Star Trek: Discovery Season 3 Will Be A Big Tonal Shift For The Show

Star Trek: Discovery has been a huge hit for CBS All Access, but it’s also been hugely controversial with the fanbase. Thanks to its release on the streaming service over network television, the series has been able to go darker and more mature than any other previous Trek show – and that’s not something that all fans have taken to. There was a clear effort to bring DIS back to something approaching classic Trek in season 2, though, and it looks like this will continue in season 3.

Jonathan Frakes isn’t just Riker on Star Trek: Picard, he’s also been a director on Discovery since the beginning. And in a new chat with ComicBook.com about what we can expect from the next season, Frakes promised that Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) and the crew’s jump to the far future imbues the series with a much brighter tone which will allow it to let go of much of the pain and angst of previous seasons.

“Michael Burnham has found a new core, not to mention a new partner in crime. So again, there’s a big tonal shift on that show, less driven by the pain and guilt of her past and more about the magical reunification of the Discovery crew and wherever she went off to. God knows where she went as the Red Angel. So those two things coming back together is very much the theme, and how grateful everyone is and what’s next. It’s got a lot of action-adventure and not so much pain.”

At the end of season 2, Burnham and the U.S.S. Discovery both separately went through a wormhole and are known to have ended up about 1000 years in the future. Burnham will be separate from her crew at the start of season 3, then, but she’ll quickly find a new ally in David Ajala’s Book, who we’ve got a glimpse of in promo images (see above). She’ll eventually reunite with the ship in episode 3.

DIS has already been renewed for a fourth and fifth season, not to mention that a movie featuring the cast is in development to boot. The future’s looking bright for Star Trek: Discovery, then, in terms of both its longevity and its new tonal shift, and you can expect season 3 on CBS All Access later this year.