“Remember, it’s an adventure!”
That, according to star Sonequa Martin-Green, was the advice the writers on Star Trek: Discovery told the cast when they shot the fifth and final season of the show.
During a roundtable discussion with Martin-Green that Reactor attended, the actor, who plays Captain Michael Burnham, shared how everyone—even before the cast and crew knew they were filming the series’ final episodes—knew this season would be different than the ones that came before it.
“We knew that we wanted to make a tonal shift,” Martin-Green said. “[Showrunner] Michelle Paradise was really vocal about that. She let us in on that process, and she said we really want this to be an adventure. We want this to be our Indiana Jones season. We want everybody to have fun.”
That doesn’t mean, however, that Season Five will be light on the major challenge the USS Discovery crew faces. “We went even bigger with our subject matter,” teased Martin-Green. “But even while we went bigger, we wanted to bring levity to the gravity of it all….”
The adventure the crew goes on is something that Paradise said in a separate roundtable was something that had been brewing with the writers since Season Four, and as such wasn’t something they thought they’d explore when the show was first created.
Alex Kurtzman, the co-creator of several Star Trek shows, including Discovery, also reflected how certain developments in the series came about as the show’s seasons passed. “I don’t know that we necessarily thought when we created the show that we’d be jumping to the 32nd century, and that turned out to be a total delight for us, and I think a delight for people who watch the show,” he shared during a separate roundtable discussion.
Kurtzman added that Burnham’s character arc—moving from a mutineer to a Starfleet captain—was something he and co-creator Bryan Fuller wanted to have happen from the beginning. These two contrasting examples, said Kurtzman, reflect how Discovery—for lack of a better word—discovered what kind of show it would be.
The first two episodes in the fifth and final season of Star Trek: Discovery premiere on April 4, 2024 on Paramount+. Subsequent episodes drop weekly, with the finale airing May 30, 2024.
