Star Trek Discovery. [SPOILERS WITHIN]

How do you know he is white, heterosexual or even male?

If sexual identity is a choice as some people claim (including some of our regular posters here), then "he could be transsexual". A woman in a man's body. He could be homosexual or bisexual in preference, and he could be of mixed race ancestry.

Fair point. Jason Isaacs is British, so he could easily be in the closet.

Shit, I guess that means he's not returning to "The OA", which is a show I am looking forward to.

Lorca? What kind of name is that?

He will be starfleets first transpeciest captain. Half French. Half killer whale.

Nothing about this so far has made me excited to watch it.

L'orca. That's funny.

But does he write poetry?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federico_García_Lorca

ETA: Jason Isaacs is hawt! I'm even more interested now.

Gross

You? Probably. Not sure what that has to do with the topic, however.

It's cute, though, how y'all can spend 1,000+ posts wanking over the ship design without even noticing the crew.

If it hadn't been for Harve Bennett, Star Trek: The Motionless Picture (to borrow from A.C. Crispin's description) would have killed the franchise.

Different doesn't only have to be different; it has to be better.

This is gonna bomb so hard......

Hamstrung by access being limited to CBS streaming service, something nobody is going to pay for just to get this new Trek prequel.

It's a prequel, which means no suspense, no mystery, no sense that anything could happen, because we already know how it all turns out.

Guess I'll just have to be satisfied with TOS, TNG & DS9 on Amazon Prime.

You could do a prequel series and make it good.

But.

You would need a real producer (along the lines of J.Michael Stracinski- Babylon Five) which vast amounts of knowledge of Star Trek history and lore who could keep writers in line and create characters that the audience cares about.

You mean to say that if it weren't for the second thing, the first thing would have been the last thing?

About the streaming thing, I'm forced to agree. Smacks of elitism, which is exactly what Trek should not be about. Maybe they'll consider it a test audience and then expand it to a wider viewership.

Kind of agree about the prequel thing, too, because that's at least part of what killed Enterprise (that and casting Scott-can't-act-his-way-out-of-a-wet-paper-bag-Bakula as the lead and surrounding him with a mostly mediocre supporting cast and "Are you fuggin' kidding me?" scripts).

But with a good cast and some solid writing, they can actually create a sense of "See how close we came to never having Kirk's Enterprise and everything that followed?" suspense. For want of a nail, and all that.

I mean, face it, how many "He's dead, Jim" moments did TOS survive because we knew they couldn't really kill one of the regulars? How many "There are billions of inhabitants!!!" moments were there, but the ship sailed on? Spock and Kirk both had to "die" twice and, while some viewers were fooled the first time, others weren't.

I suspect (and all I have is suspicion; I know no more than any of you) that's the tack they'll take this time around. YMMV.

Jason Isaacs in the supporting role, as Captain of the Discovery? Yes, please.

Aye aye, Captain Sexy. How are things go in dock? Permission to come aboard. ♥

Why does every Star Trek "prequel" idea have to revolve around the idea (seemingly) of "this is how we got to the stuff that happened in STOS, STTNG," take your pick

Put a starship and crew way out in space (pre OS, pre TNG, whichever) have them have really cool adventures. Why does it have to be "This is how we first encountered the Cardassians." "This is how we encountered the Ferengi", "This is how we encountered the Tholians".

How do you know that's what it's going to be? Even if it is, it might be only a fraction of it.

I don't know I was actually thinking of Enterprise.

[Krusty the Klown] You're thinking way too many legs.[/KK]

What CBS is thinking is that since broadcast TV is "dead" and cable is on life support, they've got to come up with something that'll keep the gravy train rolling in. Since Trekkies have shown themselves to be a loyal fanbase, and CBS has the rights to some of the property associated with that, it makes sense that they'd try to tap into that fanbase. The hope is that enough of them will do it so that the network execs can continue to afford to drive Porsches until folks jettison broadcast TV completely, and pony up for various services like CBS All Access, etc.

