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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."
Star Trek has always been quite diverse, by TV standards.
Pilot - Number One was a woman
Original Series - Black woman, east Asian man, Russian and Scot in the main cast
Next Generation - Many female and black characters, Picard was French
Deep Space 9 - Black captain
Voyager - Female captain and chief engineer, Native American second in command
I didn't even mention the black/east Asian members of the crew in the later ones, they were so normal (for Trek) by that point. And Janeway was originally going to be French too, but they replaced the actor after some test footage didn't turn out as they had hoped.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
This one seems to work for me:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8mesUEFjas
Roddenberry certainly tried to give women equal roles in the original series. In the pilot Majel Barret played the second in command of the ship. Unfortunately the studio objected and decided that they would have the child-like Yeoman Rand, and then got rid of her to make way for a love-interest-of-the-week (which is how Kirk got his reputation).
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I guess that means that we're going to have to just talk about something else...
Lack of knowledge of a subject has never stopped Slashdotters from ranting on endlessly about it. We don't read TFA, we don't read the summary, and sometimes we don't even read the post that we are replying to.
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The episode order has been increased to 15. That's 15 too many, in my opinion. The development of Discovery has been marked by pure incompetence, despite having some really good people involved. I had high hopes with Bryan Fuller and Nicholas Meyer, who did really good work previously with Star Trek. I thought Rod Roddenberry might have a good feel how to run the show because he had praised Star Trek Continues, which is really well done. Fuller is gone and the show keeps sounding less interesting as more news comes out. It wasn't that long ago that Michael Dorn passed on being cast for Discovery as one of Worf's ancestors because they gave him an insulting lowball offer, about 65% of what he was paid on TNG and DS9. Between seven seasons on TNG and four on DS9, I don't think anyone else has come close to appearing in as many episodes as Dorn has. It's embarrassing.
I have no confidence in the people developing Discovery that it's going to be worthwhile. There's nothing in the trailer that impresses me. There's a lot of action but I'm not convinced there's an interesting story to go along with it. CBS hasn't given much information on the actual premise for Discovery, and I don't see a whole lot in this trailer to provide any more information about it. It doesn't matter how diverse your cast is or how much you include special effects and combat if you don't have good writing and an interesting story to tell. With all of the delays and personnel changes, there has been more than enough time to devise a compelling premise. If there was truly an interesting premise to this show, I would expect CBS to provide more information on what that is to attract viewers. The trailer doesn't do that at all. This just seems like more incompetence to me.
I wish this show interested me. But I have yet to see anything that makes me think it's worth watching. If I'm going to watch anything on All Access, it'll be Big Brother and The Good Fight, both of which seem far more worthwhile than Discovery. It's a shame because I really like TOS and DS9, and TNG was pretty good.
Yes, and it obviously worked, as 200something episodes will tell.
What Star Trek did right back then, and what it utterly fails at here, is that diversity is a good thing, but beating it into people with a sledgehammer is not. You see, people don't like that. Uhura was a black female as the communications officer. Back then that was an "impossibility". Not only a woman, not only a black person, but a black woman as an officer!
The real impact of it all was, though, that it was treated as a non-issue. They didn't parade her and try to "make a point" out of it, "look we are so progressive, we have a black female officer!". No, it was treated as normal. Which made in my opinion the even stronger point. The message was simply that in the future, black female officers are so normal that we needn't even talk about it anymore. It's a given. Nobody questioned her ability. Hell, if there was a mobbing victim on the ship, it probably was Chekov.
That was a pretty big statement for the 1960s, a decade when the civil rights movement still had to fight to at least get equal treatment of black and white people by law. And as we know, it still didn't really arrive in all heads.
What bothers me about the "new" Star Trek is that this message is now delivered by sledgehammer. Look, we're progressive, we have an asian female nonbinary transgender captain. If it was at least an alien... but for some odd reason, alien captains are still a nono.
Why not?
Why not have a nonhuman captain and a crew of humans and aliens that has to deal with it?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
> Second, Rodenberry was a cynical guy.
Roddenberry was a working director in a tough broadcast market. From his own cast's testimony, he was a wonderful, sweet man to work with who had visions of what people could be and should be, and showed them living up to those goals in the face of tremendous pressures to please or avoid displeasing the sponsors who advertised on Star Trek episodes and on other shows by the same network.
> First, there's a big difference between a black woman with authority accepted by white men in the 60s,
This was the *early* 1960's, at the height of the civil rights movement. A black woman with authority for whom her racial identity was cultural, rather than a source of plot tension on a mixed staff, was a very large issue. The kiss between Captian Kirk and Leutenant Urura was a _very_ significatnt event, the first inter-racial kiss in television history. Nichelle Nichols part in Star Trek was a huge inspiration to black women and girls of all races. And Gene Roddenberry deserves all the credit he earned for his very positive stories that helped make Nichelle, and Uhura, heroes.
I don't really see how you can say having a black female officer at a time when it was unthinkable wasn't really hammering it home. And I don't know where you got that stuff about the captain being nonbinary transgender, but it doesn't seem to be the case at all.
The trailer and the marketing so far doesn't push the diversity side at all. In fact I don't think it does anything new at all really, since the new movies have an openly gay character.
Really, what makes you think they are hammering this in any way? Almost all the discussion I've seen about it has been anti-progressives complaining about it, with basically zero from the studio.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Why do you feel excluded from it? Half the cast is white males. Confirmed so far:
Sonequa Martin-Green (black female)
Terry Serpico (white male)
Maulik Pancholy (Asian American male)
Sam Vartholomeos (white male)
James Frain (white male)
Doug Jones (white male)
Michelle Yeoh (east Asian female)
Anthony Rapp (white male)
Chris Obi (black male)
Shazad Latif (British Asian male)
Mary Chieffo (white female)
Jason Isaacs (white male)
Mary Wiseman (white female)
Rainn Wilson (white male)
Kenneth Mitchell (white male)
Rekha Sharma (Asian female)
Damon Runyan (white male)
Clare McConnell (white female)
So the main confirmed cast is 50% white male, and 66% white. One character is gay, or 94% straight.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Why not have a nonhuman captain and a crew of humans and aliens that has to deal with it?
Because, ultimately, Star Trek, like many Science Fiction shows has always been about "humanity" and the "human condition". Most of the best science fiction is about looking at humanity through a different angle (hence the "sci-fi" part is usually to look at humans in a "what if" scenario, it's easier to examine issues and morality by separating it from the everyday normal).
Now, what's that got to do with your question? Well, if the alien is captain it takes the spotlight off humanity since the captain frequently becomes the focus. All the Star Trek characters had aliens, not to look at aliens, but to look at humans.
Data is the classic example, he's the Pinocchio of the series, the puppet that wanted to be human.
Seven-Of-Nine another classic example, a human separated from humanity by the Borg trying to rediscover what it is to be human.
These characters were loosely based on Spock, not to be like him but to fill the same role. Spock didn't want to be human of course, but his "differentness" was frequently a plot device to compare him to humans and humanity.
You probably COULD have an alien captain, but then the screenwriters would have to work harder and more creatively to write stories about humanity and human morals. A human captain makes it easier to work those into the plots.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
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.