Boldly Go: A Star Trek Discovery Season 3 Review
Going where no Star Trek has gone before.
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Spoilers for Discovery Season 3 ahead.
When the U.S.S. Discovery entered a wormhole to jump 950 years into the future- further than any Star Trek series or movie had ever ventured- I honestly didn’t know what to expect. For a series that began in a very familiar (and congested) time period in Trek history, this was a welcome reprieve… Star Trek, after many, many years, was finally going to explore the unknown again.
And what an exploration it was. Turns out, a lot can change in 950 years. To put this amount of time in perspective, the entirety of Star Trek prior to this season- from the earliest reaches of Enterprise to the last minutes of Star Trek: Picard (excluding a few time-travel excursions)- spanned a future period of about 250 years. That means Discovery jumped into a period of time far beyond anything we’d ever seen; the closest we’d come previously was a brief encounter with the timeship Relativity on Voyager and a couple of episodes of Enterprise that involved the time war, which gets a nice name-drop in this season of Discovery as well.
Star Trek has, ever since the beginning, been about going where no one has gone before. And Discovery’s third season lives this to it’s fullest. And honestly, that’s some high praise for this show, as this was a show that, in its first season, seemed to do everything it could to be unlike the Star Trek that we knew and loved. Season 2 did a lot of course-correcting (and I loved it), but now, in season 3, it finally feels like Discovery has come into its own.
I know there have been a lot of complaints about the growing pains Discovery has gone through- honestly, I’ve made a few of those complaints myself- but every series of Star Trek takes one or two seasons to start getting good. I mean, look at The Next Generation, which is probably the best series in the franchise: those first seasons were a bit rough.
On a whole, season 3 was, by far, where Star Trek has not gone before. At times it was unclear where it was leading since for the first time in a long time, we didn’t know the future that these characters were traveling towards. And after two seasons (and a whole previous Star Trek series) set pre-Kirk…
