SPOILER WARNING: This story includes descriptions of major plot developments on the series finale of “Star Trek: Discovery,” currently streaming on Paramount+.
Watching the fifth and final season of “Star Trek: Discovery” has been an exercise in the uncanny. Paramount+ didn’t announce that the show was ending until after the Season 5 finale had wrapped filming —no one involved with the show knew it would be its concluding voyage when they were making it. And yet, the season has unfolded with a pervasive feeling of culmination.
For one, the overarching story this season was about the origins of sentient life in the galaxy, as Capt. Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) leads her crew in pursuit of an ancient technology used by aliens known as the Progenitors —first introduced 31 years ago on an episode of “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” For another, in one episode, Burnham is zapped back in time to the earliest episodes of the show and faces down her younger self, when she was a mutineer with a galaxy-sized chip on her shoulder. Characters get married or brake up, engage in profound discussions of legacy and personal value, visit the archive for all knowledge in the galaxy and hold a conversation with an alien from billions of years in the past.
“It was really a season about meaning and purpose, and those are very, very big ideas,” executive producer and showrunner Michelle Paradise says in a Zoom interview with Martin-Green. “And now, of course, in hindsight, it feels like those are series-ending sort of themes.” But, while Paradise insists that “there was no thought in my head, or in any of our heads, that it might be the last season as we were writing,” Martin-Green isn’t quite buying it.
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“I think there’s more to it than just, ‘Oh, it was a coinkydink!’” the actor says with a laugh, before explaining that she’s thinking more about subtext than direct intent. “I’ve gotta give Michelle her flowers. She has always asked the deeper questions of this story and these characters. Those questions of meaning and purpose led to questions of origin and legacy, and, yes, that is quite culminating.”
But while the Season 5 finale delivers a rousing, head-spinning climax —with Burnham discovering the Progenitor’s technology while her crew battles to keep the militant aliens, the Breen, from getting their warmongering hands on it — the episode on its own doesn’t quite feel like a proper farewell. So after Paramount+ announced “Discovery” was ending,Paradise and executive producer Alex Kurtzman secured an extra three days to film what Paradise calls a “coda” to the series, set roughly 30 years after the events of the finale. The 16-minute epilogue reveals that Burnham has risen to the rank of admiral and built a family with her great love, Cleveland “Book” Booker (David Ajala); then their son, Leto (Sawandi Wilson)—also a captain in Starfleet — accompanies his mother to send Discovery on its final mission.
Martin-Green and Paradise spoke exclusively with PvNew about filming the finale and the coda, including the surprising revelation about the origins of one of “Discovery’s” most memorable characters and what Paradise’s plans for Season 6 would have been.
“It’s the Most Complicated Thing I’ve Ever Seen”
once the “Discovery” writers’ room decided the season would be organized around a search for the Progenitor’s technology, they also knew that, eventually, Burnham would find it. So then they had to figure out what it would be.
“That was a discussion that evolved over the course of weeks and months,” Paradise says. Rather than focus on communicating the intricate details of how the technology works, they turned their attention to delivering a visual experience commensurate with the enormity and complexity of something that could seed life across the entire galaxy.
“We wanted a sense of a smaller exterior and an infinite interior to help with that sense of power greater than us,” Paradise says. Inspired in part by a drawing by MC Escher, the production created an environment surrounded by towering windows into a seemingly endless procession of alien planets, in which it’s just as easy to walk on the walls as on the floor. That made for a daunting challenge for the show’s producing director, Olatunde “Tunde” Osunsanmi: As Burnham battles with the season’s main antagonist, Mol (Eve Harlow), inside this volume, they fall through different windows into another world, and the laws of gravity keep shifting between their feet.
“It’s the most complicated thing I’ve ever seen, directorially,” Paradise says. “Tunde had a map, in terms of: What did the background look like? And when the cameras this way, what’s over there? It was it was incredibly complex to design and shoot.”
Two of those planets — one in perpetual darkness and rainstorms, another consumed by constant fire —were shot on different parking areas on the Pinewood Toronto studio lot.
