I finished Star Trek Discovery and I want to talk about it now.

I want to talk about Star Trek Discovery, and its final season which I just got around to watching. If you haven't seen the final season, you may want to tune out for this blog post as there will be spoilers ahead. 

First off, I really liked Star Trek Discovery. Yes, it was tonally different than other iterations of Trek that we've had before. But the themes of exploring and discovering things that I had never seen before was a part of this show from the very beginning. I mean, they gave us a space ship that could essentially teleport around to parts of the universe (all of this made possible through the power of mushrooms). So yeah...it was an adventure to where "no one has gone before."

I feel a little bad that Discovery did not get to end its run on its own terms. If you've seen the final season, it is a whirlwind of action and puzzle-solving that is very reminiscent of the best parts of Indiana Jones (only on a galactic scale). But after that is all said and done, the final episode continues in a way that reminded me of what happened at the ending of the Return of the King. Do you guys remember that? Going back to the Shire, Sam being married, old Bilbo and Frodo making their way to the Grey Havens, and on and on and on. It kept going for like an hour after Sauron met his doom.

This is the same tack that Discovery took with its series finale. It wanted to wrap things up so it showed us old Captain Burnham, her kid all grown up, and then sending the actual starship Discovery to deep space to just sit there waiting for something in the far future...all so that it could tie into the "short Trek" episode called Calypso. All of that seemed kind of forced, but it is difficult to make an ending land like it should. Very few series manage to pull it off. To date, I don't think there has been a series ending for any iteration of Trek that I've actually enjoyed (don't get me started on how awful I thought Deep Space Nine ended).

I also think (suspect) that certain characters didn't get their due. For example, the Breen Prince who died in season five (his name is L'ak) is one of these. I think he was going to get brought back. The reason why is that throughout all of Trek, we've had multiple revived dead people. One in particular happened in Discovery (the doctor) who was brought back to life thanks to the miracles of mushroom space. I think that it is likely that L'ak would have returned in season 6, but they just got canceled before that storyline could be fully resolved. This may be especially true since we see L'ak's body getting preserved indefinitely in the pattern buffer, otherwise, why would they have done that?

Since Moll was presumably recruited by Kovich to be a temporal agent, this could have been laying the groundwork for Moll attempting to use time travel to save/revive him or maybe get a brainscan since they were very specific that the Progenitor technology could make a clone but with no memories. If we had gotten a season 6, it's of course anyone's guess what we would have seen. But maybe Primarch Tahal of the Breen would have become the major antagonist since the succession was (as yet) unresolved.

This would have allowed the writers to construct a story around some Temporal Cold War McGuffin and maybe even a search for the original creators of the Progenitor tech. This major questline could revolve around the crew of the Discovery hopping between time periods with the events of Calypso being that Zora gets lost in the 23rd century and hence, it needed to wait 1000 years to return to the present day 32nd/33rd century. As well, Moll was probably going to have a redemption arc to give Michael a chance to come full circle and become a mentor to someone that was in her place. The season and the series would have ended with L'ak and Moll ascending the throne of the Breen Imperium and ushering in an era of peace between the Federation and the Breen.

But yeah...we got none of that because the show got canceled due to Paramount trying to sell itself to any buyer that will take it. The details of all of this is a long story and goes back decades to a man that bought Viacom using money he had lying around from owning several successful movie theaters in the New York area. His heiress wanted to unload the company, and I have no idea if they've been successful. I just know that a lot of shows got the axe because Paramount needed to slim down its production of new shows to make it more appealing for a huge multi-billion dollar deal.

But isn't there a proverb that goes: "When elephants fight it is that grass that suffers?" I think this saying is appropriate here. Multi-billion dollar deals are the elephants and the grass that suffers is the content that all of us love...the art and entertainment that gets done that actually makes up the business. If we had seen a season 6 of Discovery, I think its ending would have been great based on the things I've sussed out. But they didn't have that option, and it is what it is. Anyway, if you've stuck around this long, thanks for listening to my thoughts. If you have any you'd like to share, please post them in the comments below.