The new Star Trek series Discovery is only a few months away from launching, and many longtime Trekkers have been worried that this prequel show might not adhere to the fifty plus years of continuity already established. After all—based on the trailers so far—the show, which is set a decade before the five year mission of Captain Kirk and Mister Spock on the Enterprise, looks very different aesthetically to anything in the classic series. Will CBS make sure that there are no major continuity contradictions to established Trek canon?

It appears so, as according to a report over at CNET, Star Trek Discovery producer Alex Kurtzman (who co-wrote the first two J.J. Abrams Star Trek films) said they actually hired a few Trek fact-checkers (and some superfan writers!) for the writers’ room to make sure that every storyline and episode idea does not  step on the toes of established facts and stories within the canon of the Star Trek universe. No easy task, as we are talking about five live action series and some 700 episodes of television. You can read an excerpt from Kurtzman’s comments below:

“Without spoiling anything we are adhering to a timeline and sticking to the rules, but also I think finding some new areas and avenues that have only been alluded to, but never fully explored.”

“You have to respect canon as it’s being written. You can’t say, ‘That never happened.’ No, no no, you can’t do that, they would kill you. Star Trek fans would kill you. No, you have to respect canon. You have to understand the timelines and what the different timelines were and what the different universes were and how they all worked together. You have to keep very meticulous track of who, what, where, when and why. And we have people in the writer’s room whose sole job is to say, ‘Nope, can’t do that!'”

These comments are interesting, because—based on the trailers—we have a group of Klingons who look totally different from anything we’ve ever seen before in original Trek, and uniforms that contradict the look of the Starfleet uniforms used in the original series episode “The Cage,” which also took place ten years before Kirk and Spock.

Some things obviously are just going to be somewhat different, due to advances in special effects, but based on what we’ve seen, this all looks much more like the J.J. Abrams’ “alternate timeline” of the recent films than anything in the original series. Here’s hoping the writers on Discovery can somehow make this all work.

Star Trek: Discovery premieres September 24 on CBS, and the series will run exclusively on the network’s CBS All Access streaming service.

Are you excited for this latest addition to the long running Trek mythology? And how well do you think it will adhere to established canon? Let us know down below in the comments.

Images: CBS