Thanks for joining us for Unimatrix Zero’s second Star Trek News Roundup here in Ten Forward. There has been quite a bit going on in the world of Star Trek since we launched the Unimatrix Zero column last week, and we’ve done our best to put together what we think are the highlights.
Star Trek: Discovery (DISCO) has wrapped up script writing for Season 4, which began production last November. We also learned that Tig Notaro will be back as Jett Reno for Season 4. Jett is the funniest, not to mention possibly the most endearing character to come out of the Star Trek franchise. We couldn’t be more thrilled to learn that Tig will be back for Season 4.
In an interview last month with The Hollywood Reporter, Akiva Goldsman, who is the showrunner for DISCO and is also directing the pilot for Strange New Worlds, talked about Picard and Strange New Worlds. Goldsman revealed that in Star Trek: Picard Season 2 the character of Q, despite being a whimsically omnipotent immortal in his other series appearances, will be aged and take on a darker tone in line with the rest of the show.
On Strange New Worlds, Goldsman talked about how the look of the show and characters has changed some since their appearance in DISCO. It was revealed that like the show’s look, the storytelling of the new show will purposefully harken back to Star Trek: The Original Series (TOS). In terms of storytelling, the show departs from modern form and will be episodic like the franchise’s first five series. And it seems the production team is making room for telling stories through different subgenres. So like TOS, one episode might be horror, another an adventure story, and the next SciFi tale of robot villains, for example.
In other Star Trek television show news, we finally have a bit more information about the setup behind the long awaited new kids’ show Star Trek: Prodigy. We’ve known for some time that Kate Mulgrew will be reprising her role as a hologram version of Captain Janeway. We’ve also known that the show is set in the year 2383 (five years after the crew of Voyager gets back to Earth), and centers around a motley group of young aliens in the Delta Quadrant who set off on galactic adventures in an old Starfleet ship they commandeer. But now, Mulgrew has revealed more about the characters and how they first meet the Janeway “Emergency Training Hologram.” (ETH).
According to Mulgrew, at the beginning of the new series the young aliens are all in prison in an uncharted part of the Delta Quadrant. They escape and are chased by guards across the planet until they find a derelict starship. They enter the old ship and are frantically trying to get it to work and turn when one of them hits a button turning on the ETH. It is presumed then that the Janeway hologram will help the young delinquents get the ship operating so they can finish making their escape. It sounds like it’s going to be a great first episode!
And finally, in some non-canonical Trek news, a new DISCO novel by Una McCormack called Wonderlands released on Tuesday. The book follows Burnham during her year in the future without Discovery and its crew. Plus, IDW announced on Wednesday that it’s launching a year long comic series set in the Mirror Universe. The series will be called Star Trek: The Mirror War. Issue #0 is set to release this coming August and is illustrated by Carlos Nieto.
Thanks again for joining us for our second Star Trek News Roundup. We’ll see you next time for Roundup #3!
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