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Star Trek Discovery's First Trailer Brings a New Ship, New Characters, and Old Conflicts (cbs.com)
nyquil superstar writes: Hey all, the Star Trek: Discovery trailer is out. Looks entertaining! From a report via Vox: "The trailer features Sonequa Martin-Green, fresh from The Walking Dead, as Michael Burnham, a first officer promoted unexpectedly to the position of captain by her mentor, Captain Georgiou (Michelle Yeoh). Set 10 years before the original Star Trek series (and 90 years after the franchise's only other prequel, Star Trek: Enterprise), the new series follows the starship Discovery as Burnham learns to become a captain. But she soon finds her abilities tested by a host of challenges that will be familiar to all lovers of the classic sci-fi universe: new worlds to explore and alliances to forge, hostile Klingons, and the difficulty of adhering to the Federation's peacekeeping mission."
You are correct, of course. The problem is that is even worse than what they're shovelling now... because while that was relevant social commentary back then, it ain't now.
Sticking with that - showing the great Federation as still recovering from post-WWIII social regression despite thinking of itself as an egalitarian utopia - would have been a great sci-fi premise, but a difficult sales pitch.
In fact, showing the Federation as a bunch of aggressive but cautious jerks who are reeling from getting kicked in the groin by the Romulan War right while still recovering from the Eugenics Wars, and heading straight into the Klingon War would have been a really brave move with a lot of potential for stories with emotional weight - something Trek's been pretty weak at.
Showing women (and scapegoated minorities) fighting to regain rights they know their ancestors had, in a Cold War-esque paranoid society with the general population trying to return to peace while the leaders and military know war looms and want to crack down on social progress to maintain control in the name of survival... there's so much material there. Plenty of which that would be a great analogue for the problems of today.