It would take twelve more years after the end of Enterprise for Star Trek to reappear on the small screen.  The seventh Star Trek TV series (Star Trek Discovery) premiered on 24 Sep 2017.   This show was a new modern take on Trek.  It still felt like Trek to me as there was enough that it felt like it.  But there were some core changes to the premise.

The primary actor was Sonequa Martin-Green.  But she wasn’t the captain of the Discovery.  She was a a first officer, who then gets courtmartialed, and is a prisoner.  Her character has quite the journey over the five seasons of the show.  It’s an interesting take that the primary actor isn’t the captain of the ship the show is based on.  That was new.  Before the series launched, it was said that Michelle Yeoh was the captain of the ship, and that was true.  She was, but she was a guest actor.   Not regular cast.

The other odd choice is they made it yet ANOTHER prequel like Enterprise was – except this time it was only about 10 years before the time of Kirk & Spock. Then they immediately introduced a canon problem by having the tech of the USS Discovery radically more advanced than what the Federation could do in the time of Kirk & Spock.  They did fix that problem by soft rebooting the series going into the third season.  I know a lot of people had issues with that.  But I bought into it.

The show had a much darker tone than Trek to this point, which is where I think people are put off.  It isn’t my favorite overall series – or close to it.  But I don’t actively dislike it – and there are some excellent episodes, and wonderful acting performances.  I adore Doug Jones’ Saru here.  Mary Wiseman’s Tilly is a joy.   But this series leaned more into the “Big Three” concept that TOS had, because the bulk of the bridge crew are honestly – faceless to me. As I sit here writing it, I can’t tell you any of their names.  Now a lot of that has to do with me having watched the series just once – on original transmission – very VERY few repeats.  So while it’s all relatively recent, most if where the story bits fit together are lost to me.

They did tie in to existing Trek lore in a big way a few times.  One episode was titled “Unification III” and was a sequel to the first two episodes of that name in TNG’s run.  They also did a DIRECT sequel to the original pilot – “The Cage”, which involved Talos IV again, and the Keepers and all that.  It was great.  In fact, that happened in the middle of Season 2 when Anson Mount’s Capt Pike had come on to the series, and ended up resulting in the entire Strange New Worlds series.  So there’s definite ties to lore (heck we had Spock’s parents, and a change to canon saying that michael Burnham was Spock’s adopted sister).

They finally broke the seal on having an openly gay couple – two of the (male) primary cast members were married to each other – something that had been talked about in Trek since the days of the original series.  So that was a step forward.

Also, as we’re into modern Trek, the series themselves are shorter.  TNG/DS9/VOY/ENT had roughly 24-26 eps a season.  The original had even more. Discovery bucks this trend.  Season one has the most at 15 episodes.  It then trends downward until Season 5 has just 10.

It was also the first Trek series that wasn’t broadcast on terrestrial television – it was a streaming only series on Paramount+ (which was at the time of launch called CBS All Access).   That too probably put people off.

Discovery was also the first series to have a companion series that aired with it on “CBS All Access”.  It was called “After Trek” at first, and was hosted by Matt Mira.  It was designed as a behind the scenes piece where actors and production people would come on to talk about the show.  I watched it, but it was kind of painful.  The host didn’t seem that connected to the material.  Fortunately they realized this, and in Season 2 onwards, they changed format.  They created something called “The Ready Room”, and changed hosts to Naomi Kyle.  It was better, but still felt off.  However for Season 3, they got the formula right by changing hosts again – to Wil Wheaton.  Wheaton was perfect for that.  Both from his known nerd status, and from his direct involvement in Trek.  He remained host of The Ready Room through the rest of it’s run – which covered the end of Discovery, as well as Picard, Lower Decks, Prodigy, & Strange New Worlds.

Discovery spawned two direct sequels – the series “Starfleet Academy”, and the made for streaming movie “Section 31” – which I’ll cover later.  There’s also Strange New Worlds, which is in a different time frame as Discovery but is still very much related.’

The show was also expensive to produce.  In reading about it apparently cost anywhere from $6 – $8.5m per episode, with Netflix picking up $6m of that for world wide distribution rights (except in North America).  I will say this about the series.  It definitely LOOKED good.

This show has a lot of producers.  In the pilot episode alone, there are 19 people with the word “Producer” in their title in the credits.  That fluctuates as the series goes on to over 20 in subsequent seasons.  Granted, two of them are Nicholas Meyer & Eugene Roddenberry, but do you really need THAT many producers?

Season 1

Season 1 of Discovery starts off with Michelle Yeoh’s Philippa Georgiou as captain of the Enterprise, and gets killed off in the first two episodes.  The ship is then captained by Jason Isaacs’ “Gabriel Lorca”.  Lorca then requested Burnham who got court martialed and sent to a penal colony for her actions.  It’s quite the start for the primary lead of the series.

The main cast for Season 1 was Sonequa Martin-Green (Michael Burnham), Doug Jones (Saru), Shazad Latif (Ash Tyler), Anthony Rapp (Paul Stamets), Mary Wiseman (Sylvia Tilly), and the aforementioned Jason Isaacs (Gabriel Lorca).  Stamets’ husband (Wilson Cruz’s Hugh Culber) wasn’t yet a series regular at this point only appearing in the fourth episode forward, and not every single one.

As I mentioned in the introduction, the series was the first to have an openly gay (male) couple in the primary cast.  While it never bothered me personally, I always wondered if those people who are hostile these kinds of ideas checked out because of that.  Shame, but things are what they are.

Will write more about the season in general once I watch the series, as I said in the intro, a lot of Discovery is a blur to me.

Also, Season 1 was split into two halves.  The first comprised nine episodes and aired from 24 Sep 2017 through 12 Nov 2017.  The remaining 6 aired from 7 Jan 2018 through 11 Feb 2018.  I point this out as the two halves had collective names (albeit not very inventive ones).  The first nine were called “Chapter 1”, and the final six were “Chapter 2”.  This was not repeated with any subsequent seasons.

As more of an admin note – Discovery is the first Trek series to not have a title card.  As I use title cards for my episode pages, I’m going to have to create my own.  Will use the most excellent title card generator for multiple Trek series created by Josh Mayfield.  It can be viewed here, where you can make your own for any Trek series.  Josh can be reached on BlueSky here.

• The Vulcan Hello (9/25/2026) - (24 Sep 2017) – Season 1 Episode 1 (Serial 101)