'Star Trek: Discovery' trailers for First Contact Day

Happy First Contact Day! I was so confident that either Star Trek: Picard or Star Trek: Strange New Worlds would win at least one reward that my planned post today was "Star Trek winners at the Critics Choice Super Awards." Neither Star Trek show won anything. Instead, Black Mirror: Joan Is Awful won two awards for Best Science Fiction/Fantasy Series, Limited Series or Made-For-TV Movie and Best Actress in a Science Fiction/Fantasy Series, Limited Series or Made-For-TV Movie for Annie Murphy, Kurt Russell won Best Actor in a Science Fiction/Fantasy Series, Limited Series or Made-For-TV Movie for Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, and Melanie Lynskey took home Best Villain in a Series, Limited Series or Made-For-TV Movie in The Last of Us. So much for that idea, at least for today.

Instead, I'm taking my inspiration from watching the first two episodes of Season 5 of Star Trek: Discovery last night, which is the final season of this series. Watch Star Trek: Discovery | Season 5 Official Trailer | Paramount+.

The fifth and final season will find Captain Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) and 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. But there are others on the hunt as well… dangerous foes who are desperate to claim the prize for themselves and will stop at nothing to get it.

The first sentence of the video description for This Season on Star Trek: Discovery | Season 5 Sneak Peek | StarTrek.com hints at the nature of the "ancient power whose very existence has been deliberately hidden for centuries."



Power of creation, here we come!
"Power of creation" refers back to Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Chase."

The argument is silenced when the tricorder begins projecting a holographic image of a humanoid. She explains that her civilization existed alone in the galaxy, billions of lonely years before any of the others developed. They decided to spread their genetic material to other planets, in the hopes of creating a rich ecosystem of humanoids who could fulfill the joys of finding and integrating with alien cultures that these first beings never had.

What the Progenitors, the species of ancient humanoid in the referenced holographic image, also shown in the video above, did was a form of exogenesis or panspermia, which I called "a fringe scientific idea." That written, it works much better in science fiction than science fact and helps explain (away) why there are so many humanoid aliens in science fiction shows and movies, which has a real-world practical reason, using human actors in makeup to play aliens. Only recently has CGI been able to affordably and convincingly create non-humanoid aliens, such as the Gelatin and Katrudian from The Orville. Those don't need the same in-universe rationale for existing that humanoid aliens do.

My wife and I are looking forward to the rest of the final season. I hope the writers do as good job of sending off Discovery's crew as Star Trek: Picard did for the crews of Enterprise-D, Enterprise-E, and, to a lesser extent, Voyager.