Notice I refer to the preview of Star Trek: Discovery and not the actual show. For one thing, the first episode isn’t out yet, and for another, the show is on that stupid CBS All Access network which would require me to pay for a service when I can barely afford the pay TV I have now.
But there was a certain level of controversy over the preview, partially because of the perceived political correctness of casting the two stars, China’s Michelle Yeoh and Sonequa Martin-Green (late of The Walking Dead), who are not only women but minorities. This sort of thing doesn’t concern me. We should all be aware by now that the real “sensitive snowflakes” are the cultural conservatives, and it’s not like this is the first time they’ve bitched about new media.
The idea of two strong female characters who are “of color” is in my opinion one of the more interesting things about the show. (Although I prefer not to use the phrase ‘people of color.’ One, to me it sounds too much like ‘colored people.’ Also, Donald Trump is technically a person of color.) The two stars are the main reason I’m interested. It’s the rest of the trailer that is turning me off. For various reasons.
For one, the uniforms and spaceship sets look newer and spiffier than the Original Series Trek and even the JJ Abrams old-Trek-with-modern-production movies. This was one thing that the Enterprise series, with all its problems, got right from the get-go. That show looked to me like the characters were the precursors of the Starfleet crews in the very first episodes of original Star Trek (like ‘Where No Man Has Gone Before’ and ‘The Corbomite Maneuver’ where the uniforms were even more bland and utilitarian than Enterprise).
The use of Sarek and Spock. Why are they really necessary? Especially given that the Discovery storyline is supposed to be taking place ten years before the start of the original series, and to the extent that Spock is seen in the trailer, it’s as an adolescent.
The Klingons. They look that much more alien than they did when re-introduced in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and it took them until 2005 to explain THAT.
Apropos of nothing, but has Doug Jones EVER done a role without full makeup?
Let me put this another way. I’d mentioned recently that I’d seen the new Ghostbusters reboot (the one where the principals are all women), and I liked it. However, the female casting seems to get some fans’ undies in a bunch, to the extent that the hostile reaction may have affected the movie’s box office success. Unfortunately the movie, while it had good elements, undermined itself. Namely, it started with the premise of a reboot or re-imagining with no continuity to the previous series, and yet most of the actors from the original movie did appear playing different characters. This somewhat defeated the purpose of starting fresh and made it that much harder to judge the movie on its own terms. It raised the question of exactly what the producers were trying to do.
Continuity is always an issue when you’re using established intellectual property, because while it defeats the purpose of creating something new if you don’t go off in a new direction, it defeats the purpose of saying that X is X when the new thing departs from the setting of X to begin with. It would be less irritating if Star Trek: Discovery had simply taken the parallel-universe of the J.J. Abrams series, or set the show within the past of that timeline. But the implication is that this is the universe of the original series, which already has quite enough problems with “retcon.” It’s not quite so bad with comic book properties, where a superhero series gets rebooted from scratch every decade or so and nobody questions this.. But even then, continuity matters. You can say that your Superman has no continuity with the Christopher Reeve Superman, but if you want to say that he IS Superman, don’t act surprised when people wonder why he needs to kill somebody.
The politically-incorrect grousing about casting is a red herring in comparison to the other issues with Discovery. I remember that when the first trailers for Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens came out, some guys were pitching a fit over John Boyega and Daisy Ridley being the stars. The fact that the new heroes were a black man and a white woman was immaterial to me. What sold me on the movie was that it FELT like Star Wars. Granted, some critics would say it feels TOO MUCH like the first Star Wars movie. But it got the job done.
Now granted, the actual series may explain some of the issues. (IF I see it.) The Sarek scenes with Spock might be flashbacks. Some fans are already claiming that the “new” Klingons are a nearly extinct subrace trying to save themselves. But to me the Discovery trailer, much more than The Force Awakens, seems like the producers’ attempt to slap a bunch of by-the-numbers elements together, even where they don’t fit, and market it under a well-loved brand name in the hopes that no one will notice or care about the difference. And the problem there is that with this particular intellectual property, fans DO notice the differences. As witnessed by all the little details I just went over, and I’m not as big a Trek expert as some people I know.