This episode of Priority One is sponsored by GamePrint.net. Get 20% off your order of a custom Star Trek Online starship when you use promo code PRIORITY20 – that’s PRIORITY-TWO-ZERO – at checkout.
This week, we’re Trekking Out Tig Notaro’s appearance on The Late Show. Then we head to Twitter for a few interview shorts, and Alex Kurtzman gives TV Insider a look into the future of Discovery.
COMMUNITY QUESTION: Do you want Discovery season 2 to be a Borg origin story?
by Jake Morgan
With only three episodes of Star Trek: Discovery Season 2 left, you may be wondering “Will we see Jett Reno again this season?”. The short answer: Yes.
Making an appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Comedian-Actress Tig Notaro talked a bit about being an unknowing seatmate with Colbert, her children’s terrible twos, and Star Trek, as well as showing off a clip from an upcoming episode of Discovery. Not much was said about the clip, other than it took place in Sickbay, but it proves Notaro will be back – and she hasn’t lost her edge.
If you’ve seen this week’s Star Trek Discovery, you’ll likely have noticed the fight scene between Michelle Yeoh and Alan Van Sprang. It’s epicness was not lost on Van Sprang, who discussed the experience in a Star Trek Discovery Twitter short: “It’s intimidating…But you’re safe, because Michelle…knows distance and knows how to fight…and when she’s kicking, her feet are going over my 6 foot frame easily…but it’s extraordinary and she is such a great teacher that I feel really safe with her.”
In another Twitter short, Alex Kurtzman and Alan Van Sprang talk about Control – what motivates it and the challenge of portraying it.
In regards to its motivation, Kurtzman said, “In its analysis, it…realizes that organic life and human and alien inability to…fully come together is inefficient, and that the best way to proceed is to eliminate all organic life. It won’t be reliant on anything that we organic creatures need, and it will be an evolutionary step.”
Van Sprang, who plays Section 31 Director Leland, talks about the challenge that goes with playing AI. “Doing the AI is a little more difficult. Because when you’re given an amount of dialogue and you can’t be human about it you just have to say it straightforward, and it’s just all facts to a computer, basically.”
More from Alex Kurtzman: the Star Trek showrunner sat down with TV Insider to discuss the future of Star Trek. Kurtzman confirmed the return of Number One, saying, “Yes. We saw her this season and she is coming back.” He also teased the future of Pike, telling the website, “So, if you know what happened to Pike, you’ll see shades of that, however not in the ways that you expect.”
Finally, Kurtzman was asked about cameos, including The Original Series Stars William Shatner and Nichelle Nichols. “We would love to do that. When we brought Leonard into [Star Trek] it was because the story literally could not be told without him. So, there was a very specific reason for him to be there. When you bring a beloved actor and beloved character back it has to be for an equally necessary reason. It can’t be just to throw them into a scene because then it’s random fan service and people don’t like that. But anything’s possible, always in the world of Star Trek anything is possible.”
Elio is a Northern New Jersey Cuban-American and graduate of Kean University, having earned his Bachelor of Arts in Theatre Performance in 2011. He has performed in internationally renowned performance halls such as Avery Fisher Hall with the New York Philharmonic, as a member of the Westminster Symphonic Choir, and in Beijing, China as a representative for Kean University. Since 2012, he has had the wonderful opportunity to Executive Produce Priority One – the premiere Star Trek Online podcast. Whether recruiting, managing the global team of talented volunteers, arranging interviews with special guests, editing, web-development, finding sponsors, managing crowd funding, or writing content for the podcast, Elio has a hand in it all. A long-time Trekkie, Elio has been watching the series since he was a child and sneaking in late night, back-to-back, episodes of TNG reruns. He finally embraced the Trekdom in college and spent many hours catching up on the entire multiverse…. instead of studying.
March is National Cerebral Palsy Awareness Month, and the Roddenberry Foundation has teamed up with Chase Masterson’s Pop Culture Hero Coalition. Every donation you make to Pop Culture Hero Coalition’s […]
seannewboy on 2019-04-09
Wonderful show, great job everyone.
No, i do not want it to be borg origin, i think their creation and growth should be both longer and alien. I dont want them to go from start to galactic threat in a hundred years or so.
Burnham rap for the win!
JusenkyoGuide on 2019-04-08
NO! I do NOT want it to be a Borg Origin story! I fear it’s gonna be, but I DO NOT WANT!
What I’d love would be for Control to get, er, control, of the Discovery just in time for it to be jumped off to the future without its crew… and there Control decides that it was wrong after accessing both the data and the rest of Discovery’s memories (Including Airiam’s). THAT would be a nice Trek message.
Tyler Maxwell on 2019-04-07
Do you want Discovery season 2 to be a Borg origin story?
I think there have been at least a couple of Borg origin stories over the years (both of them awful) in soft-canon sources, and I suppose there is room for a proper on-screen version to be made. But I don’t want that for this show; the Borg are supposed to be a centuries-old megalith that strikes fear across the entire galaxy, I don’t want it dumbed down to yet another Section 31/Starfleet/random human experiment-gone-wrong kind of story. Humankind is not the center of the universe; we can’t be responsible for all the bad shit that happens in it, right?
“Through the Valley of Shadows”
So, Red Signal #4 shows up over Boreth, the Klingon monastery planet which the Discovery folks learn is home to ALL the time crystals! That’s convenient. As is the monk that Pike meets to negotiate for the crystal, who is none other than Voq and L’Rell’s aged-up son! Wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff I guess. The monk sets it up to be this Herculean feat to receive a time crystal, but all Pike had to do to get the crystal was embrace his future in a blinky chair. (And people wonder why we’re not getting a ‘Pike on the Enterprise‘ show.)
Michael Burnham and Spock go on a sibling side trip to track down a Section 31 ship that didn’t do its hourly check-in on time. (So the super-secret black ops cabal requires all of their ships to check in every hour? It’s a spy group, not a cuckoo clock.) The ship turns up fine, minus the crew that are now popsicles in the dead of space, except one: an
extraI mean, a crewmember from the Shenzhou, who is obviously aBorg dronetrap infected by Control to attack Michael, though Spock is able to stop this, because…‘magnets’.And let’s not forget to check into another episode of ‘Stamets looks mopey, while Culber still doesn’t know what to do with himself’. Nothing much happens on that front, aside from Jett Reno swapping wedding horror stories with Culber and revealing that her own wife was killed in the war with the Klingons. 🙁
Then, Control activates the entire Section 31 fleet (“30” ships? Why not “31” ships, huh? HUH? It was right there guys…) to attack our heroes, leading Pike to call in the Enterprise and prepare to self-destruct Discovery, hopefully destroying the Sphere data with it. No doubt the next episode will end up with Discovery being ‘destroyed’/secretly spore-jumped to some remote nebula where the DISCO will spend the next ~900 years watching the entire CBS back catalog. (Brought to you by CBS All Access :p )
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