room may imply that this series may be going for a full twenty-two episode run (CBS the channel still routinely has shows of this length), but that's pure wish fulfillment on my part.

(While Star Trek seasons routinely went beyond twenty-two episodes - the spinoff series usually doing twenty-six a season - that's unheard of in TV today.)