There’s a new captain in town in this first full trailer for Star Trek: Discovery‘s fourth season
After years of taking orders despite being the one who's always actually saving the universe, Michael Burnham is finally in charge
TV News Unknown
After years of serving under a variety of captains—some of whom, we can’t help but flag to Starfleet HR, eventually turned out to be some flavor or another of Evil—Michael Burnham is finally in charge. That’s the big takeaway from the first full trailer for the fourth season of Star Trek: Discovery, which Paramount showed off at New York Comic-Con this morning, and which shows Sonequa Martin-Green finally, permanently, in the big chair at last, after three seasons of having to follow orders while also saving the entire universe several times a year.
And, wouldn’t you know it: Dang ol’ universe needs saving again. That’s the other big reveal of the trailer, which shows that there’s some kind of big, scary space anomaly floating around the various galaxies of the far future, gobbling up planets as it goes. Will Burnham and the rest of the Discovery crew stop it by flying their big fancy spaceship straight into it? Will Starfleet command rue Burnham’s reckless maverick bravery, while quietly admitting that, damn it, she gets results? Will Tig Notaro say a funny little line before pushing some space levers? All signs from the trailer point to “Yep.”
Discovery is, of course, just one of several Star Trek projects currently running or in development at the various Viacom/Paramount brands, mostly spurred on by the show’s own streaming success. The second season of Picard—featuring the return of John de Lancie as Q—is scheduled to arrive in February of 2022, while animated comedy Star Trek: Lower Decks is currently running on Paramount+, and is set to wrap up its second season next week. Nickelodeon’s also gotten into the mix, with Star Trek: Prodigy, starring Kate Mulgrew and John Noble, set to land on the kids’ network on October 28. (Oh, and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, the one centered on Anson Mount’s character of Christopher Pike. Lot of Trek in the hopper.)
The fourth season of Star Trek: Discovery, meanwhile, arrives on Paramount+ on Thursday, November 18.
61 Comments
Will this be the season where we finally get to know more about Bryce and Rhys, who have been on the bridge since the beginning and yet just remain in the background smiling handsomely? Or are they just going to add more new characters and we’ll never actually learn anything about those two? More to the point, will they please stop just dropping vague hints that Owo has an interesting background and actually flesh out her character? Maybe now that Michael is captain she can take more of an interest in her bridge crew and they’ll all get a line or two at some conference meeting. Given how much Michael likes taking input about her actions I’m not that hopeful.
I like your optimism, but now that Burnham’s captain, I fear the show might lean even harder into the whole “Burnham is awesome and amazing at everything.”The first season she was accused of being a Mary Sue a lot, and I didn’t think it was deserved.After watching third season, now I think it is.
If they aren’t Michael Burnham, the show doesn’t care about them. My favorite S1 episode (ironically) was when they finally took the time to give a bridge crew member some backstory just so you might care when they killed her off later in that same episode.The purpose of the bridge crew is to shout technobabble during battles. That’s it. I don’t know any of their names beyond Saru and Detmer and if they substituted new people for the rest of them next season I wouldn’t even know they had done it.
I think I like Discovery more than most of my Trek friends, but it’s definitely the part about the show that makes me the most frustrated. Trek has always been an ensemble piece. It’s not like Michael is the only featured character, we also have Stamets, Saru, Tilly, now there’s the human/Trill person. But the last two seasons have especially leaned into these scenes where the crew reunites after some battle where they all thought they were gonna die, and now they’re laughing and hugging and smiling, and you get close-ups of Rhys especially, and I can’t feel anything about it because I have no idea who he is. Fuck, Lower Decks has done more to give character to their bridge crew, and the whole point of that show is that our core characters do not work on the bridge!
I love Lower Decks. People complain that being a comedy, it mocks Star Trek, but it does the opposite. It shows the crew just as competent and brave and their live action cohorts – just with jokes. It needles sci fi tropes, but never mocks them.
Yeah, I really like it too. I didn’t realize season 2 was ending next week, now I’m bummed out.
Don’t be bummed. Season 3 of Lower Decks in already in production.
