The New Star Trek Series Finally Realizes Gene Roddenberry's Ultimate Vision

[rug]

CHARLIE JANE ANDERS
12.15.16
5:09 PM

WE FINALLY KNOW who will be taking the lead in Star Trek: Discovery, the first new Trek TV series in over a decade, when it launches on CBS’ streaming platform next May: Sonequa Martin-Green, who plays Sasha on The Walking Dead. While she won’t be a captain, Entertainment Weekly reports, she’ll be playing Rainsford, a lieutenant commander “with caveats,” aboard the U.S.S. Discovery.

Regardless of insignia, Martin-Green’s casting in Star Trek: Discovery fulfills a long held ambition on the part of the show’s original showrunner. Bryan Fuller, who has since departed from the show, has said for years that he wants an African-American woman to play the lead in his Star Trek project. But more importantly, this news also brings Discovery closer to living up to the ideals that Star Trek always tried to live up to.

From its beginnings more than 50 years ago, Star Trek has always been about humanism. Creator Gene Roddenberry was famously a secular humanist himself, and he spoke eloquently about wanting to portray a future in which people use science to solve our own problems. That commitment to humanism is why Captain Kirk is always meeting gods—and refusing to worship them—in the Original Series. And it’s why Captain Picard, in The Next Generation, tells the all-powerful Q that humanity has left behind our old bloodlust. Picard would always rather talk than fight.

It’s all too easy to see Star Trek‘s humanism as merely a matter of embracing science and rejecting barbarism—but that’s missing what makes Trek‘s version of humanism so powerful. Diversity was always a key part of Star Trek‘s vision of a better future for humanity. In the ideal world of the 24th century, every human being has the opportunity to reach his or her full potential, either in the sciences or elsewhere; anything less doesn’t represent real progress.

https://www.wired.com/2016/12/star-trek-discovery-casts-black-female-lead/

[Martin Eden]

1. WOO-HOO!!!

I've been bingeing on Star Trek reruns for the last month, taking my mind off the abhorrent present and into a future where humanity has evolved beyond the kind of orange creature that would be a villain in any Roddenberry story.

[rug]

2. I hadn't thought of it like that but you're on to something.

This might be a good break from the trmp circus, like Star Trek was from Vietnam.

Too bad it's not on broadcast but access. https://www.cbs.com/all-access/

[AtheistCrusader]

3. Hmm.

Problems:

1. The ship looks like shit. It looks more Klingon than Federation, geometrically. This is important because the design philosophy behind the ships, and the geometry of the bulk of the ship in relation to the warp drives informed the nature of the aliens in question. There's no atmospheric drag in space, but there is geometric considerations for the warp field, per ST canon.

2. What idiot missed the colors of the warp nacelles and the impulse drives are reversed?

3. Music is dark and militaristic. Hmm.


Even Star Trek 2 had the uplifting, bright, clean, 'we're off on an adventure' ship launch, even though the ship got its ass kicked and a good percentage of the crew killed. The darkest of all the movies, but the launch, set the tone that makes the rest of the movie so much more painful.

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