When Star Trek: Picard aired its season 1 finale, a promo at the end teased the arrival of Star Trek: Discovery season 3. It didn’t specify a date, though, just that it’s coming soon. As you might’ve expected, that’s because it’s currently unclear when it will be able to land on CBS All Access due to the global lockdown interrupting the post-production process.
While filming had already completed on the show’s third run, post-production hadn’t. It’s still going ahead, but is now having to be undertaken remotely, which slows things down considerably. Star Doug Jones – who plays Commander Saru – has now provided an update on how work on Discovery season 3 is progressing though, saying the following:
“I thought I had a guesstimate of when season three was going to start airing, but I have been proven wrong because post-production not being able to work at the pace it would have normally without a pandemic,” Jones says. “So, I don’t know when season three will air. I understand why people are wondering. It has been a while since season two wrapped and the storyline left you hanging with us jumping into the future. That leaves everybody wanting more. I don’t blame you for that. But I got the same message, which is it is coming. I promise you it is coming.”
As Jones reminds us, when we left Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) and the U.S.S. Discovery crew, they had jumped through a wormhole and arrived in the far future – 1000 years ahead, to be exact. This suggested Discovery would be a whole new series when it returned, but Jones is keen to stress that it feels like the same show, just set in a different time period.
“It absolutely feels like the same show to me,” he says. “The same show, but with a different backdrop. The cast is still the same. Of course, we are going to meet new people in the future. If you are going to have any interactions with people or species in the future, they are going to be new. That will infuse the show with some fresh. But the Discovery crew is still intact and doing our thing.”
Jonathan Frakes, who helmed some episodes of season 3, has previously promised that the next run will be lighter and more optimistic than the past two seasons, with the characters having left their pain and angst in the past and the spirit of going boldly where no one has gone before very much at the heart of these new episodes.
It sounds like Star Trek: Discovery season 3 will entertain both fans of the show and those who’ve yet to be won over by it alike then. It’d just be nice to know when we can expect it.