A new Trek series

[Nate the Great]

An article discusses the tradition of pilots featuring cameos from prior series (McCoy on TNG, Picard on DS9, Quark on VOY, Cochrane on ENT) and proposes that T'Pol may make a good equivalent cameo for Discovery.

Yeah, insert anti-Enterprise rant here. I'm not interested in going into it again right now. I'd rather have a scene between T'Pau and Sarek, actually. A new actress that can emulate the original Celia Lovsky, not ENT's Betty Matsushita.

[Nate the Great]

YouTube video recapping known information and summarizing rumors.

Go to 5:35 if you want to skip the stuff I've already posted (i.e. the known facts) and go straight to the rumors and speculation.

I was going to recap some of the rumors, but I don't want to get in trouble or be misquoted. Just watch the video; the "rumor" portion is only four minutes long.

[Nate the Great]

Rumors of a Dr. McCoy cameo.

I'm just going to copy over one of the comments (disclaimer: I don't necessarily share all of the opinions, etc. etc.):

"This series is "eagerly anticipated"? I wonder by whom? Most of the Trekkies I know are more hand wringing and fretting about the ship and the recently released Klingon photos. It is not looking that great overall. Why would Bones be on this ship and not mention it later in TOS? Not wise. Fake ties to actual trek will be a big fail if they try it. Putting Leonard Nimoy in the Kelvin films did not improve them at all, nor did he give them credibility as being actual Star Trek."

Speculation that the Klingon and Starfleet ships on the show have been mashed into one vessel.

Supposedly this'll make it easier to follow all the characters, and also account for the odd design of the Discovery. Yeah, no.

There will be a cadet on the bridge, and its pointed out that "Shenzhou" is a Chinese name.

Why the Klingons are flying around in a ship with an Earth name is beyond me.

[Nate the Great]

Another roundup of recently revealed information.

And another.

Salient points:

* Discovery coming in late summer/early fall. "Probably." Remember when this was supposed to come out last January? How was that EVER going to work?
* Again someone talks about how traditionally scifi doesn't do well on TV. Um, yeah. So apparently 30 seasons of Star Trek, 5 years of Babylon 5, 4 years of Andromeda, 4 years of Farscape, 3 years of Lost in Space, over 30 years of Dr. Who (including spinoffs), etc. etc. didn't do well on TV. Those were just money pits only kept on the air by insane studio execs!
* Naked aliens and more swear words were specifically mentioned. Ugh.

[Nate the Great]

Speculation that Discovery will include the Treaty of Armens.

For those of you who don't recognize the name (I didn't, FYI), the Treaty of Armens is the agreement between the Sheliak and the Federation.

You will recall when Picard cut through the red tape and owned a Sheliak captain.

[Nate the Great]

Time for a monthly roundup. You can tell that I'm not enthusiastic about this show, I hadn't noticed that it's been a month.

They're still not ready to announce a premiere date.

An actor has been shifted to another role.

I'm not the only one with serious doubts (not that I approve of the F-bomb).

More cast members announced.

Wikipedia now has 14 cast members listed.
(I'm still dubious about Sarek playing an astrophysicist. Previous canon certainly implied that he was a diplomat from early on.)

[Nate the Great]

Discovery now has 19 cast members announced.

I'm getting scared. To get to 19 cast members on Deep Space Nine you had to include the recurring cast members like Kai Winn or Dukat. I get that Discovery is much more serialized, but even so, you shouldn't have more cast members than episodes, right?

I'm not the only one that's worried.

[Nate the Great]

I had some articles ready to post about what Discovery has to do to succeed (including moving to Netflix for everyone), but I'm tired of negativity for today.

The really depressing part is one article that I found somewhere that says that since Netflix has the show everywhere else, as long as Netflix gets their profit it doesn't matter if it bombs in the United States; they'll order a Season Two.

A Trek show that doesn't air in the United States, what an idea...

[Nate the Great]

Discovery confirmed for a fall debut.

The articles speculates that the creators didn't want to give a date until the threat of a writer's strike was past.

Furthermore they take the success of the other shows on Netflix as evidence that Discovery can support a different platform.

Insert apples and oranges metaphor and miscellaneous rants on CBS delusion here.

[NAHTMMM]

Originally Posted by Nate the Great

"This series is "eagerly anticipated"? I wonder by whom? Most of the Trekkies I know are more hand wringing and fretting about the ship and the recently released Klingon photos. It is not looking that great overall."

