‘Star Trek: Discovery’ Finally Wraps Production On Season 4

| August 23, 2021 | By: TrekMovie.com Staff 27 comments so far

Production on the fourth season of Star Trek: Discovery began on November 2nd, 2020. And at long last they finally wrapped up today, almost ten months later.

S4 wrapped… and another S5 hint

The production news came from executive producer and co-showrunner Michelle Paradise, who took to social media on Monday morning to officially tell the world it’s a wrap! She offered her thanks to the cast and crew for the “effort, teamwork, and heart they brought to this challenging season.”

She gave another indication that she expects to be back for season five with, “We’re now turning off the lights and leaving the stages in good hands. Until next time… ” Earlier in the month, Paradise hinted at getting the writers’ room back together for the next season.

Paradise recently flew up to Toronto to oversee the final weeks of production on the show. She has been sharing some non-spoiler photos from some of the location shoots that took place last week.

And quizzing fans about elements of the set.

Paradise has been doing double duty, also overseeing editing on the season from Toronto. Last Friday she took a moment to praise her cast saying there is “NOTHING our actors can’t do.”

A long road…

Filming season four has taken a longer time than usual because of on-set delays and periodic halts due to COVID protocols. As members of the cast told fans in Las Vegas:

It’s been very, very long. Everything is slowed down. The entire cast and crew are tested three times a week. And we all have to stay on our levels. And when you’re on set, things go very slowly because touches can only come in waves. What I mean by that is makeup, wardrobe, hair, each have to take their turns…

While some actors like Anthony Rapp and David Ajala wrapped up work on the season weeks ago, others have continued to work over the last month on scenes not requiring the full cast. Over the last few weeks, other actors have announced completing their work, including Emily Coutts (Detmer), who revealed she wrapped up this past Saturday.

(Instagram/Emily Coutts)

It’s likely there were also pickup shots and possibly some reshoots over the last few weeks, which resulted in some actors being recalled to the set, but it appears that work is finally complete.

Tuesday update from Doug

 

Season four of Discovery will debut in late 2021.

Find more Star Trek: Discovery news and analysis.

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This series will be cancelled after the second season. No one’s watching it and CBS is getting killed financially on it. Look for Kurtzman to get fired.

/s

I’m bracing for painful facepalms when the show finally runs its course in however many years and those people say it was canceled.

TNG canceled after seven seasons! Berman is in trouble!!

Gotta admire that dedication, showing up for work and not getting paid. Toronto must have a fabulous social safety net.

Funny. In a way, the show actually WAS cancelled after season two… well, it’s original premise, setting and mission was cancelled. It is no longer a prequel to TOS.

Bringing DISCO to the 32nd century is something that had never been done for a Trek show… It’s an entirely different series now.

As for Kurtzman… He wasn’t responsible for any of DSC’s initial failures. He wasn’t even around when Fuller launched this semi-reboot of the franchise. Kurtzman was brought in to save the day and in many, many ways he did so by listening to the fanbase. He explained some of DSC’s early continuity breaches, gave the show a new setting and mission and also created SNW which has the potential to right all wrongs DSC has committed in Year 1.

Kurtzman may not be the most talented creative force but he’s a great macro-manager and able to make some tough choices and get the right people on board! And unlike the old management under B&B back in the day, he listens to the fans!

Looking at Season 4, I can also spot some changes moving DSC closer to what fans might want to see. First, we got those very Trek-ish colorful uniforms back… the first time since 1994 (if you don’t count the Enterprise uniforms in DSC S2)… Then the show is finally set around the Captain as the main character which was also a demand by many, many fans… This Trek is on track :-)

Changing the setting does not make it an entirely different show.

mmmmmm…..pretzel logic. By that reasoning everything that followed TOS was cancelled two, three, maybe four times.

Huh? They never changed the specific era a show was set in. That’s a completely new concept for Trek.

Of course it’s not “cancelled cancelled” but it’s a lot like SeaQuest 2032 or Galactica 1980… They just didn’t rename it this time…

