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Star Trek Discovery Gets Delayed Again As Spock's Father Is Cast (hollywoodreporter.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Hollywood Reporter: CBS All Access' Star Trek: Discovery has been delayed again as the series continues casting. The revival for the streaming platform has cast James Frain as Spock's father, producer CBS Television Studios announced Wednesday, as sources confirm that the show's planned May debut has been pushed. "Production on Star Trek: Discovery begins next week. We love the cast, the scripts and are excited about the world the producers have created," reps for CBS All Access said in a statement. "This is an ambitious project; we will be flexible on a launch date if it's best for the show. We've said from the beginning it's more important to do this right than to do it fast. There is also added flexibility presenting on CBS All Access, which isn't beholden to seasonal premieres or launch windows." Frain will play Sarek, the famed father of Spock who was first introduced in the original Star Trek and who has made several appearances throughout the franchise's many incarnations over the past five decades. The CBS All Access show features the franchise's Enterprise, now known as the U.S.S. Discovery. The drama will introduce new characters seeking new worlds and civilizations while exploring the dramatic contemporary themes that have been a signature of the franchise since its inception in 1966. Star Trek: Discovery was originally scheduled to debut in January and was pushed back to May, with The Good Wife spinoff The Good Fight now set to be the first scripted offering on CBS All Access, the network's VOD platform. This marks the second delay for the series, which saw former showrunner Bryan Fuller step down to focus on his Starz drama American Gods.
I loved Star Trek. TOS, TNG, you name it. Big time fan.
It all ended when they decided to "reboot" the show and give it the boot, literally so. Of course you can't really continue a show with actors that are either ancient, dead or both, and you cannot do the TNG-dance every other decade because, well, how far can technology advance before humans become fully redundant because technology literally has the ability from "poof - you're dead" to "poof - you're alive". Face it, watching a bunch of Qs meddling with time and space isn't really funny, nobody wants to watch a show consisting entirely of Mary Sues.
One Wesley was already more than anyone could stomach.
Maybe I'm also not the target audience, being old and no longer the target focus for movies. I haven't seen the last few and I most likely also won't see this one. Sorry for the nostalgic shit, but Kirk, Spock, Bones and Scotty are four old guys that are dead now. Ok, one is technically still alive, but you get the idea. If they want to rewind time and put the setting back into the 2200s, why not show the adventures of another crew? It could have been woven into the old stories of the Enterprise to make old fans happy, if only for the "oh I see what you did there!" effect, while effectively not really bothering any new fans who probably know nothing about the original show (and let's be honest here, the 60s TV show is cheesy as fuck by today's standards). That could have rebooted the franchise for sure.
What do we get instead? Well, basically what we got is that all we "knew", what has been established as canon and the stories that happened before, all that is simply tossed into the garbage can and you're expected to start over. And that's simply not working as well as it could. First, Star Trek is anything but unique today. It was in the 1960s, there was very little competition in the SciFi arena and it could easily gain a foothold, even with stories that were even for the time often sub par. If you want to succeed in the SciFi genre today, you have to pump a LOT of money to get noticed. That is of course easier if you can boast a known name, but if that name has been hollowed out as it has been here, you're basically trashing it. What they did was to throw away an existing fan base instead of building upon it. Because now you have to win us over again, there isn't anything in this Star Trek that I'd recognize anymore. But ok, fine, give me a story that I can relate to and believable characters.
And that's where it fails. Again, with new characters this could have worked. But if you reuse characters, people have expectations. You expect Kirk to be brave, cynical, able to make one of two faces and suck in his belly for at least 200 episodes. You expect a cold, logical Spock devoid of emotions. And if that expectations are not met, your reaction is that it's "wrong". Which is kinda sad because the characters aren't that bad at all. They just don't fit the boots they have been put into.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
And yet, the same person may well turn around and say "Facebook allows for 71 genders - hm. This seems a little odd to me".
That's the kind of thing that Trek was great at forcing the viewer to question. They meet all these alien races, some of them androgynous, some of them with three or five or 71 genders, and the viewer accepts it because they are aliens. That acceptance and normalization of the concept then transfers to humans, if only a little.
There was an episode of TNG with an androgynous race where any kind of gender was seen as abhorrent, and of course Riker turned one of them female. There are also the Trill race, of which DS9's Dax was a member, where they often switch gender when changing hosts. I recall an episode of Enterprise where there was a three gender race too, with the third gender being treated as little more than a breeding animal.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Star Trek has always been "SJW".
Ah, but I don't ever recall hearing the phrase "check your privilege", do you? I don't recall anyone screaming in O'Brien's face that he was a racist as he struggled to deal with the fact that he was uncomfortable around Cardassians due to his experiences in the war. I don't recall Picard making all kinds of special allowances for Worf's behavior as a proud Klingon living in a society where Klingons are extremely rare and Klingon stereotypes are constantly bandied about--on the contrary, he often insisted that Worf completely set aside all cultural biases in the name of duty. I don't recall calls for safe spaces or neo-segregation. In fact, this was pushed back against numerous times, particularly in DS9.
And perhaps most illustrative of all, I really don't recall the leading males being demonized even if they exhibited aggressive sexual advances. Of course TOS leaps to mind, but I also recall an episode of ST:TNG where it's strongly implied that a woman who accuses Riker of attempted rape not only made it up, but is actually so self-delusional that she herself believes that that's what happened. Women can not only lie about sexual assault, but they can be completely self-delusional about it... and no one even bothered charging the man with sexual assault because there was no other evidence of it other than the woman's word. Yeah. So. Name me one SJW feminist who is OK with that.
I don't know or much care about how the right sloppily uses labels like "SJW". For the rest of us, centrists and egalitarian leftists alike, it indicates first and foremost the anti-egalitarian, pro-identity politics, victimhood-obsessed sections of the left.
And that was never what Star Trek was about.
ST: Discovery takes place before ST: Enterprise,
Are you sure? Seems like a series set in a pre-warp-drive era would mostly be about a bunch of space mariners playing Poker for years at a time. Everything I've seen says that the story is set in a similar time to TOS, just slightly earlier.
and the USS Enterprise, and Starfleet itself, were new in ST: Enterprise. USS Discovery is a pre-Starfleet ship.
There have already been 7 USS Enterprises to date (and an Enterprise without the USS designation that was operated first by the US Navy and later by the Fisheries Bureau). The name was apparently taken from the British Royal Navy which has operated 11 ships designated HMS Enterprise and 2 HMS Enterprize. The name first entered the Royal Navy when they captured a French ship called L'Entreprise.
The naming of the Enterprise in TOS was following the long line of US naval tradition, and the naming of the ship in TNG followed that tradition, and the naming of the ship in ST:E was again consistent with this tradition. But as I said, this naming tradition predates Starfleet by a considerable margin -- the first USS Enterprise was christened in 1775. So even if this series is pre-Starfleet (which it appears not to be), they could still quite easily have dubbed the ship Enterprise if they'd wanted to.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'