Why Star Trek: Discovery Built Season 5 Around a Classic Episode From a Legacy Series

July 2024 · 6 minute read

SPOILER ALERT: This story discusses major plot developments in Season 5, Episode 1 of “Star Trek: Discovery,” now streaming on Paramount+.

For most of the season premiere of “Star Trek: Discovery,” the crew of the titular Federation starship are kept in the dark about their mission’s main objective. All Capt. Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) and her fellow officers know is that they must obtain a mysterious object from a 24th century Romulan’s derelict ship that has been scavenged by two mercenaries. Kovich (David Cronenberg, yes, that one) — the equally mysterious Federation operative driving the mission — won’t even tell Fleet Admiral Charles Vance (Oden Fehr) about the object’s significance.

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By the end of the episode, however, the mission has pushed Burnham and her crew to their limits, including slamming the USS Discovery into the path of a massive landslide threatening a nearby city. Before they risk their lives any further pursuing this object, Burnham demands that Kovich at least tell her why. (MAJOR SPOILERS FOLLOW.)

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Kovich’s explanation evokes the classic “Star Trek: The Next Generation” episode “The Chase” from 1993 in which Capt. Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) — along with teams of Romulans, Klingons and Cardassians — learn that all humanoid life in the galaxy was created by a single species that existed billions of years earlier, and seeded thousands of planets with the DNA to pass along their legacy. (Along with presenting a profound vision of the origins of life, the episode also provided an imaginative explanation for why almost all the aliens in “Star Trek” basically look like humans with different kinds of forehead ridges.)

Kovich tells Burnham that the Romulan scientist was part of a team sent to discover exactly how these aliens — whom they call the Progenitors — made this happen; the object they’re seeking winds up being one part of a brand new “chase,” this time in the 32nd century, to find the Progenitors’ technology before it can fall into the wrong hands. 

The season-long storyline provides a heartwarming link to “The Next Generation” — and satisfies an itch “Discovery” executive producer and showrunner Michelle Paradise has had ever since she saw “The Chase” 31 years ago.

“I remember watching that episode and at the end of it just being blown away that there was this huge idea where we all come from,” Paradise says. “And then they’re going to have another mission the next week. I found myself wondering, ‘Well, then what? What happened? What do we do with this information? What does it mean?’”

Originally, Paradise says the “Discovery” writers’ room discussed evoking the Progenitors in Season 4, when the Discovery meets an alien species, the 10-C, who live outside of the galaxy and are as radically different from humans as one could imagine. “As we dug deeper into the season itself, we realized that it was too much to try and get in,” Paradise says.

Instead, they made the Progenitors the engine for Season 5. “Burnham and some of our other characters are on this quest for personal meaning,” Paradise says. Searching for the origins of life itself, she adds, “feels like a big thematic idea that fits right in with what we’re exploring over the course of the season, and what our characters are going through.”

That meant that Paradise finally got to help come up with the answers to the questions about “The Chase” that had preoccupied her when she was younger. “We had a lot of fun talking about what might’ve happened when [Picard] called back to headquarters and had to say, ‘Here’s what happened today,’” she says. “We just built the story out from there.”

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