With season four of Star Trek: Discovery underway, hints about the upcoming season are starting to get dropped, and one involves Saru.
Star Trek: Discovery had a soft reboot with season three, seeing the show, ship, and crew be sent into the distant future. The shakeup of an already unsettled status quo caused many fans to speculate what major changes would come with the new season. The show aired, and in typical Discovery fashion, some liked it and some didn’t. However, huge changes were made to the show regardless.
So when the topic of the fourth season came up during an interview with the BlerdGurl Podcast, executive producers Alex Kurtzman and Olatunde Osunsanmi talked about possible changes coming to the show and most definitely bringing up fan-favorite character Saru as someone who could be facing a huge change from the third to the fourth season.
Kurtzman went on into more detail about Saru’s future with the series.
"Saru is definitely coming back, of course he’s coming back. But everybody is evolving in different ways, right? Like the journey for Burnham obviously was from the rejection of the captain’s chair to the sitting in the captain’s chair. And when you have those kinds of polarities, you know, you’re going to have something interesting in the season, because they’re as far apart as you could get. So, to get her from here to there, it’s going to be a journey. And Saru, who I think made an extraordinary captain, also began to recognize by the end of the season that he doesn’t necessarily have probably the hardest thing that a captain has to have, which is the willingness to be able to potentially sacrifice something you care for, or somebody you care for, to serve a greater good. And he doesn’t know where he is on the line yet. And that’s going to be part of what he gets to explore in season four. But we would never lose Doug [Jones]. Never."
So any fans worried about Saru or Doug Jones leaving the series should take a deep breath.
This is good news for Jones, who despite being a famed character actor for years, has finally gotten a lot of new eyes on him during his time as the alien Saru and while you may not recognize him if you saw him in person, you have most definitely seen him in other works.
The 60-year-old has been in everything from Tank Girl, to Men In Black II, to both Hell Boy live-action and both Hell Boy animated movies (as Abe Sapien), to Legion and even The Shape of Water.
He’s been in so many things but because he’s often under heavy prosthetics, people don’t often realize that it’s him. He’s a welcomed sight for many Star Trek fans and there’s no doubt many will be happy to hear he’s not going anywhere.