by Nick Ferro, Contributing Writer
All good things must come to an end, and when discussing television shows in their final season, you hope that they meet their end with poise and grace. Also, it would be super cool if that end was crafted with the foreknowledge that this season will be your last, prior to writing and filming the whole thing. Context is for kings… RIGHT?! Unfortunately, for Star Trek: Discovery, that was not the case. Season Six was already being mapped out and there was meant to be more adventures to come. When Paramount announced the cancellation of Discovery it felt like an unfair betrayal by a studio with a skin of evil, falling apart at the seams.
A part of me does wonder if the cancellation was really out of nowhere, considering when this show started back in 2017, I would never have thought the phrase “all good things” would come out of my mouth to describe Discovery. Yet here we are, seven years and five seasons later, I find myself realizing just how much I love Star Trek as a whole, and how there is room in my heart for the shows that didn’t hit me as hard as some of my favorites. In the past seven years, the behind-the-scenes of Star Trek has evolved to embrace what makes the franchise great. New shows like Strange New Worlds and Lower Decks have opened my eyes to how Discovery is not only a fine addition, but a necessary one. Although there are still elements to Discovery that really bug me, they tend to fall on more of the nitpicky nerd stuff that I can write off with greater ease. Star Trek: Discovery had to walk so that SNW and LD could run!
Upon learning that this would be the final voyage of the USS Discovery, I decided to go once more into the breach and do a full series rewatch. I am very glad that I did, because the huge gap between seasons left me forgetting a lot of the story, and helped re-familiarize myself with these characters and their adventures. With reports that this final season would be a treasure hunt of sorts, I set inertial dampeners to full for one last ride far beyond the stars!
I had a blast revisiting Discovery, because my love of Star Trek has grown beyond measure. There is a quote in the Lower Decks episode, “Crisis Point 2: Paradoxus,” where Mariner has a meta moment describing Starfleet. Boimler is upset that his holodeck movie is a bad story, and she says, “It’s an uneven slog that totally ignores the successes of the original… But it’s also a Starfleet movie, which means it’s worth doing!” I love this, because it is exactly how I feel about some entries in Star Trek (except for the uneven slog part). Just because a Star Trek show is not my favorite, or even consistently great, there is still plenty to love, because at the end of the day, it exists in this rich universe. It has characters to enjoy, adventures to go on, caves to explore, and emotions to be… emotioned? It is impressive to me that a show I once called my least favorite entry in the franchise has not only left that moniker behind, but made me laugh, cry, and feel genuine excitement for its continuing adventures.
Season Five kicks off about a year after the previous season’s universe-saving conclusion. Our crew has lost some members to other ships, but has finally settled into life in the 32nd century. There is actually quite a bit of exposition to start that would seem to indicate the show had finally settled into its new role as the Star Trek of the future, an irony that is not lost on me and would only become increasingly more frustrating as the season progressed. The crew is quickly assigned a top secret Red Directive mission to assist another captain obtain an 800-year-old artifact before a pair of criminals can. For those of you keeping track at home, 800 years would put this artifact’s year of origin square in the timeframe of Star Trek: The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine, an exciting coincidence, since we are VERY familiar with that time period. “What easter eggs, cameos, or known Trek lore could we be privy to in the coming season?” was the question on everyone’s mind. Luckily, we did not have to wait long, as the artifact was recovered after an action-packed chase through space, an android-owned black market, and a desert chase on speeder bikes that were definitely not like the ones in Star Wars. As it turns out, the artifact in question is the first part of a key that relates back to an old TNG episode, “The Chase,” in which Captain Picard and several other alien captains all race to discover the greatest secret of the universe: Why all aliens in Star Trek look like humans with different kinds of meatloaf on their foreheads.