“The fire planet was so bright that the fire department got called from someone who had seen the fire,” Paradise says. “It should not be possible to pull those kinds of things off in a television show, even on a bigger budget show, with the time limitations that you have. And yet, every episode of every season, we’re still coming in on time and on budget. The rain planet and the fire planet we shot, I believe, one day after the other.”
Martin-Green jumps in: “Michelle, I think was actually the same day!”
“It Felt Lifted”
The last time a “Star Trek” captain talked to a being that could be (erroneously) considered God, it was William Shatner’s James T. Kirk in 1989’s “Star Trek: The Final Frontier.” The encounter did not go well.
By sharp contrast, once Burnham activates the Progenitor’s technology— presented as an altar-like platform amid a vast meadow of flowers —she is sent to a threshold-like space to converse with the consciousness of a single Progenitor (played by Somkele Iyamah-Idhalama) who’s been dead for billions of years. (As one does.) For Martin-Green, a person of profound personal faith, having the chance to talk with a being responsible for creating life was “intense, to say the least.”
“I had my own journey with the central storyline of Season 5, just as a believer,” Martin-Green says. “I felt a similar way that Burnham did. They’re in this sort of liminal mind space, and it almost felt that way to me. It felt lifted. It really did feel like she and I were the only two people in this moment.”
It’s in this conversation that Burnham learns that while the Progenitors did create all “humanoid” alien species in the galaxy in their image, they did not create the technology that allowed them to do so. They found it, fully formed, created by beings utterly unknown to them. The revelation was something that Martin-Green discussed with Paradise early on in the planning of Season 5, allowing “Discovery” to leave perhaps the most profound question one could ask — what, or who, came first in the cosmos? — unanswered.
“The progenitor is not be the be all end all of it,” Paradise says. “We’re not saying this is God with a capital ‘G.’”
“There’s Just This Air of Mystery about Him”
Starting on Season 3 of “Discovery,” renowned filmmaker David Cronenberg began moonlighting in a recurring role as Dr. Kovich, a shadowy Federation operative whose backstory has been heretofore undisclosed on the show.
“I love the way he plays Kovich,” Paradise says of Cronenberg. “There’s just this air of mystery about him. We’ve always wanted to know more.” When planning Season 5, one of the writers pitched revealing Kovich’s true identity in the (then-season) finale by harkening back to the “Star Trek” show that preceded “Discovery”: “Enterprise,” which ran on UPN from 2001 to 2005.
In the final episode, when Burnham debriefs her experiences with Kovich, she presses him to tell her who he really is. He reintroduces himself as Agent Daniels, a character first introduced on “Enterprise” as a young man (played by Matt Winston) and a Federation operative in the temporal cold war.
This is, to be sure, a deep cut even for “Star Trek” fans. (Neither Cronenberg nor Martin-Green, for example, understood the reference.) But Paradise says they were laying the groundwork for the reveal from the beginning of the season. “If you watch Season 5 with that in mind, you can see the a little things that we’ve played with along the way,” she says, including Kovich/Daniels’ penchant for anachonistic throwbacks like real paper and neckties.
It’s one of several knowing references to “Star Trek” history sprinkled throughout the season, including the Enterprise from the Mirror Universe, placing the Archive for all knowledge inside the Badlands, to revealing what the Breen look like under their helmets. Kovich’s office is littered with relics from “Star Trek” history, like a bottle of Chateau Picard, the baseball from the desk of Capt. Benjamin Sisko of “Deep Space Nine,” and one item in particular that delighted Martin-Green: The metallic VISOR worn by “The Next Generation” chief engineer Geordi La Forge.
“I didn’t know that that was going be there,” Martin-Green says. “My whole childhood came back to me.”
“We Always Knew That We Wanted to Somehow Tie That Back Up”
Originally, Season 5 of “Discovery” ends with Burnham and Book talking on the beach outside the wedding of Saru (Doug Jones) and T’Rina (Tara Rosling) before transporting away to their next adventure. But Paradise understood that the episode needed something more conclusive once it became the series finale. The question was what.
There were some significant guardrails around what they could accomplish. The production team had only eight weeks from when Paramout+ and CBS Studios signed off on the epilogue to when they had to shoot it. Fortunately, the bridge set hadn’t been struck yet (though several standing sets already had been). And the budget allowed only for three days of production.