My favorite description of Lower Decks I’ve seen is that it’s reverent humor. All of its jokes are the exact same ones that fans have been making about the franchise for years.One of my personal favorites from the pilot being when Mariner tells Boimler that “Doc will just shine a flashlight on it.” That is one of the exact things I and my family have joked about in the series for years. Get an injury? Shine a flashlight on it!
(Also, many of the jokes and references are way too deep cut not to be coming from ardent fans.)
The best part was them explaining away how Shaxs came back after his death.“Oh, it must have been a transporter duplicate or alternate universe or something”.
Last week’s episode “I, Excretus” was probably the best they ever did.Poor Boimler. He was made into a Borg drone.
Lower Decks follows in the tradition of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (and so does Rick and Morty). It takes its sci fi concepts seriously, but points out the ridiculousness in them. They all treat these heady concepts the way Seinfeld treats regular life. Discovery never even considers what sci fi brings to the table. Although it’s a comedy, Lower Decks is the best of new Star Trek, because it actually engages with the Star Trek elements.
Lower Decks puts me off, not because it’s a comedy but that it never stops to breath and actually put faith in its own jokes. It’s just high velocity, rapid fire site gags with a hefty dose of references to TOS and TNG. Everyone’s either talking really fast or shouting.
I guess the argument could be made that with only 25 minutes per episode, its hard to cram any kind of plot into that time since they haven’t really done anything serialized (yet).
It’s just the people working on it. Some of them came right off of Rick & Morty.I mean you could bring up any animated comedy that came before it that were typically 25 minutes long that had independent plots and plenty of gags and gag setups that were given room to breathe.Just look at Futurama, The Simpsons, King of the Hill and any number of Adult Swim’s line-up throughout the last two decades.I’m not sure what becoming “serialized” has anything to do with it unless you’re commenting on the way that the live action Trek counterparts both rely heavily on season-long story arcs, essentially movie mini-series, because the writers aren’t interested in characters or character growth but just a lot of action and bombast in service of dragging a single concept or plot point for 8-10 episodes.
Patrick Kwok-Choon is adorable!!
I had to google “ST Discovery Rhys” even though I’ve seen every episode so far… But of course I remember his handsome face. Patrick Kwok-Choon is the actor. A crime how underused the bridge crew is. And yes, Lower Decks manages better character building for their ensemble in less than 30 minutes.
He has a real dreamy smile.
Rarely does the show feel like an ensemble and that is actually my biggest problem with the show. Star Trek has literally never been about one person. On TNG we would delight in the Fact that this week is a “Data episode” or a “Picard episode”. Even though the show didn’t dive too deeply into the personal lives of the crew, we learned about them through their actions week to week. We got to know who they really are by what they did.
Part of the problem is that both Discovery and Picard are written like movies, split into 8-10 hour long episodes, all in service of single story arc and they really don’t know how to do that effectively, weaving all the supporting cast into meaningful parts of the story. You’ll get an explosive season premiere that sets up the general plot of the arc and then 7 or 8 episodes of senseless gobbledygook before wrapping it all up as Michael Burnham saves the day in a WTF just happened? finale.
It occurs to me that ensemble shows work much better with longer seasons (e.g. the traditional 22- to 26-episode broadcast network seasons), where you have time to have a relatively low-stakes episode that lets a secondary character get some room to breathe and develop. The modern non-broadcast landscape mostly consists of 8- to 13-episode seasons, which means you can’t really afford to spend as many episodes focusing on secondary characters.I’m not saying that we need to go back to the 22-episode broadcast model (the flip side is that you also end up with a fair amount of filler episodes, because no showrunner can oversee Sopranos- or The Wire-level “every episode is legendary” quality on a 22-episode season year after year), but it does strike me as a weakness of the modern short-season approach.
And to add insult to injury, said crew member’s last words were telling Michael “This is all about you”.
I think the change to a short season, serialized storyline has made it harder to give the bridge crew it’s due. Back when you had 20+ stand alone episodes a season, there was a lot more room to tell their stories. I think they could make more of an effort here (after all, we’ve gotten to delve into Saru and other backstories that don’t bear directly on the main plot) but they are always going to be a bit more limited.
