With the long-awaited premiere of Star Trek: Discovery now just a little over a month away, producer Akiva Goldsman and showrunners Aaron Harberts and Gretchen J. Berg have been chatting about the new series at the Television Critics Association press tour, discussing everything from the serialised storyline to initial involvement of previous showrunner Bryan Fuller, particularly with regards to overhauling the Klingons.
“You will find this to be far more than serialized than DS9 even in its last two seasons,” said Goldsman. “So this is by far, let me amend it, the most serialized version of Star Trek that has ever existed, and as such, it’s longform character storytelling. Without conflict, there is no longform character storytelling. Obviously, there’s a tremendous amount of conflict in TOS and there’s a lot of, sort of, aspirations towards the ideals of the Federation, and then we sort of made the prime directive just to break it, apparently. So part of what we’ve tried to do is speak to how those philosophical precepts came to be.”
“We are in a section of canon that has been referred to a lot,” he continued. “There is a lot of speculation about it. We are considering the novels not to be canon, but we are aware of them. And, we are going to cross paths with components that Trek fans are familiar with, but it is its own standalone story with its own characters and its own unique vision of Trek. There’s a period where our contact with the Klingons is nebulous. We are trying to view the idea of the creation of the Neutral Zone as something that was sufficiently inexact that we can now fill in how we got there. Our story of the Klingon War is our season one.”
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Herberts went on to discuss the Klingons, and how Bryan Fuller was heavilty involved in their redesign for the show: “One of the things he really, really wanted to do was shake up the design of the Klingons. One of the first things that he ever pitched to us when we were deciding whether or not to come on the show was his aesthetic for the Klingons and how important it was that they be aesthete, that they not be the thugs of the universe, that they be sexy and vital and different from what had come before. They drilled down in such a deep way to redundant pieces of anatomy, to the different plates on the head. We were in discussions that got so deep into biology and into sculpture. From the time that Neville Page [creature designer] brought in the 3D printout into the writers’ room of the Klingon, that design really hasn’t changed. The Klingon ship, the flagship of the Klingons, which you’ll see in some of the stills, that design, again, very important to Bryan, very hands-on, worked with Mark Worthington for months and months to get it right. We think that it’s unique, and we saw no reason to change his vision for those Klingons.”
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STAR TREK: DISCOVERY will follow the voyages of Starfleet on their missions to discover new worlds and new lifeforms, and one Starfleet officer who must learn that to truly understand all things alien, you must first understand yourself. The series will feature a new ship, new characters and new missions, while embracing the same ideology and hope for the future that inspired a generation of dreamers and doers.
Star Trek: Discovery premieres on September 24th on CBS and on September 25th on Netflix. Featuring in the cast are Sonequa Martin-Green (Lieutenant Commander Michael Burnham) are Jason Isaacs (Captain Lorca), Michelle Yeoh (Captain Georgiou), Chris Obi (T’Kuvma), Doug Jones (Saru), James Frain (Sarek), Terry Serpico (Anderson), Maulik Pancholy (Nambue), Anthony Rapp (Stamets), Mary Wiseman (Tilly), Mary Chieffo (L-Rell), Shazad Latif (Lieutenant Tyler), Rekha Sharma (Commander Mitchell), Kenneth Mitchell (Kol), Clare McConnell (Dennas), Damon Runyan (Ujilli) and Rainn Wilson (Harry Mudd).
Via SlashFilm
Originally published August 13, 2017. Updated April 16, 2018.
