Discovery Season Finale, Epilogue Explained

SPOILER WARNING: This story consists of descriptions of main plot developments on the sequence finale of “Star Trek: Discovery,” at the moment streaming on Paramount+.

Watching the fifth and remaining season of “Star Trek: Discovery” has been an train within the uncanny. Paramount+ didn’t announce that the present was ending till after the Season 5 finale had wrapped filming — nobody concerned with the present knew it could be its concluding voyage after they had been making it. And but, the season has unfolded with a pervasive feeling of end result. 

For one, the overarching story this season was in regards to the origins of sentient life within the galaxy, as Capt. Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) leads her crew in pursuit of an historic expertise utilized by aliens generally known as the Progenitors — first launched 31 years in the past on an episode of “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” For one other, in a single episode, Burnham is zapped again in time to the earliest episodes of the present and faces down her youthful self, when she was a mutineer with a galaxy-sized chip on her shoulder. Characters get married or brake up, interact in profound discussions of legacy and private worth, go to the archive for all data within the galaxy and maintain a dialog with an alien from billions of years up to now.

“It was really a season about meaning and purpose, and those are very, very big ideas,” government 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, whereas 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 fairly shopping for it.

“I think there’s more to it than just, ‘Oh, it was a coinkydink!’” the actor says with amusing, earlier than explaining that she’s pondering extra 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 whereas the Season 5 finale delivers a rousing, head-spinning climax — with Burnham discovering the Progenitor’s expertise whereas her crew battles to maintain the militant aliens, the Breen, from getting their warmongering fingers on it — the episode by itself doesn’t fairly really feel like a correct farewell. So after Paramount+ introduced “Discovery” was ending, Paradise and government producer Alex Kurtzman secured an additional three days to movie what Paradise calls a “coda” to the sequence, set roughly 30 years after the occasions of the finale. The 16-minute epilogue reveals that Burnham has risen to the rank of admiral and constructed a household along with her nice love, Cleveland “Book” Booker (David Ajala); then their son, Leto (Sawandi Wilson) — additionally a captain in Starfleet — accompanies his mom to ship Discovery on its remaining mission.

Martin-Green and Paradise spoke completely with Variety about filming the finale and the coda, together with the shocking revelation in regards to the origins of one in all “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 determined the season can be organized round a seek for the Progenitor’s expertise, in addition they knew that, ultimately, Burnham would discover it. So then they’d to determine what it could be.

“That was a discussion that evolved over the course of weeks and months,” Paradise says. Rather than deal with speaking the intricate particulars of how the expertise works, they turned their consideration to delivering a visible expertise commensurate with the enormity and complexity of one thing that would seed life throughout the whole 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 partially by a drawing by MC Escher, the manufacturing created an setting surrounded by towering home windows right into a seemingly infinite procession of alien planets, through which it’s simply as simple to stroll on the partitions as on the ground. That made for a frightening problem for the present’s producing director, Olatunde “Tunde” Osunsanmi: As Burnham battles with the season’s important antagonist, Mol (Eve Harlow), inside this quantity, they fall by means of totally different home windows into one other world, and the legal guidelines of gravity maintain shifting between their toes.

“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 these planets — one in perpetual darkness and rainstorms, one other consumed by fixed hearth — had been shot on totally 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 final time a “Star Trek” captain talked to a being that might be (erroneously) thought-about God, it was William Shatner’s James T. Kirk in 1989’s “Star Trek: The Final Frontier.” The encounter didn’t go effectively.

By sharp distinction, as soon as Burnham prompts the Progenitor’s expertise — offered as an altar-like platform amid an enormous meadow of flowers — she is shipped to a threshold-like area to converse with the consciousness of a single Progenitor (performed by Somkele Iyamah-Idhalama) who’s been lifeless for billions of years. (As one does.) For Martin-Green, an individual of profound private religion, having the possibility to speak with a being accountable 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 on this dialog that Burnham learns that whereas the Progenitors did create all “humanoid” alien species within the galaxy of their picture, they didn’t create the expertise that allowed them to take action. They discovered it, totally fashioned, created by beings completely unknown to them. The revelation was one thing that Martin-Green mentioned with Paradise early on within the planning of Season 5, permitting “Discovery” to go away maybe essentially the most profound query one may ask — what, or who, got here first within 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,” famend filmmaker David Cronenberg started moonlighting in a recurring position as Dr. Kovich, a shadowy Federation operative whose backstory has been heretofore undisclosed on the present.

“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 many writers pitched revealing Kovich’s true id within the (then-season) finale by harkening again to the “Star Trek” present that preceded “Discovery”: “Enterprise,” which ran on UPN from 2001 to 2005.

