The end of an era has come. Love it or hate it, or anything in between, Star Trek: Discovery deserves its props for launching the current Trek TV boom back when it launched on CBS All Access (the old name for Paramount Plus) in 2017. After a choppy start, the show evolved into one of the most creative and unpredictable series in Trek canon.
But all good things, as The Next Generation told us, must come to an end and the U.S.S. Discovery has had its last adventure, with season 5 marking the show’s farewell. As Paramount cancelled the series after production had completed, the season finale was never originally intended to be a series finale, but thankfully the cast and crew were allowed to go back and film for three days to shoot a coda, in order to bring DIS to a more fitting conclusion — and answer one of the show’s biggest and oldest questions in the process.
Explaining the Star Trek: Discovery finale ending
Season 5 saw Captain Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) and the Discovery crew go off in search of ancient technology belonging to the Progenitors, a godlike race who created all life in the galaxy. In the finale, while her crew do battle with the Breen to stop them from getting their hands on the tech, Burnham finds it and encounters a hologram of the last of the Progenitors. Ultimately, she agrees with their wishes to keep the galaxy-changing tech out of the Federation’s hands.
Dr. Kovich (David Cronenberg), the enigmatic Federation official introduced back in season 3, is none too pleased to be denied the tech but he and Burnham reach a place of mutual respect. He even admits his true identity to her: he’s actually Agent Daniels, a temporal agent who was a recurring character on Enterprise. Don’t feel bad if you didn’t get that reference, Cronenberg’s admitted he didn’t understand it either.
Reuniting with beau Book (David Ajala), Burnham then attends the wedding of Saru (Doug Jones) and Ni’Var (that’s the reunified Vulcan/Romulan species of the future) president T’Rina (Tara Rosling)… That’s where the finale was originally supposed to end, but thanks to that extra bit of filming the episode actually culminates on a coda which jumps forward 30 years into the future.
This flashforward picks up on an elderly Burnham and Book, where we find out the former is now a venerable Starfleet admiral and her son, Leto (Sawandi Wilson). is a captain himself. But Burnham isn’t retired as she is instructed to undertake one last mission, sending the Discovery and its sentient computer Zora (Annabelle Wallis) off into deep space.
So what was all this about? This final mission finally explains the Short Treks episode “Calypso,” released back in 2018, which was set 1000 years in the future and saw a character called Craft (Aldis Hodge) finding the abandoned Discovery and meeting Zora. Season 6 was supposed to be one long origins story for this short, but the sudden cancellation forced showrunners to sum it all up to this brief coda scene instead.
Despite the show’s lifespan being curtailed, showrunner Michelle Paradise feels the finale, and the entire series, tells a complete story that she wouldn’t alter.
“I truly don’t feel like we missed out on something by not having one more day,” she told Variety. “I feel like it ends the way it needed to end.”