MisterPL

Cool name, intriguing. Will this be Star Trek's first transgender character or will she just be called Michael?  

I'm leaning toward her simply being named after someone called "Michael" and that in the future, names aren't necessarily tied to genders.

Let's face it; if we're to assume Michael is male, the SJWs would pitch a fit that they didn't cast a transgendered man, let alone a woman for the role.

I think we need to get out heads out of the 21st century. 

These showrunners just can't win. If they create a new character who's like Harry Mudd, fans will lament that they could have simply used Mudd. If they use Mudd, others accuse them of pandering.

Trekkies are a tough crowd.

I hope Rainn Wilson is playing Harry Mudd's father and sells tribbles. 

Somebody should order an appetizer.

I doubt this show will ever be the merchandising juggernaut TNG was if only because Discovery will less less accessible to general audiences by design. With TNG you didn't even need cable. It was syndicated almost everywhere. Unless you already subscribe to CBS All Access, there's no chance of stumbling across this new series while channel surfing.

CBS is going to have to market the hell out of this show, and not just on Viacom networks.

The biggest problem with Star Trek was that the fanbase was fractured.

It started with the films. Instead of continuing the mission on television, the studio looked at the popularity of Star Wars and Trek's built-in audience brimming with pent-up demand for a reunion and ditched Phase II in favor of feature film. Any chance of getting the original cast back to episodic TV went downhill after that. 

The movies forced a new series to introduce a totally new crew in a new future era. From then on fans had their favorite show; TNG, DS9, VOY, or even ENT. The more spinoffs, the more fragmented the fanbase became. But there was one thing no one could deny; the original crew was Star Trek, and even though the actors were aging, it was foolish to bury those most popular characters with the performers who helped create them. It was going to take Kirk and his Enterprise to save Star Trek and that's what Abrams delivered.

It didn't have to go that way. Trek could have come back to television back in 1979, even without Nimoy. Hell, especially without Nimoy. Save his appearances for sweeps months to boost ratings. The plots of the films would have made great two- or three-part story arcs. "Next week: An old friend returns to confront a mysterious enemy from Earth's distant past!"

Introduce new characters like Saavik and David while promoting other characters to Starfleet instructors or starship captains. Let it grow organically, logically. Replace expensive cast members with affordable new ones like Picard or Riker or Data. If you really want to shake things up, shoot the entire ship far off into the Delta Quadrant with another ship and mix the crews. Spend an entire season getting the Enterprise back, maybe through a wormhole to the Gamma Quadrant. (Spinoff time!)

But we have what we have. Fortunately general audiences don't have a problem with Kirk's crew being recast so we can continue telling their stories with expensive event movies.

It seems like everyone wants to do their own take on Klingons.

Let's face it; in TOS they looked like space Mexicans who all used the same bronzer. When Roddenberry got a big enough budget to reintroduce us to the Klingons as he always meant them to be, once again, they all looked the same. It wasn't until TSFS that we started to get a little variety.

Had Roddenberry used that big budget to show us some diversity among the Klingon crew members – long hair, short hair, no hair, male, female, pronounced ridges, subtle ridges – then this leaked picture wouldn't be nearly as jarring. As it is, perhaps we're just discovering more about their cultural caste system.

AAAARRRGH!!! CANONNNN!!!

Why can't they get it through their thick skulls?! All Klingons are supposed to look like this:



Just like all humans are supposed to look like this:



There's no way you can convince me that this:



... and this:



... are the same species! It just makes no sense!

Lately I've become trailer celibate.

If a movie manages to hook me on the first try, I actively avoid further trailers, TV spots, or featurettes. I have no idea why but for years the film industry has decided that the best way to get folks into theaters is to slowly show them all the pivotal moments beforehand. When that happens, I tend to walk out disappointed.

I'm a life-long Trekkie. I've seen all the films in theaters, even The Final Frontier and Nemesis. I'll probably always see Trek movies in cinemas unless they do something horribly, horribly wrong. So I might treat myself to the first preview to get a taste and that's it. Screw spoiler-laden marketing and fanboy prejudice and media reviews; I'm there.

So far it's been a much more satisfying experience.

Real Star Trek is this:
 
Space, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its 5-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.

Anything else is a spinoff or, at best, an homage.

I was just happy to see a prequel that actually enhanced the original trilogy instead of undermining it.

There have been Trek films that didn't break even at the box office (TFF) but what saved them was, as you'd agree, merchandising.

That's where Abrams' films have suffered. It isn't as noticeable because the first two flicks performed so well (on HUGE production budgets) but the lack of toys, apparel, et al from Beyond won't help its bottom line. Hopefully home video and other deals for streaming and television distribution will plant it firmly in the black but, yes, the next film will need either a smaller budget or a more toyetic story and a licensee willing to take a chance.

DST needs to try something different. More so, they need to be willing to try. 

As a frustrated Star Trek Minimates collector, I feel your pain. DST seems to have a huge hard-on for TOS and it's lasted much longer than four hours.

They launched 3-inch Minimates with six SKUs of TOS in 2002. It never saw a second assortment.

