Martin-Green: Star Trek Is About Universality
2 min read
Season Two of Star Trek: Discovery is in production, and Sonequa Martin-Green reflects on how people reacted to Season One and what the challenges of creating that first season were.
Martin-Green said that there have been two reactions to the latest Star Trek show. “It means a lot [that fans seem to have embraced Discovery], because it was quite an arduous journey, Season 1. We’ve been met with such fierce love and support. At the same time, we’ve been met with quite a bit of vitriol, because people are innately uncomfortable with change.
“From the very beginning, from the moment we announced what our show was going to be and who was going to be telling the story; there were lots of people who were rubbed the wrong way by that. There was a conversation that was being had for a long while at the beginning about how that response was completely antithetical to the legacy of Star Trek itself. There was a period where we were dealing with that.
“What I think I learned, or at least it was reaffirmed for me, is that people are comfortable with innovation to a point. It’s hard for them to grab ahold of diversity and change, and what they consider to be ‘other'”.
It wasn’t easy to create a new Star Trek series, because so much has gone before. “We had a lot of confines,” said Martin-Green. First, you know, the canon is our central nervous system. We were also purposing to establish our own identity. We wanted to get into the hyper-serialized storytelling space, which is quite different than any other iteration. There’s certainly been serialization in Voyager, there was serialization in Deep Space Nine, but never before has that been essential; the foundation. We are going to tell this story as a novel in chapters. Already, it’s such a new space, and it’s one that we have defined, and reached for, and pressed into. Because we have canon, we have this sort of outline and we have to find ways to jump off of it, and find ways for people to feel that this is familiar, yet unfamiliar in the most exciting way.”
Will Spock appear in Season Two? “Aaron Harberts…said…that Season Two was going to be about that line between science and faith,” said Martin-Green. “He also said that there’s going to be a lot of family dynamic. It is the Enterprise in that shot [final shot of the cliffhanger]. We all know who is on the Enterprise. You see Sarek and Burnham look at each other, and there you have it.”
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