Star Trek: Discovery Star Disagrees With Showrunner On Final Season
Star Trek: Discovery recently aired a solid and well-received series finale, and the show is rightfully celebrating its current moment in the sun. All these good vibes are almost enough to make us forget how worried we were when the show was unexpectedly canceled, making the fifth season into the last season only after it was mostly finished shooting. Interestingly, Star Trek: Discovery star Sonequa Martin-Green recently disagreed with her showrunner, implying that Michelle Paradise may have secretly known that her show was going to get canceled.
Cancellation Was Anticipated?
The context for this disagreement begins with Star Trek: Discovery showrunner Michelle Paradise and star Sonequa Martin-Green giving an interview to Variety. During the interview, Paradise said that season 5 “was really a season about meaning and purpose, and those are very, very big ideas.” She now realizes that “in hindsight, it feels like those are series-ending sort of themes,” but she is quick to point out 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.”
This may not seem like a very surprising quote from the Star Trek showrunner, but it certainly took Sonequa Martin-Green, the Captain Burnham actor, by surprise. “I think there’s more to it than just, ‘Oh, it was a coinkydink!” she said. She laughed as she said it, though, and quickly offered some additional thoughts on this point.
Deep Thought Behind Story Arcs
“I’ve gotta give Michelle her flowers,” she said. “She has always asked the deeper questions of this story and these characters,” and she believes, “Those questions of meaning and purpose led to questions of origin and legacy, and, yes, that is quite culminating.” In other words, the showrunner did a good job of evolving her characters more each season, and the introspection of characters asking such reflective questions was always going to feel like it had the emotional gravitas of a pre-planned final season.
Captain Burnham’s Big Question
Because Star Trek: Discovery has always focused on Sonequa Martin-Green’s character, it’s not that surprising that Captain Burnham had to answer the biggest question of all in the series finale when a Progenitor (basically God) asks her to learn “what is most meaningful to you.” After years of reflection, she reveals to her son that the answer is “just being here…sometimes life, itself, is meaning enough.”
Discovery’s Last Dance
Some of our other favorite Star Trek characters had to ask and answer deep questions, and their own inner journeys helped reinforce Sonequa Martin-Green’s idea that this season felt deliberately planned as everyone’s last dance. Dr. Culber, for example, embraces his connection to larger cosmic forces despite his skeptic of a husband, and Tilly transforms into the ultimate instructor with big plans to shake things up at Starfleet Academy.
Even the once meek and lonely Saru emerges from this season as a happily married man who saves the galaxy with a bluff hard enough to make even a Breen’s blood run cold.
A Seemingly Planned Final Voyage
It’s worth emphasizing that we’re not sounding some Drama Alert for Star Trek fans…Sonequa Martin-Green isn’t beefing with her boss so much as she is echoing countless fans (including us) who have noted how much of this season has felt like a planned final voyage. Planned or unplanned, it’s arguably for the best that Discovery was canceled when it was. After the snooze-fest of season 4, the show’s fifth season being so good and so rewarding for fans is the kind of miracle that even the Progenitors would have had trouble pulling off.
Source: Variety
