Martin-Green: What Worked Best On Discovery
3 min read
Now that the first season of Star Trek: Discovery is over, Sonequa Martin-Green spoke about her character, and what worked best on the show over the course of its maiden season.
Martin-Green knew the general arc of the Discovery story, and had input into her character. “I had certainly had a lot of conversations with Aaron (Harberts) and Gretchen (J. Berg) about the overall story, generally speaking, and I knew all of the big points, from beginning to end.”
“Any questions that I had, any things that I needed to know to create Burnham, I knew I had an open door to talk about it,” she said. “That being said, though, I still didn’t know just how deep things were going to go, didn’t know just how far things were going to go when it came down to the specifics. So, that was surprising and that was challenging in the best way.”
The best of the stories for Martin-Green was the final episode. “…You could talk about the finale and talk about how that was the culmination of everything we had been going through,” she said. “That really put everything together, in terms of the story. We see the war end, and we see all of these people reaching the point that they were trying to reach the whole time, with everyone getting their honors at the ceremony and whatnot, and Burnham being reinstated and Culber being recognized. So, you could say that episode works best in terms of story.”
But other stories worked well, said Martin-Green, including The Vulcan Hello, and Context is For Kings. “[The Vulcan Hello] works best, because that’s the introduction of the story and that’s where you saw it’s the Shenzhou, not the Discovery. And you could say [Context is For Kings] is the best because that’s when we get introduced to the Discovery.”
The diversity of Discovery was very important to Martin-Green. “What really gets me is girls being able to see this story, being able to see themselves reflected in me and reflected in all the women in our show,” she said. “And then it doesn’t stop with the girls. It continues with the boys. It’s just really being able to show our youth such a strong, heroic, sacrificial, utopian picture. It means everything. And then being able to see, within the show, the end of racism as we know it now and being able to see equality across the board, across universes, it’s wonderful.
The actress is grateful for the fans who tuned in and stayed for the entire season. “It means everything to us to see people tuning into it and pulling it into their hearts, people who have always loved Star Trek, people who’ve never seen it, and then the people who weren’t so sure about it in the beginning,” she said. “It’s amazing. We’re so very grateful for it. We don’t take it lightly.”
About The Author
