Before the premiere of CBS new streaming-only flagship show, ‘Star Trek: discovery,’ star Jason Isaacs essentially told Trek fans to get bent. At least, that’s how it sounded – he said that his interviewer misquoted him, so there may be some gray area there. Now that we are three episodes into ‘Discovery’ and the reactions from both critics and fans are decidedly mixed, Isaacs took the opportunity in a recent interview to try and “calm the waters” a bit.
During a line of questioning about the show, Isaacs took a moment to sidebar about Trek fans:
“I love engaging with the fans. I find it incredibly exhilarating because mostly it’s just people loving the fact that there’s a Star Trek around. But those people who are making a noise or being critical, although isn’t terribly welcome, I’m thrilled they’re around to display their passion for it. One thing they don’t need to worry about — and this is not to silence them, because they’re the most fun people to engage with, online at least — is that there’s nothing corporate going on here. The writers room is full of insane, diehard Trekkies, including the woman who’s written a number of the novels, and people who’ve worked on the films, and the TV shows — like Akiva [Goldsman], one of the head executive producers who was at the very, very first Star Trek conference in 1976. So anyone who thinks, ‘Why don’t they know the Star Trek Universe?,’ believe me, you’d lose or at least draw in Trivial Pursuit against any of them.
“[These writers] spend half their day writing and half their day throwing things at each other arguing about which bits of canon are completely fixed and what’s not, what it does or doesn’t allow for. Where a canon has already contradicted itself, there might be a third way. None of this stuff goes by unnoticed. It’s terribly funny when I read some tweet or somebody goes, ‘Didn’t they realize that blah-blah-blah?’ and you go, ‘Didn’t they realize?! They spent two weeks screaming at each other about this!'”
The debate about how much or how little ‘Discovery’ is respecting the existing Star Trek canon has been made back and forth ad nauseam, so we won’t get into it again here – suffice it to say, if nothing else, Isaacs certainly seems to be entertaining himself while engaging with the fan base of his new series.
‘Star Trek: Discovery’ airs new episodes on Sunday nights at 8:30pm on the streaming-only CBS All Access.