You’re wrong in some counts. Kurtzman was brought in first, and he backed up Bryan Fuller as creator and showrunner of Discovery, creating the show along with him. But Kurtzman’s original plan was to supervise, and let Fuller take care of day-to-day on the show. Unfortunately, things started to get behind schedule and over budget, they had to delay the premiere twice, and Fuller ended up fired. Kurtzman still tried to keep the hands-down approach, lending showrunning duties do Harberts & Berg, who were fired in the second season after complaints from the writing staff with HR at CBS Studios. And then Kurtzman finally felt he had to be in charge to keep the helm steady. So he became showrunner and discovered Michelle Paradise. They get along just fine, and finally peace ensued. Now I bet he’s running things as he originally intended, 30,000 feet up, while Paradise charts the course for Discovery, Matalas charts the course for Picard, McMahan charts the course for Lower Decks, the Hageman brothers chart the course for Prodigy, and Akiva Goldsman & Henry Alonso Myers chart the course for Strange New Worlds. Kurtzman is at his confort zone, only supervising all those guys. It is a Rick Berman of sorts, but a very different kind. Whereas Berman was more obsessed with power and calling the shots, Kurtzman feels more relaxed at giving bright creators the chance to show their own visions for Star Trek. I like it better, to be honest.

The following link takes you to the very first press release concerning what would become Discovery, in November 2015. Note that Kurtzman is already attached to it; Bryan Fuller would come in later. https://intl.startrek.com/article/new-star-trek-series-premieres-january-2017

Actually, at the start, Discovery was intended as an anthology series, and every season would have been set into a different time in the Trek universe. But it would have been an even more expensive show, new sets every season and so on. On one hand, it would have been an interesting concept, on the other hand, we saw how Brian Fuller changed the Klingons, he potentially had a shot at ruining all Trek timelines.

Every Trek iteration changed the Klingons. Not Fuller.

Except that was Fuller’s long-term series plan — CHANGING TIMEFRAMES WAS HIS ORIGINAL PREMISE — all along…those of us paying attention know this of course.

Nice try though. LOL

There was a (racist and sexist) YouTube video a few months ago about showing how the show was secretly cancelled already and S4 wasn’t happening. Mind you, S4 was in active production when he made the video.

Was this Doomc**k or Midnight’s Edge? Those guys are ridiculous.

Constantly repeating sassy rejoinders to bad Youtube click-hate videos – Disco fans find this endlessly hilarious.

Disco fans will stop making fun of the YouTube click-haters when Disco haters stop believing those YouTubers.

(There are still people who claim all current Trek is produced under some “alternate license” because they saw a YouTube video saying that.)

Wow, really? An “alternate license?” Man… these folks are damaged.

Oh, it’s a whole elaborate theory. It has as much basis in reality as the Q-Anon nonsense, but its adherents are just as passionate in their belief.

Let me see if I can sum the theory up, while noting all the errors in fact and logic on the way.

First, they say that when JJ Abrams was contracted to make Star Trek movies, he did so under an “alternate license” that explicitly required anything seen in those films to be “25% different” from previous Star Trek TV and films. By this theory, this license *required* JJ’s films to be reboots, and discontinuous/non-canonical from previous Star Trek… as if film and TV lawyers cared about “canon”!

Then, they claim that when CBS contracted Alex Kurtzman and Secret Hideout to make Star Trek TV shows, they were somehow obligated to do so under this “alternate license”… even though at that time, CBS had absolute rights to make Star Trek TV any way it wanted to, and Viacom/Paramount was a separate company, AND Secret Hideout has nothing to do with JJ Abrams or Bad Robot. (They actually claim that Secret Hideout is “the Section 31 division of Bad Robot”!)

Basically, they’ve taken the aesthetic complaints about Discovery not looking like TOS, and built an entire conspiracy theory around it, in order to justify their belief that it (and the other current Trek shows) are “not real Star Trek”.

It’s completely insane.

Exactly right.

Right because it isn’t like the only thing Star Trek firing on all cylinders is Trek streaming television. Kurtzman has been wildly successful. The film series failed and stalled not the tv shows. Star Trek hasn’t had a period like this since the 1990s with all the different shows. Its the film division at Paramount that doesn’t have a clue. If anything they should hand that to Kurtzman to run. He’d get Star Trek 4 made no doubt.

On to season five. Not bad for a show “cancelled” years ago……

Paradise is right; the actors on this show really ARE excellent! I wish I could say the same thing about the writers…

These data points bring further clarity to The Paradise Syndrome.

Is she in the middle of makeup or has Detmer’s implant changed?

I bet it changed. New improved future tech. That will be a cool touch

I’ve been speculating about the location that Paradise was teasing in her tweet.

To me that red stony soil could be near Ontario’s Cheltenham Badlands.

Now, I’ve been suggesting them here for a bit, so maybe it’s just confirmation bias.

Any folks from the region think the same?

Here’s a link to the conservation authority site: https://cvc.ca/discover-our-parks/the-cheltenham-badlands/

That was my first thought.

Well, it was cancelled from my house after season 2 so that part was true in my case.