By The fifth season of “Star Trek: Discovery” has launched on the Paramount+ service with the premiere episode revealing that the new run of episodes will serve as something of a sequel to one of the more famous “Star Trek: The Next Generation” episodes.
SPOILERS AHEAD FOR “STAR TREK: DISCOVERY” S5
Much of the episode focuses on the crew trying to obtain a mysterious object from a 24th century Romulan’s derelict ship which has been scavenged by two mercenaries.
Later in the episode David Cronenberg’s Kovich reveals the truth about said object – one that ties to the sixth season TNG episode “The Chase” which aired 31 years ago.
That episode sees Captain Picard (Patrick Stewart) and teams of Romulans, Klingons and Cardassians hunting down a computer program hidden within the DNA of multiple alien species.
They learn all humanoid life in the galaxy was created by a single species of Progenitors billions of years earlier who seeded thousands of planets with their DNA. It also partly explains why all the major alien races in the ‘Trek’ verse are essentially variations of humanoids.
In “Discovery,” a new chase begins to find the Progenitors technology before it can fall into the wrong hands. Showrunner Michelle Paradise tells Variety she’s been keen to pursue a follow-up to “The Chase” for a while:
“I remember watching that episode and at the end of it just being blown away that there was this huge idea where we all come from. And then they’re going to have another mission the next week. I found myself wondering, ‘Well, then what? What happened? What do we do with this information? What does it mean?’
We [the writers] had a lot of fun talking about what might’ve happened when [Picard] called back to headquarters and had to say, ‘Here’s what happened today’. We just built the story out from there.”
She adds that making it the season long mission, a look into the origins of life itself, is a “big thematic idea that fits right in with what we’re exploring over the course of the season, and what our characters are going through.”
The fifth and final season runs a shorter ten-episode length and will unfold weekly through until the finale on May 30th on the Paramount+ service.
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