When Star Trek: Discovery season 3 makes its long-awaited debut on CBS All Access, fans of the show are going to be introduced to something they’ve never seen before: How the United Federation of Planets looks 930 years in the series’ future.
In the season 2 finale, Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) used the time-traveling technology of the Red Angel suit to open a wormhole in the fabric of space, traveling far into the future. She did this in order to ensure that the evil A.I. Control would be defeated once and for all. The rub is that she took the starship Discovery along with her.
CBS finished filming season 3 a while back and even did a lot of post-production, but thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, the release date has been pushed back. The last bit of new footage we’ve seen was a teaser shown at the New York Comic Con back in October of 2019:
Before taking on producer responsibilities for Picard and the new Discovery spinoff Strange New Worlds, Akiva Goldsman served as an executive producer on Discovery season 2. And while he wasn’t part of the team for season 3, he does have intimate knowledge of where the story is going after the 930-year timeline jump. “We all helped build that idea, all the way back to season one,” he told Collider. “Aaron Harberts and Gretchen Berg, the original showrunners from season one, that idea dates all the way back to that. I think it is a spectacular idea, which is to go post the timeline we know.”
In the footage we got at NYCC, a new character named Book (David Ajala) shows Burnham a Federation flag with only six stars on it: two large ones (believed to represent Earth and Vulcan) and four smaller ones. Here’s why that matters: The flag on a “current timeline” show like Picard has three large stars — for Earth, Vulcan and Andoria — with a multitude of smaller ones in the background. That indicates of a healthy, robust and united Federation.
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.
However, with Andorians (the blue-skinned aliens with antennae on their head) chasing and firing on Burnham and Book in the promo, we’re gonna guess that Andoria is no longer part of the Federation. While Goldsman didn’t give any firm details on what happened to weaken the Federation of the future, he does use the phrase “post-Federation,” suggesting the organization of over 150 planets is going to have a rough millennia:
"[Producer] Alex Kurtzman has really been deeply involved in the building out of what season three looks like and what that post-Federation future is. I have seen some of it because we all work together in the same – or we did – place with lots of Star Trek pictures on the wall and editing bays and things. It seems awesome. It’s not a final frontier but it is a new one."
This reminds me of some of the ominous stuff Kurtzman told TrekMovie at NYCC: “We’re taking expectations and alliances and enemies and all of those things and putting them in a blender and mixing it all up and seeing what’s going to happen.”
Jonathan Frakes (Will Riker), who directed some episodes of Discovery’s third season, also talked about big changes to come. “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.”
Hopefully, we’ll get to actually see Star Trek: Discovery season 3 soon.
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h/t TrekMovie