Comic Con saw a lot of retrospectives and celebrations yesterday including the monemental 50th anniversary of Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek. Last Wednesday saw the world premiere of STAR TREK BEYOND outside of the San Diego Convention Center and today held a celebratory panel for all of the Trek franchises. In attendance for the panel were Scott Bakula (Star Trek: Enterprise), Jeri Ryan (Star Trek: Voyager), Michael Dorn (Star Trek: The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine), Brent Spiner (The Next Generation), and the legendary William Shatner. The panel was moderated by Bryan Fuller who is currently working on CBS's new series set to debut next year.
While most of the panel was open for Q&A with Trekkies in attendance in Hall H, most of the panel veered towards how much of Trek's message of hope and inclusion is needed in our world today. Shatner and Spiner both drove home messages about the environment and providing food for the less fortunate in our world. They all agreed that Roddenberry's creation is as important today as it has ever been. One question during the panel about the new series led to Fuller to reveal that the new show will be the first Trek series to not be episodic in nature. Fuller explained that each hour of the series will unfold as a chapter in one long story making this the first serialized Trek in any format. At the end, we were treated to a test footage teaser showcasing the new title for the show, Star Trek: Discovery.
Fuller teased that the show will definitely have surprises and characters that reflect our current society on Earth, which I would take to meet at least one or two LGBT characters on the show. I must stress that this is test footage and not final special effects. You can see that it is definitely not the caliber of effects we have become used to on the big screen or small, but we can tell that the ship looks incredibly reminiscent of the concept art for the aborted Star Trek Phase II series from 1978. Still, now we have a title and can see the ship is the NCC-1301. What exactly this new voyage will be about remains to be seen but it doesn't seem like we have much longer to wait.
Star Trek: Discovery debuts on CBS All Access in January 2017.
