Engage! 3 Reasons for Non-Trekkies to Watch 'Star Trek: Discovery'
[Writing sample for Film Daily. Instructions were to write a mini-listicle of at least 300 words about the TV series Star Trek: Discovery.]
Engage! 3 reasons for non-Trekkies to watch Star Trek: Discovery
By Adam Frazier
Unless you’ve been living under a penis-shaped rock, you’ve probably heard about Star Trek: Discovery, the streaming series created for CBS All Access by Bryan Fuller and Alex Kurtzman. The 15-episode first season received favorable reviews from fans and critics and drew record subscriptions for All Access, helping the streaming service to reach over two million viewers in early 2018.
Set roughly a decade before the events of the original Star Trek series, Discovery explores the Federation–Klingon war while following the crew of the USS Discovery on their mission to discover new worlds and life forms.
The second season, which premiered on January 19, delves further into the Trek mythos, returning familiar characters like Spock and Commander Pike to the fold. If you haven’t engaged the warp drive on Discovery yet, now is the perfect time! Here are three reasons you should drop what you’re doing (unless what you’re doing is eating a burrito, please don’t drop that) and start binging pronto.
It’s a perfect entry point for those who haven’t trekked before
Star Trek is an enormous series, spanning 750+ television episodes, 13 movies, and countless spin-off novels, comic books, and video games. Jumping into a new series connected to such a massive, long-running franchise can be intimidating.
If you’ve never really watched Star Trek, you can come aboard Discovery with little to no history with the franchise. As a prequel to the original 1966 television series, there isn’t a bunch of convoluted canon to keep up with; Discovery was designed to appeal to new fans without alienating the franchise’s diehard, so fear not non-Klingon speakers!
It’s got one hell of a cast
Best known for her role as Sasha on The Walking Dead, Sonequa Martin-Green plays the lead role as Michael Burnham, a Starfleet Science Specialist who was raised on the planet Vulcan by Spock’s father, Sarek. The character is the first black woman to lead a Star Trek television series, as well as the first leading character that isn’t a Starfleet captain.
Martin-Green is joined by a diverse ensemble of top-notch performers including Michelle Yeoh (Crazy Rich Asians), Jason Isaacs (Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets), Doug Jones (The Shape of Water), and Anthony Rapp (Rent), who plays the first openly gay character in a Star Trek series. In its second season, the series added Anson Mount (AMC’s Hell on Wheels) as original Starship Enterprise captain Christopher Pike, Rebecca Romijn as Number One, and Ethan Peck as Spock, the iconic character first portrayed by Leonard Nimoy in the ‘60s.
It’s a fun space opera with a lot of heart
Since the ‘70s, there has been this notion that Star Trek is for serious science fiction fans while Star Wars is a silly space fantasy. Like J.J. Abrams’s Trek movies, Discovery aspires to be like its younger, sexier (and more popular) space cousin and inject more humor, heart, and fast-paced action into the proceedings.
If you are hesitant to dive into a Trek series because you’re worried it will feel more like an astrophysics lecture by Neil deGrasse Tyson instead of fun sci-fi escapism, you’re in luck; Discovery is a thrilling reintroduction to Gene Roddenberry’s brainchild that captures the spirit of classic Trek while defining its future. Take advantage of the CBS All Access free trial and start binging the 15-episode first season now!
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Stream all-new episodes of Star Trek: Discovery on Thursdays at 8:30 PM ET / 5:30 PM PT, exclusively on CBS All Access.
