It is a good day to nerd...

Pictured: that time Spock got mad and
fought Khan on top of a flying garbage
truck in Star Trek Into Darkness.

Hey lookit! Did you see the trailer for season two of Star Trek: Discovery? Captain Pike, Lenny Kravitz, space angels, high-fives. I don't know about you, but I'm cautiously optimistic! I say cautiously optimistic because while I loved the shit out of season one, it wasn't perfect. And given how spectacularly Star Trek, as a thing, crashed and burned in the early 2000's, and how we had to wait years for a revival-huh? No, I'm not counting the J.J. Abrams movies. They're ok, they're just not very Star Treky (see right).

"Funny, I didn't see anything..."

-Londo Mollari*

Anyway, I don't want to get all obsessed fan here, but I need them not to screw this up. The trailer looks fun but like any good teaser it gives us very little to go on in terms of plot. We can expect some trekking. Possibly among the stars. But beyond that, there's some name-checking of Spock and a quick shot of Burnham encountering some kind of glowey angel thing or a Vorlon or something which lines up with now-fired show runner Aaron Harbert's hint that season two would deal with the themes of family and Burnham's 'struggle between facts and feelings and faith.'

It's a topic that, other than some glancing blows on DS9, is pretty un-trod territory for Star Trek so it'll be interesting to see what they do with it on Disco. The trailer also seems to indicate a lighter tone than the doom-filled Klingon War arc of season one, which I'm all for, and it's set to Lenny Kravitz's Fly Away which, I'm less all for, but it isn't the Beastie Boys again so I'm good. 

Does no one record a single album between now and the 23rd century?

Solo was fine and The Last Jedi was
the best one since Empire. You heard me.

But wait, there's more! Because this is Comic-Con season, the internet is awash in nerd news including an exclusive interview on Trekmovie.com with Alex Kurtzman, whom you might remember as the guy in charge of building a Star Trek cinematic universe...on television, which was already a thing, but cool. Anyway, he's sort of the Kathleen Kennedy of Trek, but without the irrational hatred of the fan base. Well yet...fans are a fickle bunch and sooner or later they're going to turn on him too. I have foreseen it. 

Tables...really, I mean, what nonsense.

So in this interview Kurtzman manages to say remarkably little despite kind of talking a lot, but we are able glean the hint of the suggestion that there might indeed be some more Star Trek to come thought it might not follow the traditional format of hour long dramas. Mini-episodes, animation, one-offs. It's all on the table, but at the moment the table is a secret. In fact, no one involved in production is even willing to admit there is a table or that tables are even things. You must have misremembered.

You know that's literally your job, right?

When asked about the rumors about a Khan mini-series or the return of Jean-Luc Picard, he said unhelpfully: 

"I mean they sound super cool, I'm a huge fan of both stories but it'd be really cool to see something like that."

-Alex Kurtzman, not really

justifying why this was 

an exclusive interview

Or maybe the $30 official Star Trek
vodka that has been to actual space. 

Um...yeah, that would be really cool. If only there was someone in a position to do something like that...say, like the guy in charge of Star Trek? But whatever, I don't want to be that nerd. The fact that we're getting any new Star Trek is cause enough to break out the Romulan Ale and make total veruuls of ourselves. Speaking of, it was also announced that there're going to be four short, fifteen minute Discovery mini episodes to tide us over until the show's return in 2019, one of which was written by Michael Chabon. 

Wow, Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon is writing a Star Trek, Tig Nataro is going to play an hilarious engineer and Sir Patrick Stewart might be coming back as a grizzled, too old for this shit Jean-Luc. Yup, it's a good time to be a nerd. Or, to put it into gross business terms: as long as the brand remains profitable, I'm sure we can all look forward to consuming plenty of content based on our favorite IP. 

Finally, Saru's bitter-sweet story of growing up in Brooklyn
in the 1940's as only Michale Chabon can tell it.

*like a million nerd points if this makes sense to you.