Discovery Returns for Its Final Season

This one depends on how long you’ve been away from Discovery, really, but I’m sure there’s someone out there intrigued by the final season of a Star Trek show who’s maybe either not watched since the early days or wants to jump in on the last leg. So, if that’s you… well, go watch the rest of the show first. It has its moments.

But if you insist: Discovery has not been the pre-original-Trek show it started out as for a long while now. At the end of season two, the crew and the Discovery itself were flung far, far into the future in order to close the loop on a potential galaxy-ending threat that meant they could never return to their original timeline in the 23rd century. Ever since, they have been at the furthest point a Star Trek show has ever consistently gone to, even beyond the far future glimpsed in Enterprise’s Temporal Cold War storyline: the 32nd century.

Things are, to be clear, not 100% great at this moment in time, state of the galaxy-wise. Before Discovery showed up, the Federation’s myriad member worlds and Starfleet had been completely torn apart by a cataclysmic event called “The Burn,” the simultaneous detonation of dilithium across known space which rendered warp travel—and thus the existence of interstellar society as it had existed for over a thousand years—extremely difficult.

Discovery helped solve that problem, slowly but surely allowing Starfleet to rebuild, but not before it faced another cataclysmic threat called the Dark Matter Anomaly, or DMA, a not-so-random “random” gravitational event that kept showing up and destroying entire worlds in storms of debris and chaos. Turns out the DMA was actually the product of an extra-galactic race known only as the Ten-C, which, once again, Discovery helped solve the problem with after successfully making First Contact with the beings. Hopefully things calm down a bit in terms of existence-threatening cataclysms in season five!