So, There’s a ‘Star Trek: Discovery’ Season 4 Trailer
TJ Ross
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Warning: Contains Spoilers.
We’ve spent ample time recapping episodes from Star Trek: The Original Series so far in our quest to analyze and unpack every Trek episode ever.
That stuff is the old-old. And this is the new-new:
That’s right. The Season 4 trailer from Paramount’s Star Trek: Discovery premiered early this week.
The wait isn’t terribly long to experience the latest season as Paramount drops the newest installment from the series on November 18.
Here’s the part with spoilers. Pleasantly be on your way if you’re still catching up on Discovery.
Star Trek: Discovery is on a grand scale, focusing on high stakes and season-long arcs. The titular starship is presented as a top-secret experimental vessel researching a revolutionary new technology — the Spore Drive.
The Spore Drive allows Discovery to travel through a domain of subspace called the mycelial network, jumping to their destinations nigh instantaneously where conventional warp travel would take days, months, or even years.
Star Trek Discovery’s first two seasons take place before The Original Series by eleven years. The official date is 2254 –with TOS’ The Cage in 2254, too.
The first season centers around a conflict between the Federation and the Klingon Empire and focuses on a fractured Klingon Empire uniting. In the second season, several mysterious signals appear at points around the galaxy, each heralding a catastrophic event Discovery must confront when they arrive to investigate. It all culminates in a conflict against a rogue A.I., which threatens life in the entire galaxy. Ultimately, Discovery is sent on a one-way trip 900 years into the future.
This time-jump is significant, as it places the third season of Discovery instead into the future than any previous series in the franchise has gone, thereby freeing the writers from having to dance around any established canon.
In the 32nd century, we learn that an event known as “The Burn” occurred a century earlier, in which all active warp cores were, in almost the exact moment, destroyed — killing countless souls and decimating every warp-fairing civilization. This, combined with the rising scarcity of dilithium crystals (note the “non-renewable resources” motif), necessary for warp travel, resulted in the virtual collapse of the Federation.
Starfleet and the Federation still exist — they are a mere shadow of the superpower they are presented as in the 23rd and 24th centuries. As the only ship in the 32nd century with a viable alternative to warp travel, it is up to Discovery to find the cause of The Burn. Meanwhile, the Federation is threatened by a group calling themselves The Emerald Chain.
Each season of Discovery is self-contained but has implications on everything that follows — the immediate crisis is resolved. And, each season has feature someone different in the big chair. Season 1 featured Jason Isaacs as Captain Gabriel Lorca, who represented a much darker character than we have ever seen in a Starfleet Officer. In Season Two, Anson Mount’s Christopher Pike temporarily takes over as captain while the Enterprise undergoes repairs. Season Three sees the ship’s second in command, Doug Jones’s Suru, promoted to captain. Suru is a Kelpian, a race that had not previously been explored in Star Trek.
The show’s central character is Sonequa Martin-Green’s Michael Burnham, a human raised by Vulcans. She begins the series as second-in-command but is quickly demoted and court-martialed for starting a war with the Klingons.
Discovery can be streamed here with a subscription service.
The series’ writers are also responsible for works outside of Star Trek such as Hannibal, American Gods, Transformers, and The Amazing Spider-Man 2.
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