The answer is aliens called the Progenitors seeded the galaxy with mysterious ancient technology, billions of years ago, in the hope of creating “infinite diversity in infinite combinations.” And the scientists who Captain Picard delivered this tech to decided that it was too powerful for their time. So they hid the tech, broke up the key into multiple pieces, and scattered them throughout the galaxy with the purpose of testing those who sought the technology in ways that would prove them worthy. Captain Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) and the crew of the Discovery are tasked with following the clues and finding the mysterious tech that seeded the galaxy with their new first officer, Commander Rayner (Callum Keith Rennie), a task that of course would be easy if it weren’t also a race with the two criminals, Moll (Eve Harlow) and L’ak (Elias Toufexis), who are also attempting to find the Progenitor Tech for themselves. Each episode of the season in some way deals with these clues, with only a few episodes veering outside that mission to solve a fresh problem or prevent their rivals from obtaining the clue. What I really liked about this season was how it manages to balance the season long arc with the episodic focus for which Star Trek has become known. Delivering on an episodic experience has always been Star Trek’s strength. It’s why Lower Decks and Strange New Worlds have been so successful, and partially why Picard was not so much. Discovery is truly the best of both worlds, which no other Trek show has been able to parallel since the ‘90s.
The treasure hunt aspect of the season is fun for the most part. It struggles with some of the episodes, like “Jinaal,” which is used to wrap up of Adira’s (Blu del Barrio) relationship with Gray (Ian Alexander) as a way to write Gray off the show. It’s also clunky by being the first of many episodes to force Book (David Ajala) into a situation where he isn’t really needed. It also introduces the idea that the scientists who hid the clues did so in a way that doesn’t make a ton of sense. The show keeps stressing that the clues all have tests that need completion in order to prove that the person seeking them is worthy. But then most of them are just hidden in plain sight, or could have easily been found by accident over the course of 800 years. Not to mention that the crew of Discovery does all the work to find the clues, only to have the key stolen by the Breen in Episode Eight. It is one of those story conveniences that you will either go with for the fun of the ride, or be so bothered by that it detracts from enjoyment.
But still, each episode brings something unique to the table that always has a touch of the familiar. I particularly loved Episode Four, “Face the Strange,” in which Michael, Rayner, and Stamets (Anthony Rapp) are trapped in a time loop and keep slipping into different time periods. We get a callback to the Season One episode, “Magic to Make the Sanest Man go Mad,” where Michael and Stamets have to solve a timey-wimey puzzle in order to save the ship and escape the time loop. It gives us a great moment of comedy with Stamets and Jett Reno (Tig Notaro), who is vastly underused this season. And we get a really emotional and fun moment on the bridge when they time jump to the middle of Season One, where now Captain Burnham has to convince the crew that a prisoner/mutineer was able to become captain and has to earn their trust all over again. This is the one episode where rewatching the series paid off; however I have it on good authority that not knowing anything about Season One, you can still have a good time. I also love it when Future Michael has to fight Past Michael, because it makes me think of Leela vs Leela in Futurama with the alternate universe box.
As for the main antagonists of the season, I was very excited to learn that L’ak is a Breen, and that we were going to learn some more about them as a people. We didn’t really, but I know more about them now than I did watching DS9. For example, I didn’t know that they walk around in those suits because their natural state of being is a liquid. They can turn themselves solid, but they don’t like doing that, which I found to be neat. Their inclusion is fun, but again, there is a story element here that if you go with it, you’ll be fine, but if not, it will clang for you. Ultimately, it clanged for me, because I felt like they were there to just pad the run time and get in the way. The show does some surface level character work with Commander Rayner’s backstory and his personal history with the Breen, but ultimately it doesn’t go anywhere, because it was probably meant to be the groundwork laid for a future season.
One surprise this season is lack of emotional character growth and interactions. Typically, that is a strength of the show, but it flounders a bit this season. Partially because the show focuses a lot on Rayner’s gruff and grumpy demeanor. Tilly (Mary Wiseman) spends all of her time either reminding people that she is going to be leaving the show to make her own spinoff at Starfleet Academy, or chastising Rayner for not expressing his feelings. It’s never up to the level of previous seasons, because it truly feels like she is trying to do therapy at someone who is not interested. The one shining moment that comes out of the whole ordeal is in the finale when Rayner addresses the crew, he gives them the human equivalent of telling a dog, “What a good boy you are, who’s a good boy?” One of the biggest complaints you’ll hear from Discovery detractors is that its too overly emotional, touchy-feely, and people cry too much. And yes, that can sometimes be true of the show. I myself have equated some of the mushier moments to that of Grey’s Anatomy. However, Rayner feels like the physical embodiment of the writers responding to those people. And as the Star Wars franchise has taught us, when you write to address the internet trolls, everyone loses.
