We’re just a week away from the return of Star Trek: Discovery, and we had the opportunity to speak to the show’s cast and creative team ahead of the show’s fifth and final season of adventures.
 
Along with a group of other outlets, TrekCore spoke with series showrunners Alex Kurtzman and Michelle Paradise about the themes behind Discovery Season 5, influences on the story, and more.
 

 
Q: What can you tell us about the themes of Discovery’s final season?
 
MICHELLE PARADISE: Thematically, we explore very big things — where we come from, things like that. Any given season, we look to see how those things play out with each character and their particular arcs. I do think that at the end of the day, it will feel very satisfying.
 
We did get a chance to shoot some additional material to wrap up the series itself, but I think people will feel really good about how it’s wrapping up and that it tells a complete series story for each of our beloved characters.
 
Q: Could you talk about how other properties like Star Wars or Indiana Jones may have influenced Season 5?
 
ALEX KURTZMAN: We definitely knew that we wanted to do a quest season, and probably the greatest quests committed to film are the Indiana Jones movies,  so I think there was some of that influence there. I don’t know that Star Wars ever came up — that wasn’t part of it — but we definitely wanted the idea of a quest, and putting pieces of a puzzle [towards] a giant reveal.
 
PARADISE: Internally, we talked about it as an Indiana Jones-type season, because series of films is known for its adventure. Those films make us think of archeological expeditions, and sand, and ruins, and all that; that lead to an idea of a “city in the desert” that we started to play with.
 
We just wanted to have fun with that, and explore a shifted tonal direction from previous seasons — while of course maintaining all the things that make up Discovery’s identity.
 
Q: Season 5 was only a ten-episode order — unlike the 13+ episode orders of previous seasons. Did that have any impact on how you produced the season?
 
PARADISE: The preparation and production are the same with 10 episodes.
 
When we found out that it was going to be 10 rather than 13, you have to look at the arc of the season, and maybe compress a few things. Maybe there are some tributaries that you would have gone down that now you don’t go down, because you want to focus in on the story.
 
In terms of the practicalities, it didn’t change much. We still had 10 episodes to do — and each of those episodes is its own juggernaut — so we just worked to make every single episode the very best it could be.
 

 
Q: What’s it been like to see Discovery and the Star Trek Universe as a whole grow?
 
KURTZMAN: When we started Discovery, we weren’t actually setting out to build a universe — we were just setting out to make a new Star Trek show. I think that in tacking along the different roads that Discovery gave us, the fact that we were able to bring Pike and Spock and Number One into the show… Akiva Goldsman said, “There’s a great Star Trek show with Pike in the lead, and the entire era aboard the Enterprise before Kirk takes over.”
 
I said, “Why don’t we cast a good Pike first and see how that works, and we’ll go from there!” [Laughs] That obviously ended up becoming Strange New Worlds — but that could never have happened without Season 2 of Discovery. Never.
 
I believe really strongly that every Star Trek show needs to have its own very unique identity. I don’t ever want you to think that you can watch one show and get your fill of Star Trek, and therefore don’t have to watch the others. Each one has to have its own identity, but the key to that is not making one show that’s supposed to please everybody.
 
If you try to make one show to please everybody, ultimately you’re going to please nobody. So each of these shows are really designed and targeted to access a very specific part of the fandom — and there’s a real misnomer about Trek fandom, it’s not a generic term you can apply to everybody.
 
There are so many different subsets of Trek fans, and we’re doing this ‘rainbow’ of shows to appeal to each subset without necessarily having to get everybody in the door. Discovery led the way in so many ways. It really pointed us like a compass to what was possible, and that has been incredibly exciting for us.
 
Now we’re on this wild adventure: we’re in the middle of shooting Section 31, and we’re halfway through the writing on the first season Starfleet Academy, and we start shooting that at the end of the summer… and there’s more up behind that. It’s been pretty amazing.
 

This interview has been edited for clarity.

We’ll be back tomorrow with our next Discovery interview, speaking with actors Wilson Cruz (Culber), Mary Wiseman (Tilly), and Blu del Barrio (Adira) — in the meantime, let us know your thoughts on today’s interview in the comments below!