And now, my friends, we reach the end. After Discovery, Season 2 jumped the show into the 32nd century, leaving Strange New Worlds in its wake, we worked our way through SNW, TOS and TAS, the early Trek films, TNG, DS9, Voyager, Lower Decks, Prodigy, and jumping back to the Kelvin Timeline for… reasons. After three seasons of Picard, set in Trek’s “present” (the 25th century), we return to Discovery. And like Picard, Season 3 is a completely different show from Seasons 4 and 5.
Season 3 begins with Burnham crashing head-first (literally) into the 32nd century. Like the Narada and Spock in the Kelvin timeline, they don’t emerge at the same time. So Burnham joins forces with Cleveland Booker, a courier, a sort of mercenary, in a post-Burn galaxy. The Federation barely exists. Vulcan (N’Var now, thanks to reunification with Romulus) and Earth have actually left, as have Trill, Andor, and a host of others. It takes Burnham a year to find Discovery, who have an adventure of their own after crash landing.
In place of the Federation, an Orion-centered mafia called the Emerald Chain has filled the power vacuum. They smuggle food, supplies, weapons, and most importantly, dilithium. They are the biggest threat to the rump Federation. Burnham takes her place as Saru’s number one and makes it her mission to find out what caused the Burn and rebuild the Federation. It’s traced to, of all things, a missing Kelpian starship, the burn actually triggered by a frightened child who is now over a century old. Saru leaves Discovery to return to Kaminar to serve as an elder to both his own race and the Ba’ul, the greasy water dwellers who used to eat the Kelpians (since millennia before, the Kelpians would eat the Ba’ul. And you thought the Vulcans and Romulans had issues to work out.) On Saru’s recommendation, Burnham becomes captain of Discovery.
Season 4 is about rebuilding the Federation, mainly, getting the Vulcans back on board. There is a budding romance between Saru, our favorite Kelpian, and T’Rina, the president of N’Var (formerly Vulcan and also home to the Romulan people now.) He is an ambassador, and we get to see him at a meeting of Kaminar’s elders, which includes the water-dwelling Ba’ul. Meanwhile, Tilly is tapped to train one of the first classes of Starfleet cadets in 150 years. But the main focus is the DMA, a gravitational anomaly that announces itself by destroying Book’s homeworld of Kwejian. Book is grieving, but Discovery, being the only non-warp ship in Starfleet now, is tasked with finding the DMA and determining what to do about it. It’s sort of a redux of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, but with Orion gangsters, less gawking at the blue screen, and a bit more going on than Lt. Ilia getting turned into a robot. The second half of the season even hearkens back a bit to the old Buck Rogers series, with Burnham and Owesekon getting into a boxing match while hunting for a device that might send Species 10C, the species responsible for our V’Ger-like menace, into a tizzy. Unlike V’Ger and that idiot Nero, the 10C actually seem reasonable once communications are established.
Season 5 openly references Star Wars in its look and feel and Indiana Jones in its story arc. Book, doing the interstellar equivalent of community service, returns to help find a relic from the Progenitors, referenced in the TNG episode, “The Chase.” In the original, it’s a Romulan who approaches Picard about finding out humanoids were seeded across the galaxy, and in this season, it’s a Romulan scientist who leads the multi-species effort to hide their technology. But Discovery‘s crew has a problem. Two freelance couriers named Moll and L’ak also want it. There’s a price on their heads, and this tech would pay it off nicely. While Burnham and Book play a tag-team version of Indy, Moll and L’ak are almost Bonnie and Clyde. More over, L’ak is a Breen, and we finally get to see what’s up with the mysterious, static-voiced aliens. 1.) They are ugly, and 2.) they are assholes. The Romulans were originally paranoid, but even our first meeting with them revealed them to be capable of great reason and hope. The Klingons gave us our favorite villains off the bat and became the Federation’s greatest allies. The Cardassians were the Soviet Union to the rest of the Alpha Quadrant’s NATO. You understood the Borg and the Dominion, even if they had fewer redeeming qualities. The Breen? Even Picard‘s Confederacy, never mind the Mirror Universe’s Terran Empire, would tell them to take it down a notch. They remind me of Sarris in Galaxy Quest, a far superior non-franchise Trek than Never Say Never Again was to James Bond. (More on that next week.)
With no opportunity to credibly bring back legacy characters beyond the odd mention (Picard) or holograph (Spock), Discovery had to flesh out the recurring cast. They also had to replace Burnham’s love interest, Ash Tyler. While I’d like to see Tyler come back as head of Section 31, Cleveland Booker, Book (David Ajala), is a much better fit for this cast. Additionally, with Ariam dead and Lorca in search of a homeopathic remedy for falling into a reactor (Jason Isaacs’s reason for Mirror Lorca to never return), we get Adira Tal (Blue del Barrio), a human-Trill hybrid. Adira is non-binary. After an awkward handling of her identity, she slides into her role, both a daughter figure to the irascible Stamets as well as his favorite co-conspirator. Initially, she’s part of a couple with Tal’s former host, Gray (Ian Alexander), who is initially a hallucination. A much more deft plotline uses Altan Soong’s golem transfer to bring him back to the material world, something Culber, who literally came back from the dead, guides him in navigating. With limitations, it allows Gray to return to Trill and take on his role as a guardian.
