All “Star Trek” series must end sooner or later.
Paramount Plus has announced that the next season of “Star Trek: Discovery” will be its last, with the fifth and final season arriving in early 2024. According to Deadline (opens in a new tab)“Paramount+ will honor the show’s groundbreaking storytelling over its final four seasons with year-round celebrations and appearances at key events in markets around the world” ahead of the final season .
You may remember, a long time ago, on Monday, November 2, 2015, news has leaked (opens in a new tab) that CBS was going to reboot “Star Trek” one way or another, giving the producers about a year to knock something out before the show’s 50th anniversary in September of the following year. A perfect marketing opportunity.
Nicholas Meyer was originally attached to the project before being ousted. Then Gretchen Berg and Aaron Harberts have been fired (opens in a new tab) before Bryan Fuller left the project, ultimately leaving everything in the hands of Alex Kurtzman. And Kurtzman has taken something of a back seat in recent seasons, leaving showrunning duties to Michelle Paradise.
The first episode of the first season, titled “The Vulcan Hello” aired on September 24, 2016 and absolutely, positively showed promising signs. The concept of focusing the show not on the captain of USS Discovery NCC-1031, but on the first officer instead, however, proved difficult to maintain. Therefore, over time, we found ourselves where we are now: lost somewhere ridiculously far back in time when carriers have stairs replaced and you can just beam in the new uniforms. Now that same former first officer is the captain of a refitted USS Discovery, NCC-1031-A.
Over the past seven and a half years, it has been a very mixed bag; there was inspired episodes, missed opportunitiesReally weird storiessome blatant plagiarism and even a nod at Scooby-Doo. Despite some very GOOD stand-alone episodes, however, the series has steadily declined in story-writing quality from the start.
That’s not to say the performance was bad at all; in fact, “Discovery” has some of the best “Star Trek” actors. What ultimately disappointed them all were the decisions made by the showrunner or whoever oversees the writing.
Will a strange anomaly threaten the entire galaxy? Will billions of lives be threatened? Will Starfleet and the crew of the USS Discovery have to come together and dig deep, face their own mortality and risk their lives for the greater good…again? ‘Cause that old chestnut is kinda skinny now.
Despite a strong start, it soon became apparent that while “Star Wars” had a problem with Skywalker, “Star Trek” suffered from a similar “Enterprise” problem. He was unable to let go. Michael Burnham had being related to Spock, for some ridiculous reason and we had to spawn the USS Enterprise. Now, while that spawned “Strange New Worlds” – which is so far the best of Contemporary “Trek” – it would have been nice to have a show, still set in less than three centuries, with totally new characters and minimal reference to any other long-running “Star Trek” show. Kurtzman’s decision to do the show (opens in a new tab) eleven hundred years into the future at the end of Season 2 to “free it from the constraints of the existing canon” was an effort to recover, but the damage had already been done.
It’s a bit like the current season 3 of “Picard”. So far, “Picard” is proving to be a pleasant surprise, but so many people were so fed up with the shockingly bad writing of the first and second seasons that they were hesitant to revisit it.
However, the return of “Star Trek” to the small screen has had an undeniably positive effect on television science fiction. The fact that CBS All Access, later Paramount Plus, invested so heavily in it undoubtedly influenced Amazon with its decision to save “The Expanse” in August 2018. Also, in November 2017, Disney announced that it was going to bring a “Star Wars” spin-off show live to our humble television screens and exactly two years later we had “The Mandalorian”
And let’s not forget”The Orville,” Who Also hit our screens in September 2017. “Discovery” paved the way for a renaissance in TV sci-fi and for that we’re eternally grateful, but…we won’t even be sad to say goodbye to scares black, that fucking spore drive, smart matter, excessive flame blasts, detached pods, smug snickers from Georgiou, Bottom Lip™ from Burnham and those lunatics, cavernous turbolift spaces.
The official story summary for the fifth and final season is “Burnham and the crew of the Discovery uncover a mystery that sends them on an epic adventure across the galaxy to find an ancient power whose very existence has been deliberately concealed. for centuries. But there are others on the hunt too; dangerous enemies who are desperate to win the prize for themselves and who will stop at nothing to get it.”
According to Deadline, principal photography has been completed, but additional filming is still underway in Toronto.
“Star Trek: Discovery” and every episode of every “Star Trek” show currently airs exclusively on Paramount Plus in the United States.
Internationally, the shows are available on Paramount Plus in Australia, Latin America, the United Kingdom and South Korea, as well as on Pluto TV in Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Switzerland on the Pluto channel Sci-Fi TV. They also stream exclusively on Paramount Plus in Italy, France, Germany, Switzerland and Austria. In Canada, they air on Bell Media’s CTV Sci-Fi channel and stream on Crave.
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