In the ultimate episode, when Burnham debriefs her experiences with Kovich, she presses him to inform her who he actually is. He reintroduces himself as Agent Daniels, a personality first launched on “Enterprise” as a younger man (performed by Matt Winston) and a Federation operative within the temporal chilly conflict. 

This is, to make sure, a deep reduce even for “Star Trek” followers. (Neither Cronenberg nor Martin-Green, for instance, understood the reference.) But Paradise says they had been laying the groundwork for the reveal from the start 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, together with Kovich/Daniels’ penchant for anachonistic throwbacks like actual paper and neckties.

It’s one in all a number of realizing references to “Star Trek” historical past sprinkled all through the season, together with the Enterprise from the Mirror Universe, putting the Archive for all data contained in the Badlands, to revealing what the Breen appear like underneath their helmets. Kovich’s workplace is suffering from relics from “Star Trek” historical past, like a bottle of Chateau Picard, the baseball from the desk of Capt. Benjamin Sisko of “Deep Space Nine,” and one merchandise specifically 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 speaking on the seaside exterior the marriage of Saru (Doug Jones) and T’Rina (Tara Rosling) earlier than transporting away to their subsequent journey. But Paradise understood that the episode wanted one thing extra conclusive as soon as it grew to become the sequence finale. The query was what.

There had been some vital guardrails round what they may accomplish. The manufacturing crew had solely eight weeks from when Paramout+ and CBS Studios signed off on the epilogue to after they needed to shoot it. Fortunately, the bridge set hadn’t been struck but (although a number of standing units already had been). And the price range allowed just for three days of manufacturing.

Then there was “Calypso.” 

To replenish the lengthy stretches between the primary three seasons of “Discovery,” CBS Studios and Paramount+ greenlit a sequence of 10 stand-alone episodes, dubbed “Short Treks,” that coated all kinds of storylines and subjects. The second “Short Trek” — titled “Calypso” and co-written by novelist Michael Chabon — first streamed between Season 1 and a pair of in November 2018. It focuses on a single character named Craft (Aldis Hodge), who’s rescued by the USS Discovery after the starship — and its now-sentient laptop system, Zora (Annabelle Wallis) — has sat completely vacant for 1,000 years in the identical fastened level in area. How the Discovery acquired there, and why it was empty for thus lengthy, had been left to the viewer’s creativeness. 

Still, for a present that had solely simply began its run, “Calypso” had already made a daring promise for “Discovery’s” endgame — one the producers had each intention of preserving.

“We always knew that we wanted to somehow tie that back up,” says Paradise, who joined the writers’ room in Season 2, and have become showrunner beginning with Season 3. “We never wanted ‘Calypso’ to be the dangling Chad.”

So a lot so, in truth, that, because the present started winding down manufacturing on Season 5, Paradise had began 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 not an choice, Paradise knew that resolving the “Calypso” query 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 reply that query, Paradise and the finale’s co-writer Kyle Jarrow coated the fundamentals. The Discovery is restored to its twenty third century state (after receiving a serious glow-up when it jumped to the thirty second century), and Burnham tells Zora that they’re going into deep area after which leaving her alone. Any additional element is masked underneath Starfleet’s Red Directive protocols, save for one, she says: The phrase “Craft.”

“I Feel Like It Ends the Way It Needed to End”

Resolving “Calypso” offered the storytelling basis for the epilogue, however the whole lot else was about giving its characters one remaining 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 within the captain’s chair on Discovery, imagines herself surrounded by her crew 30 years prior, so she (and the viewers) may join with them one remaining time. For the previous, the make-up crew 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 amusing — as an instance Burnham and Book’s lengthy and blissful marriage collectively.

Most crucially, Paradise reduce just a few traces of Burnham’s dialogue with Book from the unique Season 5 finale and moved it to a dialog she has along with her son within the coda. The scene — which evokes the episode’s title, “Life Itself” — serves as each a culminating assertion of function for “Discovery” and the overarching compassion and humanity of “Star Trek” as a complete.

To reassure her son about his first command of a starship, Burnham remembers when the traditional Progenitor requested what was most significant 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 chance to revisit the character she’s performed for seven years when she’s reached the top of her life and profession. “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 remainder of her forged was emotional, unsurprisingly, nevertheless it led Martin-Green to an sudden 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 extra she would’ve finished had there been extra 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 the whole lot finished in simply three days was no small feat, both. “I mean, we worked ’round the clock,” Martin-Green says with a deep chuckle. “We were delirious by the end — but man, what a way to end it.”