Comic-Con came and went without the casting announcements for Star Trek: Discovery, the new series coming to CBS All-Access next year. And while showrunner and executive producer Bryan Fuller revealed a few details in San Diego, he was much more talkative during a recent appearance on a talk radio show.
Via TrekCore, Fuller’s appearance on KERN-FM radio’s Nerd World Report with Hop & Herc led to several new tidbits about Star Trek: Discovery. Fuller reiterated that the lead character will be the female first officer on the Discovery, and he declined to share her name because it will be revealed during the season. Instead, he noted that she’ll be called “Number One” by the rest of the crew, as a homage to Majel Barrett’s character in the original Star Trek pilot, “The Cage.”
“As we were first talking about the series and talking to CBS, we said, initially, we’ll only call the character ‘Number One’ because in the Sixties, in the first pilot, Gene Roddenberry was very progressive and had a female first officer,” noted Fuller. So since [our lead character] is a female first officer, I just loved that we were calling her ‘Number One.’”
Related: Bryan Fuller Offers a Few New ‘Star Trek: Discovery’ Details
Fuller once again noted that the series is set in the “prime” timeline of the original series, and it takes place roughly a decade before Captain Kirk and the crew of the Enterprise went on their five year mission.
“[The time period we chose] came pretty organically, because we are going to try to achieve a new look for Star Trek that is very much Star Trek, but also our interpretation of Star Trek,” said Fuller. “I love each of the shows I work on to have a distinct aesthetic […] so it seemed like a good place to start our signature look for the Star Trek universe and work our way forward as we tell the stories.”
Fuller indicated that casting news will probably be made public in October, and added that he would like shorter episode orders per season to maintain the quality of the show. “Ideally, I would love to do ten episodes – I think that’s a tighter story – to really make it great.”
You can read the rest of TrekCore’s account of Fuller’s radio appearance here. Star Trek: Discovery is expected to premiere on CBS All-Access in January 2017.
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