Star Trek: Discovery Title Explained By Showrunner

Star Trek is returning to television for the first time in more than a decade with Star Trek: Discovery, and we now have a little more insight into the vision that the executive producers have for the series.

We already knew that Star Trek: Discovery takes its name from the Starship featured in the series, the U.S.S. Discovery. Speaking in a video shown at Star Trek: Mission New York, showrunner and executive producer Bryan Fuller explained why they chose that name for the ship and for the series.

“This ship is called the Discovery for a few reasons,” Fuller explained. “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 added that the title of Star Trek: Discovery was also about “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 went on to say that sense of discovering would manifest as the show reintroduces new and familiar aliens, ships, and technology to the Star Trek universe.

This spirit of discovery sits well with what little we know about Star Trek: Discovery so far. We know that Star Trek Discovery takes place in the original Star Trek universe, not the alternate timeline of the current Star Trek movies and that it takes place 10 years prior to Star Trek: The Original Series.

Star Trek: Discovery will also be the first Star Trek series whose main protagonist is not a captain. Instead, the series will focus on a female, lesser-ranking Starfleet officer referred to as “Number One,” who may or may not be the same Number One who was the first officer to Captain Pike in the first Star Trek: The Original Series pilot.

“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,” Fuller said on the topic.

The spirit of exploration and discovery is vital to the core the Star Trek franchise, and it sounds like Fuller and his crew understand that when it comes to their vision for Star Trek: Discovery. Hopefully, they can make this prequel more exciting than Star Trek: Enterprise, the largely disappointing Star Trek television series that took place even earlier in the Star Trek timeline and was the final Star Trek series on television prior to the announcement of Star Trek: Discovery.

While Paramount Pictures is keeping Star Trek alive in theaters with films like Star Trek Beyond and the upcoming announced Star Trek 4, Star Trek became an institution on television. Hopefully Star Trek: Discovery proves to be a return to form.

Star Trek: Discovery premieres on CBS in January 2017, before moving to the CBS All Access streaming service for the remainder of its 13-episode first season.

[H/T] io9