Fleet Admiral Charles Vance (Odeh Fehr) gives the rebooted Discovery a bit of Pike-like gravitas. Had Discovery stayed in the 23rd century, he might have made a good replacement for Pike or a decent boss for Saru or Burnham, as both inevitably become captain. Additionally, Season 4 adds Laira Rillak (Shelah Horsdal) as the Cardassian/Bajoran/human hybrid president of the Federation. But the most enigmatic addition, one suspects as a foil to, then replacement for, Phillipa Georgiou, is Kovich. Kovich is a powerful figure with no known obvious role other than Vance defers to him. Played to perfection by director David Cronenberg (whom I suspect wasn’t acting, given his own enigmatic personality), Kovic first seems to be head of the rump Section 31, then something else entirely. He reconstitutes Starfleet Academy and kicks off Season 5 with a “Red Directive,” meaning even Section 31’s rules are out the window. In the finale, what was probably meant to be the final scene before the cast and producers learned of the show’s cancellation, Burnham pushes Kovich to reveal his real name. He reveals, “I am Agent Daniels of the USS Enterprise, among other places.” (Sidenote: The Enterprise cast, according to Dominic Keating, collectively groaned at the reemergence of the character as his storylines tended to pull attention away from most of the regulars.)
The characters find their own finally. While Burnham provides a direct link back to Spock to sell the Vulcan-Romulan reunification, she otherwise loses her Mary Sue tendencies. She begins, after a year as a courier, as Saru’s number one, disappoints him as she did Georgiou (with less fatal and more admirable motivations.) Her rise, fall, and rise again lands her in the captain’s seat. President Rillak informs her the new flagship with be the new USS Voyager. Captain Burnham is qualified, but not quite ready. Eventually, Burnham tells Rillak as the latter’s opinion changes that she might be ready, but she’s needed on Discovery. It’s the only ship that doesn’t need warp drive to get around in a still-dilithium starved era.
Saru, meanwhile, transforms from a reluctant commander to an elder statesman. After 932 years, that’s pretty damn elder. So it seems only fitting a romance blossoms between the philosophical Saru and the born-intellectual T’Rina. By now, Vulcans are comfortable with their warts, having lived centuries with their Romulan brethren, who seem to have shed their paranoia in favor of sciencing stuff. (As a group, they were upset Vulcan/N’Var seceded from the Federation over a technical problem.)
It’s Tilly, whom I joyfully crush hard on, who has the biggest journey. Timid, mousy, and chattery when we first meet her, over these final three seasons, she acts as Saru’s number one for a time and finds her spine. In Season 5, she doesn’t hesitate to put new XO Rayner (Callum Keith Rennie, as a more nuanced take on the Jellico archetype) in his place.
I think if Discovery had just started from the 32nd century, even referencing Kirk or Pike or even Sulu as their point of departure, the show would have worked better overall. The setting takes some getting used to, especially when Season 2 had Pike in temporary command and dealt with other legacy characters. Not possible now beyond holos of Spock and references to Picard.
The chronological binge ends with a Short Trek from early in Discovery‘s run. Eager to promote their new ship, the producers created a vignette in which a man dubbed Craft (not his real name) finds an abandoned Discovery in the 43rd (?!) century, an AI named Zola waiting. Zola herself began development midway through the second season, with the MacGuffin sphere data of 100,000 years of knowledge possessing just enough awareness to defend its existence. By the end of Season 3, it’s become a female personality of Zola, which scares the hell out of Stamets. However Kovich is intrigued, and Zola is invited to become part of the crew. Handy, since she’s pretty much become Discovery itself.
It’s clear they had a longer arc in mind for Zola from the short “Calypso,” but Paramount decided five years, instead of the original seven for TNG, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager received (and Enterprise planned for), would be the lifespan of a Trek series. The pandemic played a role, delaying Discovery, Strange New Worlds, and Lower Decks. Add to that an actors’ and a writers’ strike and shifting fortunes at Paramount, and you can see why the timeframes have been shortened. (Strange New Worlds has a built-in expiration date due to Kirk taking command and Pike’s fate.)
“Calypso” shows us Zola actually waiting for Craft, by order of Kovich in the series finale. Craft is fleeing a war and trying to get home to his wife and child, whom he hasn’t seen in years. During his time on the abandoned Discovery, Zola falls in love with him and tries to convince him to stay. In the end, if you love someone, set them free. She sends him home in her last functioning shuttle. It’s a bittersweet ending that leaves many questions. What happened to the reconstituted Federation? Why was Zola made to wait in deep space all alone? What happened to send Craft running in the 43rd century? Alas, we’ll probably never know, but as this takes place literally 2000 years after “The Cage,” it may not matter.