They redid Trek Minimates with the 2-inch bodies in 2007, expanding the TOS selection to 18 SKUs while only offering two from DS9 and one from TNG. That lasted five series.

Then they rebooted Trek Minimates yet again in 2013 with two Legacy assortments that had a better SKU balance (2 TNG, 2 DS9, 2 TOS, and one each from ENT and VOY) but the Minimates starship line was exclusively TOS (4 SKUs of Enterprise variants). Legacy never made it to a second assortment.

This year they offered an assortment of the TOS bridge crew to retailers. There wasn't enough interest so DST apparently gave up as if they were out of source material. 

Of course there's plenty of untapped source material from TOS, both film and television, but DST went the easy route, the safe route, and essentially offered the exact same product they had before in presumably different packaging. Collectors who'd already acquired that crew weren't interested and newbies didn't even know about it because it never even got solicited.

I can't help thinking that anything BUT TOS at this point would garner more interest. I'd wager even the same character assortment offered in uniforms from ANY of the six films would have fared better. But there seems to be an unwillingness on the part of DST to take a chance on anything but the original TV show. They might nervously dabble in other eras but they've never gone balls deep with TNG, VOY, et al as they have repeatedly with TOS.

That said, Star Trek is not Stargate or BSG. The latter two aspire to have the kind of brand awareness that Star Trek has enjoyed over the last 50 years. My expectations would be much higher for Trek merchandise than those two, and I entertain no illusions that Star Trek is anywhere near the peak popularity it enjoyed when TNG and DS9 were new and TOS was alive and well on the silver screen.

A generational shift is here. Original fans of TOS are literally dying off. The Trek their kids enjoyed most took place in the 24th century, not the 23rd. Those kids are now adults brimming with the same nostalgia that kept TOS going for so long. It's time to offer them the tchotchke they'd like, whether it's a block figure version of the crew of the 1701-E or a desk-worthy electronic replica of Deep Space Nine.

In short, yes, DST's Trek line needs to boldly go where it hasn't, or at least in a way DST's not 100% comfortable with if they're going to keep this license moving forward.

Back when Star Trek was on life support following the cancellation of ENT and the terrible box office performance of NEM, it was pretty clear to me that the only characters who could save the franchise were the ones most people were familiar with. Let's face it; if you asked the general public who was the captain on Star Trek, the most likely response was Captain Kirk.
 
Unfortunately, using that crew would require a new cast. While a Battlestar Galactica-style reboot would have been fine with me personally, Abrams went one step better and saved the Prime universe instead of writing over it. And by bringing back those most familiar characters, the franchise got the jumpstart it desperately needed thanks to – poetically – Captain Kirk and his legendary crew.
 
With a question like "What is your favourite Star Trek TV series?" I have to define what I believe qualifies. Generally, I stick to the classic mission statement:
 
Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.
 
By that strict definition, only four series qualify; TOS, TAS, TNG, and ENT.

In my opinion, the first season of VOY really should have been the eighth season of TNG. I saw no reason to force the TNG crew onto the big screen at the expense of the television franchise. There was no ten-year, pent-up demand for that crew as there was with the original crew. If certain cast members were getting to expensive, write them off and replace them. Goodbye, Patrick Stewart. Hello, Kate Mulgrew.

The spinoff DS9 was positively anti-Trek in concept; no captain, no starship, less than half a Starfleet crew aboard an alien space station, boldly waiting where no one had waited before. It is by far my favorite Trek series for somewhat personal reasons even though I can't really qualify it as such. 

(I suppose that's why I'm so optimistic about DSC; it's a story that takes place within the Trek universe – phasers, transporters, the Federation! – even though it's not about "the voyages of the starship Enterprise.")

ENT could have easily been that BSG-style do-over, with Scott Bakula as Kirk, Jolene Blalock as a gender-bent Spock, John Billingsly as an alien-instead-of-xenophobic McCoy, etc. Instead it was an uneven prequel that ended up having more potential than it was allowed to demonstrate.

So by my own standards, I should vote for TNG. It carried a torch farther and more successfully than any other Trek series. It easily boasts the second most popular cast and crew thanks to its seven-year run on television, four features films, and an impressive amount of merchandise.

But when it comes to my favourite, I gotta pick DS9 which, despite its built-in handicaps, still managed to entertain for seven satisfying seasons and probably deserves a followup more than any of the others.

In an ideal world I'd like DST to have the licence to do old and new Star Trek from whatever series or movie out there: TOS, TAS, TNG, DS9, VGR, ENT, DSC, TMP, WOK, SFS, TVH, TFF, TUC, GEN, STFC, INS, NEM or ST09, STID, STB.

Fixed that for you.

Just because Roddenberry did what he did in the 1960s doesn't mean he wouldn't have chosen to do otherwise given the opportunity 50 years later.

Regardless of the aesthetic, I just want a show that retains the optimism of Trek. Personally, I'd stick to the original mission statement; exploring strange, new worlds, seeking out new life and new civilizations, and I'd set it aboard the Enterprise. But I'm not getting the 1701 so I guess I'll have to settle for something different.

DS9 was anti-Trek and that turned into my favorite of the series. I'll remain optimistic.