Personally I think this is another case of CBS thinking "too far" into the future.

Do they really think a few tens of millions of people watching tv on their Iphones are really going to supplant three hundred million television sets over night?

Given the drop in cable TV subscribers over the years, yes.

Broadcast TV and cable TV are dying industries. Most of your Millennials are people who never had to deal with the limitations of TV (i.e. you watch it when it first airs, or you don't see it until months later).

I dropped cable TV over a decade ago, and don't miss anything about it. I can watch what I want, when I want, where I want, and how I want, while someone who's limited to cable or over-the-air TV has to arrange their life around what they can catch when it airs or if they're able to record it with a DVR (or whatever). I don't have to do that, and I'm pushing 50. "Kids" (who're still adults, but young enough to be my children) have grown up instinctively looking on the internet for entertainment, not waiting for the TV to show it to them. They'll even opt for watching it on their PC or phone, over the TV, because the other devices seem more "intimate" than a much larger TV screen.

Cable and satellite TV companies are so desperate for subscribers that they'll give you TV networks for free, so long as you agree to not drop your package with them to "internet only." If you know what you're doing, when you call a company like Dish TV, you can get their "service" without them having to come out and install any hardware. (Because they have a plan to deliver their content to you via the internet.) But you'd know that if you'd followed this thread.

Knowledgeable & competent producers, talented writers, characters people care about - these things are important for any kind of series.

I have two TVs but I don't have cable. And people like me are growing at an alarming rate to the cable companies.

If, by some miracle, this show turns out decent, I'll wait for the season DVD set.

The problems with Enterprise were myriad, but I never thought Bakula was one of them. He's a good actor, just like Mulgrew is a good actor, but their characters were horribly written. Enterprise as a series was horribly written. I agree the supporting cast was mediocre at best.

Maybe.....but they won't be able to rely on that gimmick for long, eventually the show will have to stand on its' own merits.

We'll see soon enough.....

I didn't have cable for almost four years, but a couple of months ago my cable company gave me an offer I couldn't turn down. I was just paying for internet and have Amazon, Netflix and Hulu, but they offered me some basic channels (no sports channels thank god) and HO, plus streaming and on demand for two years for five dollars less than my internet service. Like I said, it's a good deal, so I took it, but I still don't sit and wait for the shows I watch, I just watch when I want. There are some good shows on broadcast and cable, but most people do like to stream it. The problem is having Star Trek only available on All Access is a bad decision. Why not offer it Netflix or Amazon? I already have three streaming services, I'm not going to get another one just for CBS.

There is a good chance I'll skip out on this. I quit Voyager around season 5 and I never bothered to watch Enterpise except for the random episode here and there. I'm ok skipping this one too.

I'm of two minds about the streaming. I feel it's a necessary evil, albeit they should've stopped being greedy and put the damn show on Netflix. But even AllAccess is better than the UPN treatment.

I concur with everything else.

What Tuckerfan said.

PCs have long since outnumbered TV sets in most households and I imagine mobile devices like phones and tablets outnumber PCs.

Out of necessity, I've been streaming for the last seven years. I bought a TV that I've maybe used three times in the last year, and a whole collection of DVDs that I haven't played in forever since all the TV shows I own besides the anime that was dubbed before Crunchyroll existed are easily found online.

You couldn't pay me to tack cable onto an internet bill. Not even to save five dollars. I don't want to deal with returning the box and it's the principle of the thing.

I have Netflix and Amazon Prime, and between the two I have hundreds of thousands of movies, and TV shows available at an instant, most in HD. I pay for a high speed internet connection, that also comes with basic phone. Grand total per month? $50.

My parents, on the other hand, have cable, because they can't stand the idea of not being able to simply flip through the channels on their TV, or that they might have to switch over to HDMI 1 instead of just turning the TV on and seeing broadcast TV. Their total per month? $110. Just for cable TV.

So those people are still around, but I imagine the numbers are dwindling.