Star Trek: Discovery Season 5 Review: A Voyage Comes to a Flashy, if Generic, End

After five years of retooling, toxic fan backlash, soft reboots, continuity issues and cast changes, the crew of the USS Discovery warps into one final voyage with Star Trek: Discovery Season 5. Judging by the first few episodes, the season looks to make a fun, if unremarkable, curtain call.

Season 5 picks up with Captain Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) and her crew following the trail of a pair of thieves, Moll (Eve Harlow) and L’ak (Elias Toufexis) who have made off with the diary of a famed Romulan scientist. The Discovery receives a “red directive,” that is, a top-secret, priority mission to reclaim the diary, which contains the location of an ancient technology that created all life in the galaxy. Burnham and company also must cope with the presence of Rayner (Callum Keith Rennie), an antagonistic, authoritarian captain demoted after causing a major calamity while chasing the thieves.

Season 5 of Discovery has all the hallmarks of a final season: a sense of elegy, characters contemplating their future outside the ship, self-referential plotting and couples ready to tie the knot and retire from Starfleet. It also continues the show’s backward slide into pandering fan service. The season works, in essence, as a sequel to a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode…though we won’t say which here.

Another Chase

Trek has never hesitated to beam back to its roots—several Next Gen episodes essentially remake those of the original series, while legacy characters (Sulu, Riker, Q) pop up in spin-offs. Still, doing a direct sequel to an episode from another series—one that amounts to a retread more than anything else—will suit fans who feel the show needs to somehow affirm their fandom. It does nothing, however, to distinguish Discovery as its own story, or to move the milieu of Trek forward. A rotating group of showrunners in early seasons made Discovery feel a bit schizophrenic in tone, but at least those first couple of seasons dealt with philosophical conundrums—the heart of Star Trek from the very beginning.

The third season of Discovery came the closest to recapturing that Gene Roddenberry spirit, thrusting Discovery 1000 years into the future (thus eliminating those continuity problems) and focusing on rebuilding the Federation after a disaster. Even if that story collapsed in the season finale, the lead-up raised an interesting question: how can Utopia sustain itself?

Unfortunately, the fourth season of the show more or less photon torpedoed this quandary in favor of a lot of effects-driven action (not to mention a story that bore an uncomfortable resemblance to Star Trek: The Motion Picture). This final season does the same, and features plenty of flash and action, but very little that will engage viewer emotions or intellect.

That does not, however, mean Season 5 isn’t fun. Rennie, an actor who specializes in playing cocky douchebags, brings his trademark gruffness here. His clashes with Burnham and the rest of the Discovery crew generate some real friction, and always entertain. The special effects look sleek as ever, and the opening episodes (four were made available to critics), feature some wild chase sequences and shootouts in the halls of the ship.

It all looks great, and the actors do the most they can with the material (Anthony Rapp and Green shine in Episode 4), but it doesn’t amount to much beyond a run-of-the-mill space opera. Indeed, the MacGuffin of a superweapon seems lifted from Star Wars rather than the best Trek outings. As villains, L’ak and Moll lack the personality and cunning of the best Trek baddies.

Star Trek: Discovery marked the first return of the Trek franchise to television following the disaster of Enterprise some 10 years earlier. That show, which recycled the Next Gen formula used throughout all the 80s and 90s Star Trek stories, became synonymous with franchise fatigue. Discovery also followed the “Kelvin Timeline” movies of the 2010s, produced and written by Alex Kurtzman, who now oversees the franchise for Paramount.

The Jar Jar in the Room

The 2009 movie, which netted a sizable box office haul, essentially remade Star Wars in Star Trek drag. While popular in the moment, the impact of that film proved fleeting. The subsequent sequel, Into Darkness—a laughably bad exercise in fan service—stalled any momentum the franchise had regained. The rushed-into-production Star Trek Beyond outright flopped at the box office. Paramount continues to insist that it has a fourth Kelvin reboot movie coming down the pipeline.

Wise Trek fans shouldn’t count their Tribbles before they’ve spawned. A general ambivalence among the audience, as well as the cast & crew, coupled with the studio’s financial woes, indicate that the new movie probably will never leave space dock.

All of this warrants mention because Kurtzman’s involvement in the Paramount+ series—including Discovery, Picard, and Strange New Worlds—seems the culprit for small-screen Trek’s devolution into a generic sci-fi action romp. For Star Trek to catch fire again, for it to boldly go where Trek has never gone before, requires a creative mind unafraid to take risks or challenge an audience. Yes, sometimes that means adopting a cavalier fans-be-damned attitude, but as the best episodes of Next Gen (the Klingon succession arc), Deep Space Nine (the Dominion War), and Voyager (exploration of the Borg) proved, creativity will win fans over, even if it takes time for that to happen.

Discovery had (and has) all the right elements: a charismatic cast, interesting characters, a healthy budget, and a fandom thirsting for great Trek. The show may yet find the vector to warp to a magnificent finish, but for all the action and fan service, Discovery seems poised to become a show that never lived up to its potential. Perhaps one day a Legacy series will reunite Burnham, Saru, Staments, Tilly, etc. for an outing both thoughtful and flashy.

Season 5 of Discovery arrives on the heels of Netflix’s 3 Body Problem and Warner Bros.’ Dune Part Two, two projects that realize great science fiction entertainment needs to pair breathtaking visuals with deeper moral and philosophical issues to resonate. Latter-day Trek, much like Disney’s Star Wars (The Last Jedi notwithstanding), looks like a stale voyage into self-reference by comparison.

Staleness seldom quenches appetite. For now, Star Trek: Discovery Season 5 offers a fun, if forgettable, conclusion to Star Trek’s return to television. Here’s hoping Paramount+ next opts for a Star Trek series willing to investigate some new frontiers.

RATING: 7/10 SPECS.

Star Trek: Discovery Season 5 arrives on Paramount+ Thursday, April 4.