Season four of Star Trek: Discovery wrapped up this week, and while things are more or less good for the Discovery crew (and Earth and Ni’Var and the rest of the galaxy), there’s little doubt that things will get dramatic again when the show comes back for its already-greenlit fifth (and final) season.
What that new season will cover is anyone’s guess. Discovery director and producer Olatunde Osunsanmi, however, gave us a hint of what may be in store for Michael Burnham and her crew in season five.
In an interview with Screen Rant, Osunsanmi teased that the next season of Discovery will “look to the past” in some ways. Check out his full statement below:
Buy the Book
The City Inside
“The galaxy’s a big place where incredible things can happen. Season 5 is shaping up to be … all I can say is that—it’s not time travel—but we go back into the past to get further into the future. There’s this old version of Star Trek that exists. And this new version that’s been created by [Discovery co-creator Alex Kurtzman] but there’s a lot of things we still love about the old version. So it’s about pulling from there … not necessarily stories or characters but more themes and process, and how those stories are told, and applying it to what we do in the future. And that includes [Burnham’s] character and things she does as a Captain.”
Osunsanmi doesn’t say this explicitly, but his reference to returning to old “themes and process, and how these stories are told” could mean that Season Five of Discovery might take on more of the episodic story approach that defined other Star Trek shows.
This is a bit of conjecture on our part, of course, but if this is true, I really hope we’ll see a humorous episode in season five of Zora getting used to sentience and being a Starfleet officer. Will they make new friends? Will they become a regular at the mess hall, even though they don’t need food in the biological sense of the word? We can only hope.
The first four seasons of Star Trek: Discovery are now streaming on Paramount+.