I can't even be bothered to wring my hands. I'm just rolling my eyes over here.

[Flying Gremlin]

I am not wringing my hands. I am patiently waiting for everything to come up Millhouse.

[Nate the Great]

Discovery crew members will use a variant of the arrowhead symbol (i.e. the Cochrane Delta) on their uniforms.

Um, what?

Unlike some other fanon stuff, the existence of a unique chest symbol for each ship in Starfleet during this time period is CANON. The link even shows what the symbols for the other Constitution-class ships were!

An attempt to argue that the "different chest symbol for each ship" thing was just an aberration during the time period of the first five-year mission. Yeah, I call shenanigans.

[Nate the Great]

Should we dedicate a separate thread to this new "Orville" show? Because a lot of it will be direct comparisons to Discovery, right?

[Nate the Great]

Discovery fan art.

[Nate the Great]

First look trailer.

For the purposes of this post alone, no comparison to any other Trek show allowed.

1. Forcing a fellow officer to trudge through a desert for no particular reason is cruel. It almost seems belittling, like the fellow officer deserves no more respect than a cadet. Why are we supposed to like this captain? And remember, a lot of the ratings depend on us liking the captain.
2. "We have engaged the Klingons." Well, that's just bad grammar. We have engaged a Klingon ship/fleet, we have engaged with Klingon forces, etc.
3. The notion of "screw diplomacy, we have to fight" is simply a bad lesson to introduce the audience to a conflict. We know nothing about these Klingons, what they've done, or whether or not the Discovery is authorized to initiate hostilities. It does seem a bit like pandering: "Don't worry, viewers at home, there's going to be a lot of action!"
4. An alien that can sense the coming of death. Well, that makes for good clickbait for one episode, but I hope he's not a regular, because it'll make problems later on. Either he's going to be sensing deaths with complete accuracy, robbing us of drama, or he can't sense deaths with complete accuracy, which means the viewer is asking why he's there taking up screentime. There's only so many times a viewer will accept that kind of ooga-booga, only for the supposedly doomed person to not die.
5. It was nice to hear the fanfare. (Okay, that was a comparison, but at least it's a positive one for a change.)

[Nate the Great]

A breakdown of the trailer.

Okay, NOW I can complain about continuity again.

Gold for Command, Silver for Science, Bronze for Operations. So we're in the mid-2250s according to the studio. Let's move past the fact that "The Cage" already established what the basic design of a Starfleet uniform looked like in this time period. It should be Gold for Command, BLUE for Science, and RED for Operations. Even the Kelvinverse got a detail like this right. Even ENTERPRISE got a detail like this right!

Why weren't the standard TOS uniforms acceptable? It sure would've gone a long way towards cashing in on that TOS nostalgia that Paramount seems to think is the key to success. And isn't that the point: to make money?

[Nate the Great]

I'll just quote a comment here:

"Unless you are going to negate the previous story lines, etc. & create a new, ‘re-imagined’ Star Trek, you need to follow the basic Trek story & timeline. If ‘Discovery’ is after ‘Enterprise’ & just before TOS, then the Klingons look should look like they did in TOS. But more importantly, Star Trek in whatever form, is at its best when it is story-driven, & when it addresses issues. Makeup & special effects should serve the story, not be the focus of it. Roddenberry didn’t create an ‘adventure’ series. He created a sci-fi series as an avenue to address social, political & moral issues. The idea that the latest incarnation of Star Trek needs to ‘out-FX’ the last version misses the point of what Star Trek is supposed to be & why it exists in the first place."

[Nate the Great]

Fans are told to stop worrying about Discovery fitting into canon.

Yeah, good luck with that. We were TOLD this is the Prime Universe, therefore we have the right to complain about conflicts.

Easiest way to solve the problems? Declare this to be a universe separate from Prime or Kelvin. Done. No conflict, any similarities are coincidence.

But did they go this route? No, they did not.

Harry Mudd confirmed for nine episodes.

Assuming that they mean that they're all in Season One, that's over half the episodes. I predict comic relief fatigue. Harry's the kind of guy that you can only do once per season, maybe two if a really good script comes along. Remember how NextGen did their best to not overexpose Q?

[Nate the Great]

Why Discovery has to be a reboot

They even make a convincing argument that this is the SIXTH reboot, not even the second.

[Flying Gremlin]

So would that article convince you to give Enterprise the time of day?