Warning: This article contains spoilers for the first episode of Star Trek: Discovery, Season Five.
The fifth and final season of Star Trek: Discovery has premiered, and the overarching challenge facing Captain Burnham and her crew has its roots in an episode from Star Trek: The Next Generation.
I’m talking, of course, about the Progenitors, who we first met in the April 1993 TNG episode, “The Chase.” In that episode, Captain Picard (Patrick Stewart) reunites with his old archeology teacher, Richard Galen (Norman Lloyd), who wants him to leave Starfleet and come with him on an expedition to finish his research on a secret project that, when revealed, will shock sentient life to its core. Picard refuses, and Galen subsequently dies when his shuttle is mysteriously attacked.
The captain realizes the attack has something to do with his mentor’s work and goes on an interstellar search to find out why. He and his crew uncover that Galen was gathering DNA chains—“seed codes,” if you will—from planets across the known universe, all of which appear to have connected sequences that can only come from someone intentionally coding them as such billions of years ago. The Klingons, the Cardassians and, in the end, the Romulans, are also looking to find the missing pieces of the code on other planets, and for the most part, the species work to one-up each other (except for Starfleet, of course) and try to hoard the codes they find.
Dr. Beverly Crusher (Gates McFadden) gets the last sample on an almost-lifeless planet while the others fight and puts the code together. When she does so, an automatic message plays on her tricorder from “The Progenitors,” a four-billion-year-old species who has long since died out, but who sprinkled their DNA over multiple planets so that life in their humanoid likeness would rise after they were gone.
The message ends with the Progenitor being happy that all these species came together to unlock the message. “It was our hope that you would have to come together in fellowship and companionship to hear this message,” the recording says. “And if you can see and hear me, our hope has been fulfilled. You are a monument, not to our greatness, but to our existence. That was our wish, that you too would know life, and would keep alive our memory. There is something of us in each of you, and so, something of you in each other. Remember us.”
The rub, of course, is that the different species spent more time fighting each other than working together, though the last scene, where Picard talks to the Romulan captain, suggests that maybe this knowledge will slightly improve relations for the better.
The concept is a heady one, but is something that hasn’t been explored much in Trek since then, suggesting that those who heard the Progentior’s message didn’t do such a great job in remembering their words. The episode, however, stuck with Discovery showrunner Michelle Paradise, and she and her writers’ room wanted to bring the concept back to the franchise.
“We were originally exploring the Progenitors in Season Four,” Paradise said in a roundtable discussion that Reactor attended. “And back then we were thinking that we would have them toward the end of the season, but as we really got into exploring the season itself, the Ten-C felt like enough, and it felt like it was just too much story. But the idea of exploring the Progenitors—Where we come from, where did life come from? How do we all look the same but different?—really stuck with us, and so it felt like a really wonderful jumping off point for the fifth season, even before we knew it was our final season, in terms of what our characters were going through and where we wanted to take them emotionally.”
As we see in the season’s first two episodes, Burnham and her crew have a chase of their own related to the Progenitors—it’s up to them to collect all the pieces of another message from the species who started it all over four billion years ago, before the two rogue actors, Moll and L’ak, do.
The first two episodes of Star Trek: Discovery‘s fifth and final season are now streaming on Paramount+. Subsequent episodes drop weekly, with the finale airing May 30, 2024.
