Spoiler Warning: There are spoilers ahead for Star Trek: Discovery Seasons 1-4.
As you may know by now, the upcoming fifth season of Star Trek: Discovery, which is due to be broadcast early next year, is going to be the show’s final outing. Paramount broke this news back in March – and true to form, did so in a poor way and with shockingly bad timing, though I suppose that’s somewhat beside the point. Discovery hasn’t always been everyone’s favourite Star Trek show, and I get that. But I think the one thing that Trekkies and viewers should be able to agree on is this: Discovery’s fans deserve to see a decent and conclusive ending.
Whatever you may have thought of the show, its characters, and its storylines, a creditable final season capped off with a solid ending could reframe how we view the show, and could even bring in some new fans. And every show, especially serialised ones like Discovery, should see their main character arcs and narrative threads tied up by the time the curtain falls for the last time.
When news of Discovery’s cancellation broke, I wrote the following here on the website:
“It’s my hope that Discovery’s writers will have known the end was coming well enough in advance to have planned out a conclusive ending for the series and its characters […] If this recently-announced news had been known to the producers and creative team, hopefully they will have been able to put together an ending worthy of the show and its great cast of characters.”
When a creative team knows that their production is coming to an end, they can find ways to wrap up storylines and pay off character development, bringing things to a conclusive end for at least some of the characters in the show. That’s what I hoped would happen for Discovery.
But unfortunately, we’ve recently learned that a conclusive end to Discovery was never written. In fact, it sounds like the show’s finale was a rushed affair comprised of last-second rewrites and pick-up shots – because in true Paramount style, the corporation has no idea what it’s doing with the flagship series for one of its biggest brands.
Star Trek legend Jonathan Frakes directed the first half of Discovery’s fifth season finale – the episode that will now serve as the series finale. And he recently had this to say about it:
“When we did it [filmed the Season 5 finale] we didn’t know it was the end. And then Olatunde Osunsanmi had to go back up and do two or three days of new stuff to actually make the finale the finale.”
I don’t want to cast aspersions on the work of Olatunde Osunsanmi, who has directed some fantastic Discovery episodes – including Season 4’s Coming Home, which I regard as the high-water mark of the entire series. But Frakes’ comments sound incredibly ominous, and I have a bad feeling about Discovery’s finale right now.
In what Frakes recalls as being “two or three days,” additional work was done on the finale to wrap things up. Considering that a normal episode takes far longer than that to produce… I just don’t see how enough can have been done, even with a good director and a team who were ready to go. That’s on top of the emotional toll that would have been taken on the cast and crew as they learned – apparently at the last moment – that the series was to be cancelled.
Although Starfleet Academy may serve as a spin-off of sorts, continuing Discovery’s 32nd Century setting for another season or two, I doubt we’ll get much more of a follow-up. Discovery isn’t The Next Generation – there won’t be a fan campaign to bring it back, nor is there likely to be a Picard-style resurrection in a few years’ time. This is it for Discovery, and as a series with such a strong serialised focus, that means a definitive and conclusive ending is necessary. It just isn’t possible to write something like that on short notice, let alone film it in a couple of days.
After working on a series for five seasons across more than seven years, the cast and crew had to have known that there were almost certainly fewer days ahead than there were behind. But even so, the manner of Discovery’s cancellation feels all the more brutal in light of Frakes’ comments, and I really feel for everyone involved in the production. Apparently Season 5’s original ending would have at least left the door open for a potential sixth season, and with filming having been completed, that was then ripped away from the cast and crew at the last possible moment. Not for the first time, we’re talking about a lack of professionalism, management, and just basic decency at the upper echelons of Paramount.
Paramount Plus is failing. Discovery’s cancellation is one consequence of that, Prodigy’s equally abrupt end is another, and there are other examples we can point to beyond the Star Trek franchise. As Paramount’s executives continue to flop around, unable to get to grips with a streaming market that they have no clue about – and continue not to understand – desperate decisions like these will keep being taken. With writers’ and actors’ strikes on top of that, the future of Star Trek beyond 2024 feels very uncertain indeed.
