Star Trek: Discovery ended its second season with a leap. If you haven’t seen that finale yet, you should check it out. If you have, though, it’s time to talk about what went down.
Talking to the Hollywood Reporter, showrunner Alex Kurtzmann sheds some light on the decisions leading into the finale, which ends up with the Discovery and her crew flung through a wormhole 950 years into the future of the Star Trek universe, immediately transforming the prequel into one of the furthest-flung sequels the series has yet seen.
“We love playing within canon,” Kurtzmann explained. “It’s a delight and a privilege. It’s fun to explore nooks and crannies of the universe that people haven’t fully explored yet. That being said, we felt strongly that we wanted to give ourselves an entirely new energy for season three with a whole new set of problems. We’re farther than any Trek show has ever gone.
I also had experience working on the [J.J. Abrams] films where we were stuck with canonical problems. We knew how Kirk had died, and we wondered how we could put him in jeopardy to make it feel real. That’s what led us to go with an alternate timeline; suddenly we could tell the story in a very unpredictable way. That’s the same thought process that went into jumping 950 years into the future. We’re now completely free of canon, and we have a whole new universe to explore.”
His answer seems to suggest that, yes, for a while, at least, Discovery is sticking with the future as the show’s new status quo. It also means that Discovery going forward will be a show without the narrative constraints of the first two seasons, fully acting out its own imagination in terms of storytelling. After all, we don’t know anything about this future. Anything could happen. Going boldly, indeed.