The newest Star Trek series, Discovery, is a very different sort of television programme to its forebears.
While the original series, and all of its successors to date, have centred on a core bridge crew with the captain very much at the forefront, Discovery’s Captain Lorca, played by British-Jewish actor Jason Isaacs, is a remote and somewhat mysterious figure who is rarely at the centre of the action.
He’s neither straightforwardly, impulsively, heroic like William Shatner’s James T Kirk nor is he measured and almost irksomely correct like The Next Generation’s Jean-Luc Picard.
With his willingness to do the wrong thing for the right reasons he’s got more in common with Kate Mulgrew’s Captain Janeway from Star Trek: Voyager but while the darkness of Voyager was tempered with weekly examples of tiresome buffoonery and bathos from ship’s cook Neelix, Discovery is a far less cosy prospect.