Then there was “Calypso.”
To fill up the long stretches between the first three seasons of “Discovery,” CBS Studios and Paramount+ greenlit a series of 10 stand-alone episodes, dubbed “Short Treks,” that covered a wide variety of storylines and topics. The second “Short Trek” — titled “Calypso” and co-written by novelist Michael Chabon — first streamed between Season 1 and 2 in November 2018. It focuses on a single character named Craft (Aldis Hodge), who is rescued by the USS Discovery after the starship— and its now-sentient computer system, Zora (Annabelle Wallis)— has sat totally vacant for 1,000 years in the same fixed point in space. How the Discovery got there, and why it was empty for so long, were left to the viewer’s imagination.
Still, for a show that had only just started its run, “Calypso” had already made a bold promise for “Discovery’s” endgame — one the producers had every intention of keeping.
“We always knew that we wanted to somehow tie that back up,” says Paradise, who joined the writers’ room in Season 2, and became showrunner starting with Season 3. “We never wanted ‘Calypso’ to be the dangling Chad.”
So much so, in fact, that, as the show began winding down production on Season 5, Paradise had started planning to make “Calypso” the central narrative engine for Season 6.
“The story, nascent as it was, was eventually going to be tying that thread up and connecting ‘Discovery’ back with ‘Calypso,’” she says.
once having a sixth season was no longer an option, Paradise knew that resolving the “Calypso” question was non-negotiable. “OK, well, we’re not going to have a season to do that,” she says. “So how do we do that elegantly in this very short period of time?”
To answer that question, Paradise and the finale’s co-writer Kyle Jarrow covered the basics. The Discovery is restored to its 23rd century state (after receiving a major glow-up when it jumped to the 32nd century), and Burnham tells Zora that they’re going into deep space and then leaving her alone. Any further detail is masked under Starfleet’s Red Directive protocols, save for one, she says: The word “Craft.”
“I Feel Like It Ends the Way It Needed to End”
Resolving “Calypso” provided the storytelling foundation for the epilogue, but everything else was about giving its characters one final goodbye.
“We want to know what’s happening to Burnham, first and foremost,” Paradise says. “And we knew we wanted to see the cast again.”
For the latter, Paradise and Jarrow devised a conceit that an older Burnham, seated in the captain’s chair on Discovery, imagines herself surrounded by her crew 30 years prior, so she (and the audience) could connect with them one final time. For the former, the makeup team designed prosthetics to age up Martin-Green and Ajala by 30 years —“I think they were tested as they were running on to the set,” Paradise says with a laugh —to illustrate Burnham and Book’s long and happy marriage together.
Most crucially, Paradise cut a few lines of Burnham’s dialogue with Book from the original Season 5 finale and moved it to a conversation she has with her son in the coda. The scene — which evokes the episode’s title, “Life Itself” —serves as both a culminating statement of purpose for “Discovery” and the overarching compassion and humanity of “Star Trek” as a whole.
To reassure her son about his first command of a starship, Burnham recalls when the ancient Progenitor asked what was most meaningful to her. “Do you know how you would answer that question now?” he asks.
“Yeah, just being here,” Burnham replies. “You know, sometimes life itself is meaning enough, how we choose to spend the time that we have, who we spend it with: You, Book, and the family I found in Starfleet, on Discovery.”
Martin-Green relished the opportunity to revisit the character she’s played for seven years when she’s reached the pinnacle of her life and career. “You just get to see this manifestation of legacy in this beautiful way,” she says. “I will also say that I look a lot like my mom, and that was that was also a gift, to be able to see her.”
Shooting the goodbye with the rest of her cast was emotional, unsurprisingly, but it led Martin-Green to an unexpected understanding. “It actually was so charged that it was probably easier that it was only those three days that we knew it was the end, and not the entirety of season,” she says.
Similarly, Paradise says she’s “not sure” what more she would’ve done had there been more time to shoot the coda. “I truly don’t feel like we missed out on something by not having one more day,” she says. “I feel like it ends the way it needed to end.”
Still, getting everything done in just three days was no small feat, either. “I mean, we worked ’round the clock,” Martin-Green says with a deep laugh. “We were delirious by the end — but man, what a way to end it.”