Sorry, but this just doesn’t satisfy me. Discovery has found the time to introduce new characters each season (Spock, Pike, and Jett Reno in season 2 and then Adira and Booker in season 3) and flesh them out. They also dangled one tiny factoid about Owo to use her to save the fuckin’ day at the end of season 2. I get your point about shorter seasons, bit we’ve had time by now to know them at least a little bit. It’s lazy writing. I’m not even talking about a “day in the limelight” episode, these characters are on screen frequently, let them say the occasional line about themselves instead of just Michael and Tilly. A character is built of little moments, maybe Rhys is leaving the mess to go play volleyball, or Bryce says “We didn’t have [blank] when I was growing up on the moon,” or just some other bullshit.
Pike and Booker were brought on to star (and for Booker to be a love interest). Reno got one episode where she was central to the plot and now she pops up occasionally for a couple one liners. Spock was central to the entire season plot. I don’t see how Adira’s role could have been filled by any of the existing bridge crew. So when you add new people in that are need to move the plot forward in a way that the existing bridge crew can’t, you’ll once again wind up having less time to slot in the bridge crew. I do agree that it would be good for them to try and give them more to do, like you said, even a few lines would help (Detmer did get much of an episode last season), but they’ll never get the same amount of attention the old crews did.
I should have read through the comments before posting a reply that was exactly the same as what you said. /facepalm
The article title had me hoping that a whole other captain aside from Burnham would be introduced (since the character worked better in the first two seasons when Pike and Lorca were around to push back) but alas. There are still a lot of things I like about the show. In general, I really enjoy just spending time in the world and with the characters. But the Burnham love is out of control, the show desperately needs some nuance in its relationships, and they really need to pull back on telling and focus more on showing.
She’s completely reckless and egocentric, and I wouldn’t hire her to dogsit my poodle.
Note: I do not have a poodle.
Note: I do not have a poodle.Well then you should hurry up and get one in order to optimise your comment!
She can’t even handle Beavis & Butthead! 😉
I want to like “Discovery.” I really do. And every season I go into it thinking maybe all the pieces will work better this time. But too often everything feels so generic. There’s nothing about this trailer that get me hyped for “Star Trek.” In fact, if you didn’t know it was “Star Trek,” it just feels like any sci-fi action film where they have to save the universe from [insert macguffin] while CGI and explosions surround actors standing in front of a blue screen.There’s 50 years of Trek backstory on which to build new stories on and too often “Discovery” either feels so far removed from it, or actively tries to reimagine it into something different that it’s jarring.“Lower Decks” is both more fun and feels like it gets “Star Trek” better than its live-action sister shows. Because “Lower Decks” understands better than “Discovery” or “Picard” that the ships and action and the Trek universe itself are just mediums through which they can say something about their characters and themes, not just tools to be action set pieces.
Yay mutiny!I mean, that was where the show lost me years ago, since it was pretty obvious that anyone somehow having their career still going after that was going to be not just the protagonist of the show (with the plot revolving around justifying their actions, which is generally terrible to write) it but also eventually captain. Took long enough.I’ve peeked in from time to time and there’ve been a couple interesting things – Pike especially – but it set a rotten foundation that’s never been fixed.
Pike was great. I can’t figure how they got him so right and Burnham so wrong.
Game of Thrones syndrome. They are great at adapting existing stuff, but terrible making up their own.
I see Saru is back in uniform. I liked him as captain, a more stable influence for the crew. Burnham is brave, but a hothead. If Starfleet were a real thing, they’d never give her a captaincy.
There is also the possibility that since Burnham has now ascended to the highest position on the ship that they might focus more on the other characters instead of making it the “Michael Burnham and friends” show.(crosses fingers)
I don’t have much hope of that, but I second your finger crossing.
Ah yes, the classic raised-by-Vulcans hothead character.
And they sure wouldn’t let Tilly be first officer.
“After years of taking order…”Was she? I remember her character not taking orders and doing what ever she wanted and being forgiven. Why not make her Captain, hope she’s ready for those who don’t do as they’re told.
This new threat to the entire galaxy… billions of lives in danger… so much at stake…I wish that they would remember that Star Trek is just as good, if not better, when it tells smaller stories.
