Feature Story

‘Bold’ science‘Daily Planet’ kicks off a new theme week

By Cassie DreschTV Media

It’s said that if you look hard enough at pictures of Spock,

you can see he actually has three ears — the left ear, the right ear and the final frontier. OK, OK, that was a groaner of a joke, but it helps set the stage for “Daily Planet’s” newest theme week. Co-hosts Ziya Tong and Dan Riskin are taking viewers of Discovery’s flagship series on some grand new adventures with Boldly Go Week, premier-ing Monday, Aug. 29, and wrap-ping up Friday, Sept. 2.

Part tribute to the 50th anni-versary of the Star Trek franchise and part celebration of scientific game changers, Boldly Go Week kicks off the 22nd season of “Daily Planet,” and promises to be an epic five-day expedition of never-before-seen marvels, from the deepest parts of the ocean to the outer-most reaches of space.

“The great thing about Boldly Go is we’re getting to join peo-ple and see people do things that have never been done be-fore,” Tong said in an interview with TV Media. “This is really new terrain, new landscape. These are things that even I’ve never seen before.”

A concert headlined by Radiohead in the magma cham-ber of a volcano. An actor vying to be named Iceland’s Strongest Man for the sixth-straight year. A Smithsonian museum curator who is in charge of an iconic piece of Star Trek history. These are only a handful of the many interesting stories “Daily

Planet” delves into during Boldly Go Week, with Tong and Riskin — her an accomplished television host and him a well-travelled evolutionary biologist — bringing their expertise to the studio.

Of course, with a theme-week name inspired by the title sequence from one of the most influential sci-fi franchises ever, it makes sense that there will be a Star Trek element to the proceedings, and Boldly Go Week leads into Discovery’s original 50th anniversary Star Trek special — “Building Star Trek” — which is set to air Sunday, Sept. 4.

Over the course of two hours, “Building Star Trek” will high-light the efforts of two American museum teams that are working to preserve artifacts from the original 1966 “Star Trek” series. Before the special’s premiere, though, Tong and Riskin plan on checking in with one woman from those teams: Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum cura-tor Margaret Weitekamp.

“She loves ‘Star Trek,’ she’s a total Trekkie,” said Tong. “She’s got her hands on the original U.S.S. Enterprise [model], and she’s in charge of getting it back in shape before public view-ings. It’s been a long time

since that thing has been viewed by the public, so we’re going to go behind the scenes and see how she gets it back in tip-top shape.”

However, the stories aren’t all Star Trek-related. Actor Hafthor Björnsson, known for playing The Mountain in HBO’s “Game of Thrones,” is more famous in his home country of Iceland for being a strongman. “Daily Planet” visits Björnsson in the Nordic country as part of Boldly Go Week to see if he could win a remarkable sixth-straight Iceland’s Strongest Man title.

“It’s incredible to see him train for this,” Tong said of Björnsson, who tops out at six-foot-nine, weighs 397 pounds and eats about 10,000 calories per day. “It’s incredible to see if he can actually master the feat [of winning another title], and we’re the ones who get to go behind the scenes because we travelled all the way to Iceland to check it out.”

Dan Riskin and Ziya Tong host “Daily

Planet’s” Boldly Go Week

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