‘Star Trek: Discovery’ News Sees More Delays And Problems For CBS Trek Show

Star Trek: Discovery – the new Star Trek series that will supposedly appear on the CBS All Access streaming service – is experiencing even more delays and problems. Now some people are wondering if the show will ever make it to the air at all.

Production Delays

As noted by IGN, the premiere of the show has once again been delayed. At one time, Star Trek: Discovery was supposed to premiere at the beginning of this year; then it was going to be May of this year. It’s now been put off until the summer or fall of 2017. These delays are probably related to other problems the show has had getting off the ground.

Star Trek: Discovery still follows Bryan Fuller vision https://t.co/Hw3PrY2BJl #tkcon #startrek #discovery

— TrekConvention (@TrekConvention) January 23, 2017

For instance, the departure of Bryan Fuller – the principal producer and force behind Star Trek: Discovery– from the show last year threw a massive monkey wrench into the production schedule. While it was initially claimed that Fuller would continue to have a hand in the project, he’s recently suggested that he has nothing whatsoever to do with it.

The fact that the lead actor on the show – Sonequa Martin-Green’s – also has a major role she is committed to on The Walking Dead was another reason why the show missed its May premiere date. Unless Star Trek: Discovery finishes production soon, scheduling problems could crop up for other actors as well.

Problems with the Look of the Show

In addition to the organizational and scheduling problems Star Trek: Discovery has encountered, there’s also the issue of how the show looks. Many longtime Star Trek fans are deeply concerned about some of the early images they’ve seen so far.

During the short preview that was released last year – in which the producers admitted the effects weren’t quite finalized – lifelong Trekkers were shocked by the ship design itself. Instead of the traditional sweeping pylons that connect the various sections of a Starfleet vessel, the discovery is connected to its warp nacelles by a triangular section that looks like it was lifted directly from a Klingon vessel.

For people who are not Star Trek fans and have no familiarity with the trivia related to the various incarnations of the show over the last 50 years, this might seem like a fairly small point. But for the committed fan base that CBS needs for this show to be a success, this ship design is simply terrible. Worse, the studio is apparently fully committed to it.

Whether the poor reaction to the design of the Discovery was an underlying reason for the dismissal of the company doing the effects for the series is unknown, but the chaos that must have ensued in the production process following this decision certainly would have contributed to delays.

Star Trek: Discovery and Canon

Supposedly, Star Trek: Discovery is set in the original series timeline – rather than in the Abrams created movie timeline – taking place sometime just before the events on Kirk’s Enterprise. But if the reported underlying story points of the series are accurate, there are some tremendous continuity problems between this new Star Trek series and the ones that came before it.

For instance, the character of Sarek – Spock’s father in the original series and the movies – will be serving on board the Discovery. Absolutely every bit of Star Trek canon prior to this series made it very clear he was never in Starfleet and in fact disapproved of it as a career choice.

Then there are the images of what are supposedly Klingons. Although it is certainly true that Klingons have varied in appearance since the original Star Trek series of the 1960s, over the last few decades – and more particularly the last few Star Trek series – people have become accustomed to seeing Klingons looking more or less like Vikings with ridges on their heads.

While the Abrams movie version of Klingons was very different from this, most people assumed that Klingons in the Star Trek: Discovery series would look like Worf and company from Star Trek: The Next Generation. But the photos of Klingons recently released – if they are Klingons – suggest the design of these characters has been changed almost entirely.

[Featured Image by CBS]