In a way, I guess you can blame DS9 for that. They switched to a heavily serialized format with The Dominion War, and given how bad Voyager/Enterprise (before they went back to the long arc) was going back to the “problem of the week” format, effectively killed that format for Trek series going forward.
I’m in the minority of really liking Voyager, and I think Enterprise did a lot of things right and was generally underrated. I think they both did a good job with arcs while still keeping the stories individualized and focused on the characters.Discovery prioritizes the arc over character development. The biggest problems with this are that the arc isn’t as interesting as they think it is and the character development feels forced and unearned.
Even DS9 told lots of smaller stories even in its later seasons. Its serialization was loose at best. I feel like that would be a perfect format for Trek nowadays.
If loving Michael Mary Sue Burnham is wrong, I don’t wanna be right. That simple “mm hmm” tells me this gonna be a fun ride.I know it’s not terribly well-written tv, but damn is it fun.
Look, plot and characters aside, can they just pick a uniform and stick with it?? Every season they have a new uniform!
And each new iteration looks worse than the one before it
Hopefully Strange New Worlds will get back to salt vampires and such.
Nice, David Cronenberg is back! I love that he’s apparently the one guy allowed to wear glasses in the future.
I love the absolute weirdness of his performance. It’s great.
Am currently seeing lots of folks in this comments-section erroneously referring to Michael Burnham as a “Mary Sue,” without understanding what a “Mary Sue” actually is.A “Mary Sue” is a guest character on a TV show who upstages the main characters in some fashion or other. Sonequa Martin-Green is the lead actor on her show — e.g., not a “Mary Sue,” by definition.The label was actually meant to describe (or rather, parody) examples of that kind of story done badly, with the author’s wish-fulfillment outweighing decent storytelling. People forget that in ‘60s and ‘70s TV, it was quite common for episodic shows to center their episodes on guest characters, because guest characters could go through actual growth and change and life-and-death drama while the leads had to remain permanently the same. TOS was supposed to be that kind of show, which was why Roddenberry pitched it to execs by comparing it to Wagon Train, a show that actually named each of its episodes “The [Guest Star] Story.” You can see it in the early first season — the second pilot centered on Mitchell and Dehner, “Mudd’s Women” focused on Eve and Harry, “Charlie X” centered on Charlie, etc. That changed somewhat when Spock became the breakout-character and the network wanted him to be the focus, with Roddenberry and Shatner pushing to keep Kirk ahead of Spock in importance, so that the show ended up centered on the two of them plus McCoy.
There’s also the fact that — again — Burnham is not the guest star of her TV show. She’s the lead character of a semi-spinoff/prequel-series starring Burnham, Saru, Tilly, Stamets, and Culber, and following their adventures as the featured crew of the U.S.S. Discovery, with Pike, Spock, etc. being the supporting cast. If anything, Pike was the Mary Sue in Burnham’s story, because he was idealized, and for some fans outshone the show’s central cast.
“Once we enter the anomaly, we are going where no one has gone before.”But in what manner are you going? Courageously? Bravely? With a certain overt determination?
Ooh! Ooh! I know this one!Is it… “recklessly, and against orders?”
Let’s not kid ourselves. Burnham was always the captain, kinda.I think Lorca was the only captain that managed to get her on the same page.
Seems obvious, but I think it was off the rails after killing Captain Georgiou.Give the Burnham character a season to … season … under Captain Georgiou, and give us (at least) a season to enjoy Michelle Yeoh, and maybe things would’ve turned out better, with less seemingly manufactured emotion and character development.
And he was EVIL Lorca. 😉
I miss EVIL Lorca. 🙁
Best actor on the show, so naturally, write him off after ONE season.
Lorca remains my favorite captain.
I’d like to think that the “good” Lorca was in fact an even bigger asshole.
anyone catch the irony that she only became captain 1000 years into the future after the federation collapsed. I think that’s absolutely hilarious. Probably in 10 years they’ll recon that dumb writing move and this whole timeline will vanish and she’ll be forgotten. Entire show is crap
Never mind all that! When’s The Orville coming back?