SPOILER WARNING: This story includes descriptions of major plot developments on the series finale of “ Star Trek : Discovery,” currently streaming on Paramount+. Watching the fifth and final season of “ Star Trek: Discovery ” has been an exercise in the uncanny. Paramount+ didn’t announce that the show was ending until after the Season 5 finale had wrapped filming — no one involved with the show knew it would be its concluding voyage when they were making it.
And yet, the season has unfolded with a pervasive feeling of culmination. For one, the overarching story this season was about the origins of sentient life in the galaxy, as Capt. Michael Burnham ( Sonequa Martin-Green ) leads her crew in pursuit of an ancient technology used by aliens known as the Progenitors — first introduced 31 years ago on an episode of “Star Trek: The Next Generation.
” For another, in one episode, Burnham is zapped back in time to the earliest episodes of the show and faces down her younger self, when she was a mutineer with a galaxy-sized chip on her shoulder. Characters get married or brake up, engage in profound discussions of legacy and personal value, visit the archive for all knowledge in the galaxy and hold a conversation with an alien from billions of years in the past. “It was really a season about meaning and purpose, and those are very, very big ideas,” executive producer and showrunner Michelle Paradise says in a Zoom interview with Martin-Green.
“And now, of cou.