What Star Trek: Discovery Season 6 Would Have Been About

"Star Trek: Discovery" ends its journey with Season 5, but fans are no doubt eager to know where the show might have taken things if it had a chance to continue. In an interview with Variety, the people behind the series have offered some hints on what could have been — and it sounds like Captain Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) and the rest of the crowd would have been in for a pretty interesting time. 

"The story, nascent as it was, was eventually going to be tying that thread up and connecting 'Discovery' back with 'Calypso,'" showrunner Michelle Paradise said about the planned central plot for the Season 6 that will never be. She was referring to the "Star Trek: Short Treks" adventures — namely, Season 1, Episode 2 of the shortform anthology show, titled "Calypso." 

In the episode, a man called Craft (Aldis Hodge) wakes up on the long-abandoned USS Discovery and befriends its computer, which has become a sentient AI entity called Zora (Sash Striga and Annabelle Wallis). The budding romance between the mystery man and the evolved AI ultimately fails and Zora equips Craft for a journey home. 

The Season 5 ending actually does feature an extremely rushed version of what might have been the central arc of Season 6. However, all the viewers ultimately get is an abbreviated hint at the "Calypso" story potentially being more than meets the eye. In the series finale, "Life, Itself," Burnham effectively sets up the events of "Calypso" by sending Discovery and Zora to wait for Craft. The interesting thing here is that the details of the Craft mission are under Starfleet's Red Directive, which is just about as classified as a situation can get. 

For a full frame of reference, other Red Directive people and events include long-standing "Discovery" mystery man Dr. Kovich (David Cronenberg) and the life-creating Progenitor technology. Combine that level of urgency with the weird amount of trouble it takes to make sure that Zora meets Craft in the far future, and fans can only begin to guess what importance Aldis Hodge's character secretly holds in the grand scheme of "Star Trek." The way the show handles the situation basically just adds a few more question marks to the still-expanding untold truth of "Star Trek: Discovery."