There's been a lot of speculation floating around about just how Star Trek: Discovery will fit with the TV shows in the franchise that have gone before it, and now we finally know more of what to expect from the series, thanks to showrunner Bryan Fuller. It looks like long time Trek fans can definitely expect to be rewarded when Discovery begins to tell its story. Here's what Fuller had to say:
There's an incident and event in Star Trek history, that's been talked about but never been explored. To do this series, we're telling a much more serialized story, to dig deep into a very tantalizing [storyline]. And we have a character who's on a journey, and in order to understand something that is alien she first has to understand herself.
Bryan Fuller answered some questions about Star Trek: Discovery during the Television Critics Association's press tour on Wednesday (via Entertainment Weekly), and revealed a lot about the new show, while also cleverly leaving us to guess about many aspects of the upcoming series. While we've been wondering for months when exactly the new series would take place in the Prime timeline (that refers to the TV shows and non-J.J. Abrams movies), we now know that Discovery will actually begin a whole 10 years before the original adventures of Kirk, Spock, Bones and the rest of the Enterprise crew.
Are you already going over every bit of information in your mental Star Trek files trying to figure out what big "incident and event" in the lore has been brought up but never fully explored or shown on camera? This is certainly a puzzle for the most die hard Trek fans. By the way, if you were guessing that the event that will lead to this "tantalizing" story is the Romulan War, Bryan Fuller would like you to know that you are very nearly on target, but, alas, not quite all the way there. The main character, who Fuller tells us will be female and a lieutenant commander in Starfleet as opposed to a captain, will need to figure herself out in order to figure out something alien. This might mean that the big event has something to do with first contact of an alien species, but something tells me that that's going to end up being too simplistic of an answer.
OK, the big challenge now is figuring out what the series could be using as a jumping off point that will lend itself to a serialized story. Bryan Fuller has certainly given us something to think on in the months leading up to the premiere of Star Trek: Discovery, and we can get the full picture when the show hits CBS All Access in January next year.
