Star Trek: Discovery season 3 will have a “big tonal shift”

The season finale of Star Trek: Discovery season 2 saw Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) use the timeline jumping technology of the Red Angel suit to open a wormhole in the fabric of space and time and jump forward 930 years into the future, taking the USS Discovery and its crew with her.

Now, we wait for season 3. Star Trek: The Next Generation legend Jonathan Frakes (William Riker) directed episodes in the upcoming season, which finished shooting before the COVID-19 pandemic shut down everything, although there’s still post-production work to be done. While we wait for the show to sort that out, Frakes is here to outline what to expect.

“Michael Burnham has found a new core, not to mention a new partner in crime,” he told ComicBook.com. “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.”

If you’d have told me the crew of the Discovery would be “grateful” to Brunham for taking them farther down the Star Trek timeline than any other series or film had gone before, basically stranding them in the future away from their friends and family, I’d have called you crazy. But here we are.

Pictured (l-r): David Ajala as Book; Sonequa Martin-Green as Burnham; of the the CBS All Access series STAR TREK: DISCOVERY. Photo Cr: Lilja J–nsd–ttir /CBS ©2019 CBS Interactive, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Anyway, according to Frakes, season 3 will involve a new character named Book (David Ajal) who will somehow be involved in Burnham’s trek through the future. For Frakes, it was important to find a way to depict the future that stayed consistent to what we know about Trek but also explored some new areas. “Finding a future that’s futuristic but is practical to shoot has been fascinating,” the director said. “You can’t get caught up in the technology. It is about maintaining a basic core of why we’re there, which is to tell emotionally compelling stories.”

We don’t yet know when the third season of Discovery will hit CBS All Access, but Alex Kurtzman teased it was “coming soon,” so you never know when that will happen.

Let’s hope for the best.

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h/t TrekMovie