Meyer: Star Trek: Discovery Is Self-Examination
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Star Trek director/writer Nick Meyer spoke recently about his hopes for Star Trek: Discovery.
Meyer was “enormously flattered to be invited back,” he said, to the Trek world, “as a sort of an eminence grise [decision maker behind the scenes], which is sort of what I am, or have become, even though I don’t feel very grise and then I look at the color of my hair and I go, ‘you’ve turned quite grise.’ So the eminence was maybe a fantasy, but here I am.”
Obviously, Meyer hopes that the series is a success, saying “That’s my first hope.”
He also wants the series to “[perpetuate] the Star Trek condition of helping people see themselves, making us able to contemplate dilemmas that otherwise we might be too close to judge without prejudice,” as was the case with previous Trek, such as the original series.
“I thought that was the series’ strength,” he said, “by taking hot button issues, renaming them and setting them someplace else, that we could think about ourselves and how we want to be. I hope the new series contributes to that tradition, that would be a good thing.”
Not a fan of the series or of sci-fi itself, Meyer can only relate to Star Trek by “understand[ing] the earthbound human aspects of the stories that I can create or relate to them. I used to read these stories by C.S. Forrester,” he explained, “…about Captain Hornblower. I thought, ‘Star Trek is Captain Hornblower, and I can do this,’ just change the name to some alien species.”
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