If there was any evidence of a coherent plan behind the cancellations of Discovery and Prodigy, maybe it wouldn’t feel that way. Slowing down the Star Trek franchise, refocusing on fewer productions that might all share a single timeline, and prioritising quality over quantity are all good things – and if that’s what Paramount was doing, I’d actually be supportive of it.
But that’s just not what’s happening.
The seemingly chaotic way in which Discovery was cancelled, after its entire fifth season had been written and filmed, speaks to that. There’s no plan here, no direction. Paramount saw the losses mounting for its streaming platform and has hit the panic button. There may well be serious narrative consequences for Discovery as a result.
No one expected Discovery to last forever, and after several cancellation scares and rumours in years past, as well as being an expensive series to produce that arguably never quite managed to make good on that initial investment… the writing has arguably been on the wall. But as a fan of Star Trek, and as someone who has supported Discovery as best I can across its run, I want to see the show get a decent ending. Whether or not you think Discovery as a series deserves that… surely you can agree that its fans and supporters do.
Perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise, given the chaotic and haphazard way in which the overall Star Trek franchise is being handled, that its flagship series was cancelled without a plan and without an ending written. Paramount is incompetent at every level, so nothing about this situation shocks or surprises me any more. But that doesn’t make it any less disappointing – or any less worrying.
Seasons 3 and 4 both had their issues. Pacing, structure, overused tropes, forced drama, and boring relationship nonsense all dragged down what could have been stronger and more interesting stories. But there was also a sense that Discovery was rediscovering some of that Star Trek magic, and especially in the fourth season finale, things seemed to be improving. I wouldn’t have chosen to cancel Discovery if I were in charge.
But if there was a threat of cancellation in the air – and after more than seven years in production, with five seasons having been created in that time, it’s inevitable that those conversations would have been happening behind the scenes – then a timeframe for that decision needed to be in place. If cancellation were a realistic outcome, a story with a definitive ending needed to be written – not one that had to be rewritten at the last moment.
There’s a very real danger, I fear, that Discovery’s finale will be a disappointment. Moreover, depending on when these additional scenes and sequences may have been filmed, there’s also the prospect that they’ll be incredibly obvious and that it’ll be painfully clear which scenes were part of the original version of the episode and which were the last-second pick-up shots.
With Star Trek’s future so uncertain, and the survival of Paramount Plus hanging in the balance, the last thing we need is a disappointing, underwhelming, or incomplete Discovery finale. A poorly-received final episode could end up seriously detracting from the show’s very real successes, as well as harming the prospects of both of its upcoming spin-off projects: Section 31 and Starfleet Academy. Paramount needs to get this right – and realistically, that meant planning for the end from the ground up. Season 5 as a whole needed to be written with the show’s end in mind, and it wasn’t. It couldn’t be – because once again, Paramount dropped the ball.
After Coming Home had been such a fantastic end point for Season 4, and with the promise of Discovery finally dropping its “the whole galaxy is in danger and only Burnham can save it!” premise, I felt that Season 5 had a solid foundation to build upon. When the show’s cancellation was announced it was a disappointing blow – but one that, under the right circumstances, could have worked. Now that we know Season 5 wasn’t intended to be the show’s final season, and that last-second rewrites and pick-up shots were needed, I really am concerned that the show’s ending won’t be as conclusive, as definitive, or as enjoyable as it ought to be.
Star Trek: Discovery Seasons 1-4 are available to stream now on Paramount+ in countries and territories where the platform is available, and are also available on Blu-ray. Season 5 will stream on Paramount+ in early 2024. The Star Trek franchise – including Discovery and all other properties mentioned above – is the copyright of Paramount Global. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Trekking with Dennis 