In Another Timeline, Star Trek: Discovery Might’ve Starred Gillian Anderson

In 2016, when Star Trek: Discovery was still in development, the basic premise of the show was closely guarded. Using secret code words, a growing writers’ room, shifting showrunners, and a surprising timeline choice, Discovery was a massive mystery almost right up until its premiere on September 24, 2017.

But the show we got in 2017 eventually took on many different guises throughout its five-season run. By 2019, Discovery became a series that connected directly to the TOS era. which later launched Strange New Worlds. By 2020, Discovery jumped to the distant future and remained there for the rest of its run through 2024. But before all of that, it could have been a very different show. Speaking to the podcast The D-Con Chamber, Discovery co-creator Bryan Fuller teased the version of the show that never got.

As most hardcore Trek fans know, though Bryan Fuller and Alex Kurtzman co-created Discovery, and Fuller was set to be the showrunner of Discovery, he ended up parting ways with the series, leaving the actual showrunning to Gretchen J. Berg and Aaron Harberts, who would end up being replaced by Season 2. At the time, Fuller described his departure from Discovery as “bittersweet,” but only a few details of his original vision were ever fully revealed. All we knew was, at one point, he wanted Star Trek to become an anthology series, which, in a sense, has now actually happened.

But while speaking to D-Con Chamber hosts Dominic Keating and Connor Trinneer (Reed and Trip from Star Trek: Enterprise) Fuller has revealed that he had many very different ideas for casting in Discovery that never came to fruition. While he was part of the decision to cast Michelle Yeoh as Georgiou and fought for the production to “wait” for Sonequa Martin-Green as Michael Burnham, he had several other ideas in mind, too.

“I was talking to Richard Armitage about playing Sarek,” Fuller said on the podcast. Ultimately this role went to James Frain who played the character in Discovery’s first two seasons. Fuller added that “Gillian Anderson was going to play a Starfleet captain” and that he wanted to cast “Laurence Fishburne as a Klingon.” He also indicated that Anthony Rapp and Wilson Cruz’s roles were originally flipped, and originally Rapp would have played an “Andorian doctor.”

So, why didn’t any of these ideas actually happen? Prior to working on Discovery, Bryan Fuller got his start as a Hollywood writer on Deep Space Nine, and then was part of the writers’ room for Star Trek: Voyager. Perhaps better known today as the man who gave us Pushing Daisies and the TV version of Hannibal, Fuller has Star Trek writing in his DNA. Talking about his experience writing for Voyager, Fuller described himself as a “fan first,” and still considers himself a Star Trek fan more than a former Star Trek writer.

“On my last week [working on Discovery], I approved the Starfleet uniforms, which they tossed out, and rejected the Klingons, which they kept.” Notably, both the Discovery uniforms and the Klingons from that era proved to be controversial with fans, which indicates that maybe, had Fuller stayed, the exact opposite would have occurred — we would’ve gotten uniforms that everybody liked and Klingons that weren’t widely criticized. Even Strange New Worlds co-showrunner Akiva Goldsman has thrown shade on Discovery Klingons, telling Inverse in 2023: “I worked on Discovery and I’ll just say, it’s nice to have those Klingons in the rearview mirror.”

Fuller’s reason for leaving Discovery was primarily linked to his double commitment as the showrunner of American Gods. “It felt like it was best for me to focus on landing the plane with American Gods and making sure that was delivered in as elegant and sophisticated a fashion as I could possibly do,” he told Newsweek in 2016.

Would Fuller’s alternate Star Trek: Discovery cast have been better than what we eventually got? Would Gillian Anderson’s Starfleet captain have been amazing? Could we all have loved Anthony Rapp in blue makeup with two antennae sticking out of his head? Somewhere in an alternate Star Trek dimension, the answer is still maybe.

You can listen to the D-Con Chamber here and watch Star Trek: Discovery streaming on Paramount+.