The final season of Star Trek: Discovery is finally free of Trek baggage

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that even with the greatest television shows in Star Trek history, most of them need two seasons to stop being bad. Never has this been truer or more painful than in the case of Star Trek: Discovery.

It often felt like that discovery What really worked in the first few seasons was figuring out what wasn’t working. Strong performances from a great cast? It is working. A Klingon design that absolutely no one liked? Definitely not. But despite the stumbling blocks, discovery Season 1 had still earned average grades of C and B from reviewers and had built an audience and subscriber base for Paramount Plus. On the strength disco‘s first season, Paramount greenlights Star Treks Picard, Lower decksAnd Wonder, three new shows that span a wide range of ages and nostalgic tastes. And turn it off discoThe second season, which introduced familiar, nostalgic characters and a lighter, more Star Trek-like tone, was produced by Paramount Star Trek: Strange New Worldsundoubtedly the best addition to the franchise since 1996.

Star Trek: Discovery crawled so the rest of the modern trek could run… and then it started running. In the show’s third season, the USS Discovery and its crew found themselves in what should have been their starting blocks: the bleeding future edge of Star Trek’s timeline. Thanks to the preparatory work for Season 3, this happened for the first time in Season 4 discovery

had a status quo worth returning to. In the fifth and final season Star Trek: Discovery is finally free – more free than a Star Trek TV series has been in 23 years.

Star Trek: The Next Generation is such an elder statesman of the television elite that it’s easy to forget it was daring. The show’s triumph was not just that it introduced a new cast of characters, but also its boldness in imagining the future of the future – and making that future distinctive different. The original series featured a racial and national collaboration that seemed fantastical at the time, with an alien crew member marking the next frontier of each other’s embrace. Next Generation saw this bet and increased it by installing a member of the Klingon species, the Federation’s once feared imperialist rival state, as a distinguished officer on the bridge of Starfleet’s flagship.

Next GenerationThe time period of Star Trek – a century after Kirk’s Enterprise – was not a nominal decision, but rather a commitment to advance Star Trek’s story. With the foundations of the show, Gene Roddenberry and his new and old employees set a precedent for the advancement of the Federation. Therefore, in keeping with the utopian themes of the franchise, old enemies would become friends over time. Next Generation hugged The original series‘ Arch-enemies and the rest of ’90s Trek saw this bet and raised it again, drawing many away Next Generation‘s villains into the heroic fold. Voyager welcomed a Borg crew member and dissolved the Borg Empire; Deep Space Nine provided the franchise with the first Ferengi Starfleet cadet and brokered an alliance between the Federation, the Klingons and the Romulans in the face of an existential threat.

But discovery — at least until it managed its Olympic long jump 900 years into the future — failed to move Star Trek forward. As long as it takes place “immediately before Kirk’s Enterprise” and is constrained by the constraints of an already established era of Star Trek history, it can graft on new elements (like Spock’s secret human foster sister) but not create it from the whole fabric (like a galaxy-wide one Starship fuel shortage that almost destroyed the Federation). Like its predecessor, the ill-fated one Star Trek: Enterprise

In the 2000s it was doomed to hang like a remora on the side of events The original seriesor, if you’ll pardon another fish metaphor, doomed like a goldfish that can only grow as big as its half-gallon fishbowl will allow.

discoveryThe later free seasons in the 32nd century have shown the Federation at its most vulnerable, a subtler echo of this Picard‘s own strike in Season 1 against fallen institutions. (Fans of Voyager And Deep Space Nine know that this is an extremely rich form of Trek storytelling.) In its third season discovery solved a galaxy-wide fuel crisis that had rocked the Federation community. In her fourth turn, she fought for a fragile new Federation alliance and its age-old ideals.

And these seasons have also boldly embraced the idea of ​​imagining the future of the future – 900 years of it. The centuries-old divide between Vulcans and Romulans has long been bridged, Ferengi serve as Starfleet captains, and Doctor Noonien Soong’s work has brought new medical technologies to the forefront.

Even, discovery wasn’t really free in the third and fourth seasons. Star Trek: Picard was out there forming new past elements of a post-Next Generation/Voy/DS9 era, the discovery had to stick to it. Finally, the show still had to make sure it had something to fall back on next season.

But now – with Wonder And Picard finished, and Strange New Worlds And Lower decks trapped in their settings of Star Trek’s established past, and Starfleet Academy And Section 31 not yet in production at the time the final season was to be written – discovery has achieved that final final frontier for a Star Trek show. If you’re a Star Trek fan, this should delight you.

Not since Deep Space Nine in 1999 and Voyager In 2001, a Star Trek series had the freedom to end its run with the Federation in any state. With franchise flagship Next Generation at the end, and Voyager limited only to the Delta Quadrant, Deep Space Nine used its final seasons to plunge the Federation into all-out war and make sweeping changes to the established fictional political norms of ’90s Trek. Voyager used his finale to do what Captain Picard never could: defuse the Borg (mostly).

We don’t know exactly what discovery will get by with this freedom. The directors of season four have spoken of “into the past in order to move further into the future” and compared it to Indiana Jones. Official press releases said the crew would “uncover a mystery that will send them on an epic adventure across the galaxy to find an ancient power whose existence has been deliberately hidden for centuries.” But there’s speculation as to what that means , would be irrelevant.

discovery, the show about an intergalactic teleporting spaceship, can finally actually go anywhere. It’s been almost a quarter of a century since a popular Star Trek series has been so revealing. Let’s hope they are very brave indeed.

Star Trek: Discovery The two-episode fifth season premieres April 4 on Paramount Plus.