‘Star Trek: Discovery’ Season 4 Sets Production Start — Dare We Have Hope for the Future?

Season 3 has only just launched, but the cast and crew of Star Trek: Discoveryare getting to work on Season 4. In the below video released by CBS All Access, stars Sonequa Martin-Green and Doug Jones, and executive producers Michelle Paradise and Alex Kurtzman reveal that they’re set to return to the set on November 2.

It’d been known for a while that pre-production on Season 4 was in progress, even while work also continues on multiple spin-off series, including Strange New Worlds and the Michelle Yeoh-starring Section 31. But this is the first official word that the show will be returning for a fourth season.

Star Trek: Discovery Season 3, premiering this week, has thrust Michael Burnham (Martin-Green) into a whole new era of the franchise — one further forward in history than we’ve ever seen before, and one where the Federation is a distant memory following a traumatic event known as the Burn.

The first four episodes of Season 3 take full advantage of launching into this new era, with the crew we’re familiar with struggling to comprehend a future without the Federation. It’s essentially, a universe that feels more post-apocalyptic than any we’ve ever seen before in the world of Trek (though in line with the darker tone of Star Trek: Picard and previous seasons of Discovery) and honestly one of the show’s strongest creative decisions to date.

Discovery, in its initial conception, originally was set timeline-wise about nine years before Kirk became captain of the Enterprise NCC-1701. This offered up the ability to get nostalgic about the TOS era of Trek — something that Strange New Worlds will be doubling down on, spinning off the characters of Captain Pike (Anson Mount), his Number One (Rebecca Romijn) and science officer Spock (Ethan Peck).

But for Discovery, its place in the timeline always felt a bit limiting, especially given the potential for continuity errors. (Given the literal decades of history behind this franchise, avoiding such goof-ups would be a pretty much impossible task.) So Season 3’s new place in the annals of Trek opens up a whole new world of storytelling for the series — one which, we now know, they plan to explore in Season 4.

(Also, now there’s a cat named Grudge. Grudge rules.)

The big question becomes whether or not Discovery‘s time in the 32nd century is going to last, or if the crew will find some way to return to the past (AKA their former present) at the end of the season. Personally, I hope not. Going back to the 2200s would feel like a step backwards, and there’s a whole lot more future for them to explore. There are no answers in the video below, but it’s clear that the team is excited to continue the journey.

New episodes of Star Trek: Discovery Season 3 premiere Thursdays on CBS All Access.

Source: collider.com