Star Trek: Discovery deliberately cracks open a box of Next Gen
Calling back to a single 30-year-old television episode is a time-honored Star Trek tradition, one that has led the franchise to some of its most fascinating detours. And in the two-episode season premiere, Star Trek: Discovery seems to start an entire season and hark back to a particular episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
And not just any episode! The 1993 episode of Next generation in question delivered a revelation so seemingly earth-shattering that it should have rewritten galactic politics on a massive scale. But then, like in the era of episodic television in the 1990s, it was never talked about again.
At least until now.
(Ed. remark: This piece contains spoilers for the first two episodes of Star Trek: Discovery season 5.)
Photo: Marni Grossman/Paramount Plus
Writer Michelle Paradise and director Olatunde Osunsanmi explain the connection at the end of the first of two episodes released this week, “Red Direction.” Discovery’s mission is to follow a series of ancient clues that lead to a cache of ancient technology, and get there before a pair of professional thieves, Moll (Eve Harlow) and L’ak (Elias Toufexis), do.
The technology, as Doctor Kovich (David Cronenberg) explains, belongs to the so-called Progenitors, a little-understood ancient spacefaring species that “created life as we know it (…) every humanoid species in the galaxy.” Presumably, such technology holds the key to understanding how the ancestors did it, and how that power could be repurposed.
The Progenitors are from the Star Trek episode “The Chase”
Kovich also calls up a helpful video presentation of the moment the Progenitors were discovered by a gathered group of Federation, Klingon, Romulan, and Cardassian captains, including Jean-Luc Picard. But you don’t have to be a Star Trek nerd to know that you’re really just watching snippets from an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Specifically from the 20th episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s sixth season, “The Chase,” in which Picard and his team discover pieces of a computer program hidden in the DNA of species from dozens of different planets. There are many questions: what does the program do? And what kind of entity could have been so ancient and powerful that it had determined the genetic legacy of most of the known galaxy before sentient life had even evolved here – and then left no trace of its existence except the genetic codes themselves?
In short, the mysterious death of Captain Picard’s old archeology professor (did you know that if he hadn’t gone to Starfleet, Jean-Luc would have studied to be a space archaeologist? Well, now you do) sets the Captain and the Enterprise on a quest to find the missing DNA fragments needed to complete his unfinished work.
Image: Paramount Plus
The action of the episode becomes one big chase, as the Klingon and Cardassian captains come to believe that the program must be a great weapon or a dangerous secret. Eventually, Picard and his rivals all discover the lonely planet with the last DNA strain – and when they get there, some Romulans who have been secretly following them all also show up, to make things even more exciting.
Ultimately, the program is not a weapon or a secret, but a message from an ancient race of humanoids that apparently created conscious life in our galaxy as we know it.
Actor Salome Jens appears as a Progenitor hologram and delivers a speech that is moving by any standard of Star Trek monologues, telling the story of a race of sentient humans who went to the stars and found them empty. They had evolved too early to encounter other forms of sentient life, and knew their time was too limited to ever expect that.
“We knew we would be gone one day; that none of us would survive, so we left you,” Jens’ Progenitor explains. The Progenitors spread humanoid life across the galaxy in their own image; life that tended to evolve into bipedal, tailless, largely hairless creatures with two eyes and two arms and five fingers on each hand. And they left clues in the genetic signature of their work, spread among the stars.
Wait, was this really all about pushing the boundaries of Star Trek’s alien design?
Image: Paramount Plus
A little bit yes! The writers of ‘The Chase’, Ron Moore and Joe Menosky, were inspired by elements of Carl Sagan Contactbut also through Menosky’s fascination with pets that created an in-universe explanation for why all the common alien species in Star Trek are basically shaped like humans (albeit with latex on their faces).
In other hands it would be bland and banal, but even under heavy makeup Jens sells her single scene on voice and attitude alone – it’s no wonder she was asked back to the Trek group to play a major antagonist role play in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.
“It was our hope that you would come together in fellowship and camaraderie to hear this message, and if you can see and hear me, our hope is fulfilled,” the Progenitor hologram concludes with gentle compassion. “You are a monument, not to our greatness, but to our existence. That was our wish: that you too would know life. (…) There is something of us in each of you, and therefore something of you in each other.”
But while “The Chase” featured a major reveal, nothing ever really came of it. You would think that a message of togetherness that would fundamentally rewrite the origins of life in the universe would to have to have tweaked Star Trek’s galactic politics a bit, right? It seems like this would give the Star Trek setting a radically different understanding of the origins of life than we have in the real world – this is literally intelligent design! There would be at least some other characters talking about how humans and Vulcans and Klingons and Romulans and Ferengi and Cardassians and Trill and Bajorans all share the same genetic ancestor.
But no: Pandora’s box of Progenitor lore remained closed. Gene Roddenberry’s successor and Trek producer Rick Berman seems disappointed by the episode’s reveal – and you can’t really blame him for not wanting to turn the entire cosmology of Star Trek on its head in an episode that largely about explaining how to reverse DNA fragments this they form a cool spiral. Now look at this computer screen with the spiral:
Except now, Star Trek: Discovery is to open the box and rock the boat. This new crazy puzzle box chase across the galaxy promises an expansion of the Progenitors, an idea so big that even The next generation was willing to touch it. It’s quite a task, but Discovery has never been freer to shake up Star Trek continuity than it is now – we’ll have to wait for more episodes of the show’s final season to find out just how free it plans to be.