Star Trek: Discovery Season 4 Teased by Showrunner

Star Trek: Discovery Season Three debuts in October, and it sounds like work is already underway on Season Four. Discovery co-showrunner, and head of the Star Trek Universe, Alex Kurtzman spoke to Gold Derby about Emmy nomination earned by Star Trek: Picard and Star Trek: Short Treks. During the conversation, he also spoke about how the pandemic has affected Star Trek plans, revealing that it’s given the writing teams a head start. “We’ve been running all of our writers’ rooms on Zoom, and the silver lining is that we’ve been actually been able to get quite ahead on the scripts for upcoming seasons of Discovery, and Picard, and Strange New Worlds, which is going to be shooting next year, and Section 31.”

What’s interesting here is that Kurtzman is working on future Discovery episodes even though the fourth season has not officially been ordered, or at least not publicly announced. It seems the future is bright for Discovery‘s continued adventures.

Kurtzman went on to discuss how the pandemic has altered plans for Star Trek. He confirmed that Discovery would have debuted earlier if not for work-from-home conditions slowing down the post-production process.

“The thing that we’re very lucky about is that we wrapped Discovery 10 days before the lockdown happened,” he says. “The challenge that it posed is that is slowed post down quite a bit. It slowed visual effects. It slowed editing. I’m now editing with our editors, and we’re both on our laptops. Obviously, the visual effects companies took a very hard hit, and it took them a minute for them to get back on their feet after everything that happened, and when it comes to recording music, you can’t have musicians in an orchestra in one room anymore, so each musician is individually recording their instruments, sending it to Jeff Russo, our composer, and Jeff has to mix them together as if they were all sitting together in a room. So all of that takes a lot longer.

“That being said, everybody’s been heroic about it, and I think it’s given everybody a real purpose. We get to keep working. We get to keep occupying ourselves during this really difficult and challenging time, and we are planning to go back into production. A lot of time has been taken, coming up with a big plan for how the sets and the stages are going to be run that’s still being iterated right now, obviously, safety being everyone’s number one concern. Everybody’s working on that really diligently, because everybody wants to go back to work, and nobody wants to do it in a way that’s unsafe.”

Star Trek: Discovery Season Three premiers on CBS All Access on October 15th.