Star Trek: Discovery’s Season 4 Villain May Not Be Corporeal
Star Trek: Discovery is adding a new villain for Season Four, but that doesn't mean it's going to be the typical sort of life form.
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Star Trek: Discovery just recently closed out its third season, but they are wasting no time gearing up for Season Four. And that means a lot of planning around plot details, character arcs, and ultimately who the villain will be in the new set of stories. It’s coming out now that we might get a baddie a little different than we’ve seen in the past within the franchise. Recent quotes from the higher-ups at the show suggest this next season will have a villain that’s nonphysical and formless. That could be a scary proposition indeed for the crew of the ship.
Showrunners Alex Kurtzman and Michelle Paradise had a sit down with Deadline recently. They waxed on a number of different things about the fourth season of Star Trek: Discovery and the direction of the show moving forward. One of the details that came up was whether they’d introduce a new antagonist into the mix for the upcoming season. Kurtzman, knowing he was being overly cryptic and even admitting as much, had this to say about what the Discovery would be up against this season:
“There have been many kinds of villains over the course of Star Trek. What happens when the villain is not actually any kind of living, breathing entity, but something else? How do you solve that problem?”
Sure, this is a very vague way of describing what the Star Trek: Discovery crew could face this season. Non-corporeal lifeforms have appeared in previous iterations of the Star Trek franchise. They can come in the form of various energies or gas, though can take human forms as well to interact within the show. They aren’t quite god-like characters but typically have some kind of powers well beyond what we see within the universe.
A good example would be “Q” who appeared in some form in a number of different seasons of the show. Q often took different human forms but was incredibly powerful when it came to space and time control. Q references both the human form of the character, but also of the collective consciousness of the Q “race”. Could we see it return in Star Trek: Discovery?
Star Trek: Discovery just wrapped its third season on the CBS All-Access streaming app. The ratings and critical reception have been very positive throughout its run so far. It garnered around 10 million viewers when it finally appeared on CBS suggesting that the streaming numbers were very high as well. And critics have praised it as well, sitting at 84% on the Tomatometer with the last season the highest-rated yet.
At the core of Star Trek: Discovery is Sonequa Martin-Green as Michael Burnham. She’s been fantastic in the role, taking the franchise in a different direction in terms of tone and energy around the main character. And clearly, we’ve seen that her role on the ship is only going to grow and expand moving forward. How she handles this upcoming season and the new, non-distinct threat could be fantastic viewing.
As of right now, Star Trek: Discovery is already in production on their fourth season, getting a renewal before the third season had even wrapped up. There have been some pandemic-related delays around filming, so it’s a little unclear when the show will finally hit the screen. But no doubt this next season is gearing up to be fantastic. Adding a new layer of villainy, in which the antagonist poses an existential threat more than a physical one, could continue to push the show forward into new areas. What a cool time to be all-in on the Star Trek franchise.
