'Star Trek: Discovery' Final Season Premiere Date Set

It was at the start of the year that the final voyage of Star Trek: Discovery, the show that not only brought the Star Trek franchise back to television after a dozen years but led to a blossoming renaissance, became clearer to its audience. Several days ago, the premiere date for the fifth and final season of the Paramount+ series appeared on the service’s app for the UK audience, and now it’s promptly been confirmed: the end begins on Thursday, April 4.

The ten-episode season will roll out over nine weeks until the May 30 series finale, currently titled “Life, Itself”, written by Kyle Jarrow and executive producer and showrunner Michelle Paradise. The double bill that makes this format possible is found in premiere week, with “Red Directive”, written by Paradise, and “Under the Twin Moons” written by Alan McElroy. The season as a whole sees the crew of the U.S.S. Discovery “uncovering a mystery that will send them on an epic adventure across the galaxy to find an ancient power whose very existence has been deliberately hidden for centuries,” as the synopsis tells, as well that they’re not the only ones seeking said power, but “dangerous foes who are desperate to claim the prize”, including mercenary scavengers Moll, played by The Expanse‘s Eve Harlow, and L’ak, played by The Night Agent's Elias Toufexis.

The logline for the season premiere, “Red Directive”, reads

Captain Burnham and the U.S.S. Discovery are sent to retrieve a mysterious 800-year-old Romulan vessel; until the artifact hidden inside is stolen, leading to an epic chase. Meanwhile, Saru is offered the position of a lifetime, and Tilly’s efforts to help pull her into a tangled web of secrecy.

The April 4 premiere date date does have significance to the Trekkie fandom, as it’s the Thursday closest to First Contact Day, observed on April 5, which will be the day in 2063, now 39 years away that Vulcans first made their presence known to humans as depicted in 1996’s Star Trek: First Contact. And it seems that unlike with Strange New Worlds’s “Those Old Scientists” back in July, the streamer won’t be budging off of its typical Thursday releases for new original series episodes for the occasion. 

Sonequa Martin-Green, who plays Michael Burnham, spoke a lot about the new season at last week’s Atlanta’s SCAD TVfest.“There’s a big thing. A biiiig thing in Season 5,” she teased. She also promised that instead of darkness and heaviness that previous seasons had, there will be l“a great sense of adventure and fun” here: “It’s a bit of a tonal shift that I think people will enjoy.”

Burnham being back in the same sector as Book, played by David Ajala, as the previously-covered teaser scene showed has Martin-Green cagily relenting that it “would seem to suggest that they are on some sort of mission together.” She assures that their relationship is “part of the story,” but the final season has all the relationships to explore among the Discovery crew. She remarks “There’s no stone left unturned… We dig into some of everything in Season 5.”

The main cast for Star Trek: Discovery’s final season is rounded out by Doug Jones as Saru, Anthony Rapp as Paul Stamets, Mary Wiseman as Sylvia Tilly, Wilson Cruz as Dr. Hugh Culber, Blu del Barrio as Adira, and this season’s new series regular, Callum Keith Rennie as Rayner, who is absent from the poster.

Sources: TVLine, TrekCore