There’s yet to be an announcement about Star Trek: Discovery getting a fifth season.
ViacomCBS CEO Bob Bakish spoke at the UBS Global TMT Virtual Conference where the topic of Star Trek came up. Bakish took a victory lap, goading about getting Discovery back from Netflix internationally while failing to remember just how angry fans were about that decision.
The quote came as he talked about third-party deals, which resulted in him saying “…we just took back Star Trek: Discovery internationally from Netflix.”
He called Star Trek as a whole, a working core franchise for the streaming service, and even touted the “numbers” that Star Trek: Discovery is doing. Saying that the show’s fourth season is, “…fastest start in terms of subscribers .” Though, he never actually said what he meant by that.
Despite a past precedent to announce future seasons of a show at the start of the show’s current season, and the high praise that the CEO of the company scooped onto Discovery, no announcement of a fifth season was made.
Star Trek: Discovery is looking like it won’t get a fifth season.
This is speculative and maybe 100% due to the pandemic, but the fact we’re almost a month into season four of Discovery, and we have yet to hear an announcement as we did for Lower Decks or Picard about new seasons, may lend one to believe that a fifth season isn’t happening.
That alone isn’t damning, it may be a bubble show, and they may be waiting until the end of the year to decide if the show gets a new season. That’s fair.
The only problem is, that Discovery, Lower Decks, and Picard were all greenlit to have two seasons produced back to back. Picard and Lower Decks would do their second and third seasons, and Discovery would do their fourth and fifth seasons.
That changed during the pandemic and Discovery was reduced to just one season of production, and even that was rumored to have been shortened by a few episodes due to a lack of money.
Nothing a CEO says during a press junket should ever be taken seriously, as it’s usually done to help fortify the bottom line. Due to the lack of details given and the vagueness of the words used, it’s very possible that Trek isn’t doing as well as he would lend us to believe.
If that’s the case, then it would make sense for Discovery, which has famously been a money pit, to be in its final season. Though until we know for sure, it’s just a hypothesis.