Martin-Green is by far this show’s greatest asset, especially when it comes to delivering on the emotional moments. She is a powerhouse of an actor, who, time and again, has delivered some of the best performances that I have ever witnessed in Star Trek. Unfortunately, because she has been this show’s heart and soul for four seasons straight, all of her emotional beats feel like a retread of old ideas. Her emotional through line was fully realized over the course of the show. This was maybe the one downside to having watched all four previous seasons in preparation. Nothing clangs more than seeing a smart, well drawn-out character having to relearn a lesson she already learned four years ago. I struggled with this, mainly because my biggest negative with Discovery is the lack of time it gives to the secondary characters. There are so many people who could and should have the spotlight of their own episodes, that just don’t because it is Martin-Green’s show. This is the problem with giving us too short a season time and again. You rob the audience and the secondary characters of the ability to grow as much as the lead.
Season Five does attempt to give Dr. Culber (Wilson Cruz) an arc where he has a crisis of identity, but it’s elusive and disconnected from the main story. The show tries to shove Book into the story in any way it could possibly make it work. Spoiler alert: It does not. I understand wanting to give him a role to play because the previous season leave him in such a bad place and his relationship, with Michael in tatters. I also wanted a redemption for this character. However, the way it’s gone about left me wondering if the writers didn’t see it as important, but did it anyway. Another misstep this season makes is to give Saru (Doug Jones) a reduced role, taking him off the ship and making him an ambassador for the federation. His absence is felt greatly in the middle portion of the season, as he has for four years been a key part of the show.
It also does not help that several of the main characters who had been on the show since day one were written out of the season for unknown reasons, and replaced by a crop of new “red shirts” who don’t even wear a red shirt, nor come into any danger ever. It is so frustrating when Detmer (Emily Coutts) and Owo (Oyin Oladejo) are “assigned to take another ship to HQ” and are never heard from again. I kept waiting for them to come back, and when they didn’t, I began to think that they would save the day in a cool ex machina moment during the finale. Spoiler alert two: They do not. This season even gives Lt. Commander Rhys (Patrick Kwok-Choon) some more backstory, and even a first name, leading me to hope a fool’s hope that he would get some more screen time in later episodes, or even a commission of his own. Spoiler alert three: He does not. And most of these thoughts all stem from the idea that this is the final season, and I wanted to see some closure for these characters I had grown to love. But like I said up top, they didn’t know this was the end until the season was completed, so there isn’t any kind of conclusion for anyone.
Well, that’s not entirely true. There is one silver lining in the series finale: The showrunners were given an errand of mercy and allowed to write and film a coda to close out the series. The finale’s actual ending feels like the crew is gearing up for another new adventure for Season Six, but then we get a time jump to what appears to be 30-ish years in the future. Michael and Book are old and living on a beautiful planet that appears to be autumn year-round (a.k.a. the dream). She pops on her spiffy admiral’s uniform and goes to see very off on its final mission which will essentially decommission the ship. We are given a flashback of the whole crew hugging and laughing on the bridge together in a very sweet goodbye and then it’s wrapped up by cutting off the final dangling thread from the Short Trek episode, “Calypso.” I really liked this ending and was moved by the emotion of saying goodbye to this crew. I don’t care how rushed it feels and how slapped on to the end it is. It definitely will feel that way for many, but c’est la vie. I have my suspicions that we will see these characters again as cameos in the new Starfleet Academy series.
With Season Five being the endgame for Discovery, I can’t help but reflect on what we are leaving behind. This is a show that introduced us to some amazing characters and gave us some equally amazing performances. In fact, the acting was always what made Discovery stand apart from the Star Trek shows of the past. It’s much more cinematic in the best way possible. These past seven years have felt as though Discovery was in the hands of the prophets, never sure what would happen, yet each new season brought something new to love. This final season may not reach the threshold of its potential, but I would certainly not throw it down the chute; it is simply the gift of an average season of Star Trek television. Although I am sad that these are the voyages that ended this series, I am grateful for Discovery kicking off the next generation of Star Trek.
Rating: Liked It
Star Trek: Discovery is currently streaming on Paramount+
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