With Star Trek now confirmed to return to the small screen with next year’s Star Trek: Discovery, some new details have surfaced on the upcoming series.

From TCA, creator Bryan Fuller has revealed that Discovery will feature a female, human lead, with the character to be a lieutenant commander rather than a captain. The plan is to cast a “diverse actress” in the role, and the male lead of the series will also be diverse. In addition to this, robots and aliens will be plentiful, with Fuller saying, “We’ll probably have a few more aliens than you typically have on the show. We wanted to paint a picture of Starfleet where we’re going to have new exciting aliens and also new imagining of existing aliens.” Fuller also added, “Absolutely we’re having a gay character.”

On the structure of the show, the first season will be made up of thirteen episodes, with Fuller explaining, “Each episode is a chapter, within each chapter will be a beginning, middle and end.”

Star Trek: Discovery will be set about a decade before the first major mission of Captain Kirk & Co., with Fuller revealing, “There’s been an incident and event in Star Trek history that’s been talked about but never been explored. To do this series, we’re telling a much more serialized story, to dig deep into a very tantalizing storyline. And we have a character who’s on a journey, and in order to understand something that is alien she first has to understand herself.”

The first season of this new show will focus purely on entirely new characters, although Fuller also teased that existing Star Trek characters could appear in some form as the series progresses.

Production on Star Trek: Discovery is due to start production in Toronto in September, with the show to debut on CBS in January before finding a permanent home on the streaming CBS All Access service. In the UK, the series will call Netflix its home.