Today is the anniversary Star Trek’s debut on CBS in 1966, and to celebrate, the network is holding “Star Trek Day”, using the occasion to host a number of panels about the franchise.
Along with those panels is a new trailer for the upcoming third season of Star Trek: Discovery, which debuts on CBS All Access on October 15th.
At the end of Season 2, the crew of the U.S.S. Discovery found themselves rocketed 930 years into the future to prevent the Sphere (a living, planetoid-sized entity) from falling into the wrong hands. This new teaser shows the crew adjusting to their new surroundings: a one-way trip into the future, and where the Federation has largely collapsed as a result of some event known as “The Burn”—the “day the galaxy took a hard left.”
As they work to figure out their surroundings, they come across a bunch of people who are hopeful despite their dismal surroundings, clinging to the belief that the Federation would somehow return and make things right again. It’s a hopeful message that’s at the core of the franchise.
CBS’s panel for the series debuted the trailer in which Mica Burton moderated a virtual panel with co-showrunners Alex Kurtzman and Michelle Paradise, and new series star David Ajala. They speak a bit about how they’ve updated the logo for the series, and some of their favorite moments from the trailer—Burnham screaming after she lands on a new planet, some of the action scenes, and feeling of hope that the characters feel as they confront their new mission.
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Kurtzman explains that the characters find themselves in a world that’s reminiscent of our own, and that their goal this year is to try and rebuild a better world, something that’s keeping with Gene Roddenberry’s original optimistic vision for the future.
When asked about the thousand year time jump, Paradise said that it was an exciting change for the show, one that would allow them to go “beyond established canon and see what a whole new world would look like.” The first two seasons allowed them to fill in some gaps with the franchise’s longer canon, but jumping so far into the future would allow them with a fresh environment with with to work.
Ajala’s character Cleveland “Book” Booker is an inhabitant of this distant future, and he says that he’s someone who discovers a new sense of purpose with the crew of Discovery, and he’s going to bring out something special in Burnham and vice versa.
Kurtzman and Paradise note that there’ll be some major changes in the world, some of which Booker will be a window for. The Federation didn’t face away: there was some cataclysmic event that crippled it. Paradise notes that at first, it’s a mystery for Burnham to unravel, and after that, they have to figure out how to revitalize it.
Star Trek: Discovery returns to CBS All Access on October 15th.