While there was no new footage or casting announcements made for Star Trek: Discovery at Mission New York today, there was a video from executive producers Bryan Fuller and Alex Kurtzman, which talked a little bit about the choices they’ve made with the new show.
“This ship is called the Discovery for a few reasons,” said Fuller. “Not the least of which is Stanley Kubrick’s contribution to the Discovery on 2001: A Space Odyssey, NASA’s vessel the Discovery, and also the sense of discovery.” He also drew a connection between the meaning of the word to fans, adding that part of the title comes from “what the word ‘discovery’ means to Star Trek audiences who have been promised a future by Gene Roddenberry where we come together as a planet and seek new worlds and new alien races to explore and understand and collaborate with.”
Fuller said that they see this whole show as a chance to “reinvent, re-explore, and reintroduce” the familiar things about Star Trek—especially alien races that audiences would recognize—but also bring a bunch of new ships, aliens, and technology to the Star Trek universe.
As for the decision to make the main character not be the captain this time around, Fuller said in the video: “There have been six series all from the captains’ perspective, and it felt like for this new iteration of Star Trek, we need to look at life on a Starfleet vessel from a new perspective.” The new character is “not a captain,” but is going to have a “whole new dynamic” with the crew. Fuller said that this will let them tell “richer, more complicated” stories about life on the Starfleet vessel.
The video itself didn’t reveal anything, the footage was from the old shows intercut with the video of the Discovery revealed in July. The only thing that was actually new was a single shot of some alien latex that looked lizard-based. We’ve been teased this way before.
At the panel in person were Nicholas Meyer and Kirsten Beyer, who both sit in the writers’ room for the new series. They also couldn’t give any specifics about the show, but both agreed that their jobs were to service Bryan Fuller’s vision for the show. Although Meyer did have one piece of advice for a fan looking for assurance that the show would be everything they hoped it would be: “Lower your expectations.” He continued, a bit later, “It is a symbiotic relationship and all I’m suggesting is that if you go with open minds and open hearts, you may be rewarded. Whereas if you go with a set of impossible to realize expectations, which even you cannot specifically define, then we’re bound to fail. And so I’m saying: Get loose.”