Star Trek Discovery Season 2 - interview - IndieWire

[nenya_kanadka]

‘Star Trek: Discovery’ Producers on Season 1 Finale, and How Season 2 Will Be ‘What Trek Does Really Well’

Key quotes:

[Georgiou and Tyler] both are so important to Michael Burnham. And so our goal is to create a universe of characters and our goal has always been to find other avenues of storytelling in terms of characters who can carry storylines. We didn’t want to limit ourselves. We love those characters and there’s a very good chance that you’ll see them again.

Less war, more away missions?

We are excited, because this season does free us up to [say] ‘Let’s try more away missions,’ ‘Let’s find some new alien species,’ ‘Let’s chase down new mysteries,’” Harberts said. “That’s hard to do when there’s a war to deal with. So Chapter 2 of the novel does get to be about what ‘Star Trek’ does really well, which is philosophy and debate and intellectual ideas and science and all those things.

They're still saying there's more to come for Culber & Stamets:

For the record, the writers haven’t forgotten about Dr. Culber, played by Wilson Cruz, who they promised would eventually return following his tragic and untimely death. “The presence of Dr. Culber will continue to be extremely important,” Harberts said. “We know what we want to do, but we’re just figuring out when and how.”

And they note that now with the end of the Klingon war they're now running parallel to events that have been mentioned in previous canon, and are looking forward to making that all slot together. On Pike:

[Christopher Pike] is everything that Lorca was not. He sacrifices himself so many times for others [...] The other thing that’s interesting about that character is we don’t know a lot about him. There’s a lot of stuff we don’t know.

And the question is posed: Should Saru get a kitten?

Comments

[lilacsigil]

But would Saru be comfortable with a pet predator species?

I know they keep talking about more Culber, but I was seriously disappointed by them killing him for really no reason at all. I adore Michael and Saru and Tilly and Paul and the Emperor (and at least like everyone else) but it left a very bad taste in my mouth.

[nenya_kanadka]

Saru would be so freaked out by kittens and puppies (sharp teeth oh no!) until he realized he wasn't actually sensing death. :P

I think, as in I honestly do believe, that what they think they're writing/are writing/are planning is an epic slash h/c longfic with a 'presumed dead' sub-arc. I don't currently believe that they killed Culber randomly or to motivate the straight characters and are now wildly covering their asses by saying there's more to the story. (Wilson Cruz said yesterday that they'd known they would have a season 2 to work with before they killed him. And he's still saying "there's a long game.")

But of course what is literally on screen right now is a couple episodes of the first canon gay couple being happy before one of them is murdered for knowing too much about an undercover plot. And at the end of the season, gets a posthumous medal and a significant space spore twinkle.

If this were a fanfic, it would be part 1/? of a WIP where the author wasn't going to be updating for a few months. But if it were fic we'd all be 99.9% sure that "Bert/Ernie, established relationship, hurt/comfort, presumed dead, 1/?" meant they'd end up back in each other's arms by chapter 7, even more in love and even more epic because of what they went through.

(And I do think that's the plan.)

But it's television and television doesn't have that context, that background of pro-queer stories being the default so that you can put your gay characters through the absolute wringer and the audience feels safe enough to just revel in the angst. TV is "Oh. Not again. We don't matter. Again!" land.

So I think it was kind of...arrogant, maybe, to assume that they could write this story like this, especially with this pacing--kill him 2/3 of the way through the season, promise a return but not deliver before the season finale. Whatever the story ends up being in the future, right NOW there are a lot of real live LGBT+ Star Trek fans feeling very hurt and betrayed. And that's on the writers/showrunners. And it's really unkind of them.

For myself, I saw them kill off the female captain of colour and incarcerate the black lead and put a morally iffy white male captain in the captain's chair by episode 3. By the end of the season the ugly messages that seemed to be sending were completely upended and I was riveted by the story they were telling. For me the initial pain made the rest of the arc more triumphant. So this show has earned a certain amount of grace from me, and I can believe that they will do that again, this time with the gay characters. It seems to be what Disco does.

But I don't blame anyone one SINGLE TINY BIT if that's not how they feel. Even if in retrospect the general consensus is that it was worth it (and it might not be, and I might even be completely wrong in my thoughts here), RIGHT NOW they've at best made some pacing choices that are pressing on some very raw wounds for many queer viewers, and I'm not really thrilled about that.

(Even though I do genuinely think they are writing the TV equivalent of an h/c epic with a happy ending. Even if I've spent the season going "my god, this feels so much like fanfic" with so many of the other plots.)