Kirsten Beyer and Nicholas Meyer were on hand to give fans some insight into Star Trek: Discovery! What did they have to say about the impending show? Take a peek below….
Meyer and Beyer took the stage to talk to fans about Discovery, following a video from Bryan Fuller and Alex Kurtzman (the pair talked a bit about Trek’s legacy, and there was one new shot featuring new alien prosthetics, from an unknown species). Here is what they had to say:
Meyer says that everyone on the team is working toward Fuller’s vision of the universe, which Fuller himself has described as “different but familiar.” When asked about the start of his wiring career, he explained that he always wrote screenplays, and that his novelist career began due to a Writer’s Guild strike. Beyer came to writing from a similar angle to Fuller–she didn’t want to just write, she wanted to write Star Trek. She has been writing Voyager novels for some time, and has also written Buffy novels.
In terms of bringing Trek up to date, Meyer talked about meeting with scientists to have a better idea of how to make the future more authentic. Beyer pointed out that they are working hard to “honor [the continuity] while not looking silly” in terms of technology and science, since we have already progressed so far.
Meyer said that people like Beyer and Fuller know every episode, every piece of canon minutiae, whereas his job is more to be an arbiter of what is possible in storytelling, to keep the show grounded in its possibilities.
Beyer was given a new job recently as well, one that they named specifically for the panel: “Admiral of Intertextual Communications.” She will be working with Simon and Schuster to develop novels and comics to coincide with the show’s first season. David Mack will be writing the upcoming books, and Mike Johnson will pen the comics.
Meyer talked about the importance of really engaging with current topics on the new show, including issues brought forth by the upcoming election, and that while Star Trek is about hope, it has to be about “hope in context” that doesn’t pull punches. He wants to be sure that they don’t just use strawmen in their conflicts, but that they delve into what is happening in the world currently, the same way the show did when it was conceptualized. He pointed out that often you can get pretty on-the-nose with the parallels and that often people don’t notice anyway; he had to explain to his dentist about how Star Trek VI drew direct parallels to the collapse of the Soviet Union. The choice to set the show ten years before the Original Series was about exploring a gap in canon where there was room to expand, which both Beyer and Meyer were taken with.
When asked about the common weakness of television pilot episodes, and how they planned to combat that, Beyer would only say: “I wouldn’t miss the pilot episode of this one.”
