One of the biggest questions to pop up after the most recent Star Trek: Discovery trailer was… where was Captain Lorca?
It seems he was a special surprise being kept for Entertainment Weekly, who have an article on the new series coming out in their next issue.
But before we get to that…
Yesterday, the star of Discovery spoke about something a lot of us have been contemplating since the release of the trailer – what is Lieutenant Commander Burnham’s relationship with Vulcan? And, in particular, Sarek.
Sonequa shared some information on her character’s arc with Entertainment Weekly:
“I have an inner war and it’s a journey of self discovery and finding out what it means to be alive, to be human, to be a Starfleet officer, what it means to be a hero.”
Yes. The character is human. Many of us wondered if she might in fact be a Vulcan.
We were wrong!
On her connection to Vulcan, she said, “I have the Vulcan conflict in my life from Sarek and Amanda so there’s always going to be that inner conflict with me. But I think it’s relatable because we all have some kind of inner conflict going on – who we are versus who we present ourselves to be. There’s a lot to be discovered.”
It might seem a little wanky, but the thing I love about this show is that it feels like the title, Discovery, is about more than just the ship or some ‘meta’ sort of “we’re out here discovering things” vibe. It seems like the title runs through everything, from the intimate lives of each character, to the ‘macro’ stuff of discovering strange new worlds, and new civilisations.
And Captain Lorca? What about him? Well, that’s Gabriel Lorca to you. Yes, he finally has a first name!
We don’t know a great deal about him, other than his name (finally), and the fact that he’s a brilliant military strategist.
Does that give us a hint about the Discovery‘s mission? Might that add something to the strange markings on the USS Discovery, as visible in the most recent image of the ship?
Are those markings meant to differentiate the ship from others in Starfleet in some way? Is the Discovery covert ops? Was the Shenzhou also covert ops – and is that why the uniforms for both crews are slightly different to what we’re used to – which is, for want of a better term, the exploration arm of Starfleet? We now know that the Shenzhou is an older ship, so it would be interesting to get a close up of it’s dorsal section to see if it bears similar markings to those on the Discovery. Could they be from the same fleet… sub-fleet(?) of Starfleet? There are way too many ‘fleets’ in that sentence!
There is precedent – for there being more than one fleet (that’s an historic precedent) and for differing uniform designs (within Star Trek).
Fleets first… at the moment, the United States maintains seven fleets in its Navy, according to Wikipedia:
– United States Fleet Forces (formerly the Second Fleet, and both Homeland Defence and taking care of the North Atlantic);
– United States Third Fleet (East Pacific);
– United States Fourth Fleet (South Atlantic);
– United States Fifth Fleet (the Middle East);
– United States Sixth Fleet (Europe);
– United States Seventh Fleet (West Pacific), and;
– United States Tenth Fleet (Fleet Cyber Command, and formerly the anti-submarine warfare coordinating organisation).
If Discovery is set in 2255, as has been indicated, that’s 100 years after the events depicted in Star Trek: Enterprise (Seasons 1-4 happen between 2151 and 2155 – with the season 4 finale taking place in 2161), and there could still be a hangover from that pre-Federation era where we had Starfleet and the MACO (Military Assault Command Operations) – both answerable to the government of Earth, but one more militaristic than the other. Do we know what happened to them? I know that at some point their responsibilities were passed on to Starfleet Security… but did something survive? Did the MACO have a new life in between the time of Archer and the time of Kirk?
The uniforms… well, the MACO had a completely different uniform to our friends in Starfleet. Obviously, two different organisations, but serving the same government.
If the MACO continued in a slightly different form, as a part of Starfleet – as a specialist fleet, might they not have a different uniform? That’s way out there, because if we were to use the US military as an example, the different fleets mentioned above don’t have different uniforms but this is the 23rd Century!
To me, Starfleet and the MACO are kind of like NASA and the US Military. NASA is an independent agency of the executive branch of the US Federal Government and is in essence civilian, but it recruits from the military to fill some of its positions. The US Military are the federal armed forces of the United States and, like NASA, are answerable to the government. Do we have something similar going on in this era of Star Trek? Could Burnham, Lorca and Georgiou be part of a new (or old), more military arm of Starfleet? Hey, I’m doing what fans do. Divining explanations from random sources to create ‘head-cannon’.
Ah… speculation, my old friend…
But I digress. We were talking about Captain Lorca before I went on a flight of fancy.
Entertainment Weekly have very generously released the first official image of Captain Gabriel Lorca, on the bridge of the USS Discovery. We don’t get to see much of the bridge, but we do get Lorca looking every bit a Captain and every bit a man who could most definitely be a military genius.
He looks good, hey?
It’s been a really exciting week for news on Discovery. If any more pops up, we’ll be sure to share it with you here.
If you’d like to check out the Entertainment Weekly exclusive, and subscribe to EW for the actual article when it comes out, click here.
Of interest to some of you, Kirsten Beyer and Ted Sullivan have been getting pretty active on Twitter recently, running non-spoiler Q&As. If you want to check them out – and I recommend you do – follow @StarTrekRoom (the Star Trek: Discovery Writers Room) and @karterhol (Ted Sullivan).
If you’d like to read the most recent exchange, visit TrekMovie, here.
Now that we’ve seen Jason as Lorca, I am hanging for a new trailer so we can watch him in action and see how he and Sonequa bounce off each other!
I am so excited for this series! What a cast. How beautiful does it look?
Star Trek: Discovery airs on CBS (first episode only), CBS All Access, and Space (in Canada) on the 24th of September, and on the 25th of September for Netflix and international audiences.
It stars Sonequa Martin-Green, Jason Isaacs, Michelle Yeoh, Doug Jones, Terry Serpico, Maulik Pancholy, James Frain, Anthony Rapp, Chris Obi, Shazad Latif, Sam Vartholomeos, Mary Chieffo, Kenneth Mitchell, Mary Wiseman, Rekha Sharma, Damon Runyan, Clare McConnell and Rainn Wilson.
scifimojo.com 