We’re now only four months away from the arrival of Star Trek: Discovery, the newest addition to the hallowed franchise. Showrunner Bryan Fuller has kept most details under wraps, but fans have been privy to some snippets of info. We know that the show’s storytelling will be more serialized than some previous installments, but those stories won’t center on the captain of the starship. The lead character will be a woman of color known as “Number One,” which presumably refers to her rank, as well as Majel Barrett’s character in the original series’ pilot.
The new series is set in the prime timeline, and will take place 10 years before James T. Kirk helmed the Enterprise’s five-year mission. This decision was made to give the writers more “room to maneuver” to whip up all manner of space stories that don’t involve Kirk cramming for the Kobayashi Maru (we know, that’s not really how it works). There’s tons of material out there, canonical and otherwise, from which Fuller and his team could draw inspiration, including this fan-edited video of the many horrific things that TOS “predicted” that thankfully never came to pass.
Star Trek: To Boldly Go Where No One Ever Went from Phil Whitehead on Vimeo.
All the preceding series’ imagined various tweaks and revisions to the existing Star Trek canon—a couple of them are even mentioned here—but this video focuses on bits of “history” fabricated for plot purposes. Phil Whitehead’s spliced-together clips from TOS episodes like “Assignment: Earth” and “Space Seed,” as well as Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, to point out the many things that never came to pass, including a successful mission to Saturn in 2009, “the launching of an orbital nuclear warhead platform by the United States,” and the Eugenic Wars that spawned Khan Noonien Singh.
There’s also something for Discovery’s costume design folks, though it looks like Fuller’s already ironed out the uniform details with Gucci. This wardrobe and makeup test for the first season of The Next Generation shows off the different looks that were considered for Jean-Luc Picard, Deanna Troi, and William Riker, among others.
There’s Brent Spiner, modeling various pallors and eye colors for Lieutenant Commander Data. Spiner clowns around a bit, of course, but what else would you do while wearing mother-of-pearl skin? Speaking of which, we’re glad they nixed the blush, because it really just made him look like a ventriloquist’s dummy. Tasha Yar (Denise Crosby) is also subjected to scrutiny, though her look doesn’t appear to have been altered—maybe they were saving the alterations for her role as Commander Sela. Picard and Riker’s stylings seem to have been remained untouched, but it looks like Geordi LaForge’s Jheri curl was left on the cutting-room floor.