Star Trek: Discovery Is Staying In the 32nd Century

Star Trek: Discovery‘s third season has taken the ship and its crew into the 32nd century. According to Discovery‘s new captain, they won’t be leaving the era any time soon. The jump 930 years into the future is the most extended lunge forward in the Star Trek timeline since Star Trek: The Next Generation began telling stories taking place 100 years after Star Trek: The Original Series. It also gives the show more freedom to write new continuity than it had as an Original Series prequel during its first two seasons. Doug Jones says that’s a significant change for the show, but not one they play to undo.

“[The show] has massively changed,” Jones tells Collider. “We are boldly going where no Star Trek series has gone before, and that was a permanent jump to the future. 930 years. So not just a couple of years. We went to a whole new era with a new set of rules, new customs, new everything. What this did for the writers, though, we were playing ten years before the original series in the first two seasons. We started having to adhere to canon and making sure everything we were doing didn’t affect later seasons and canon and storylines that they have already filmed. Now we’ve jumped ahead to where the writers have freedom to create from the ground up. That’s exciting, and we’ll explore new worlds and new creatures and, of course, the nostalgia of all the species you know already, we’re going to visit them again but with new relationships to each other than what you know. It’s exciting to see how the galaxy had changed in those 930 years.”

The jump to the future isn’t without its cost for the ship’s crew. The ship’s crewmembers left everyone they knew and loved centuries in the past and are still searching for a point of connection with the Starfleet they knew. Jones told ComicBook.com earlier this week that he thinks Saru’s history helped prepare him for his crew’s challenges.

“Yes, without knowing it, Saru’s past prepared him for this day,” Jones said. “Absolutely. He’s left everything behind once before. If you’ve watched the Short Treks and seen my backstory in ‘Brightest Star,’ you’ll see that he had a choice to make when he made first contact with outer space. And Lieutenant Georgiou, at the time, swooped down in a shuttle to take me away. She told me, ‘Your people are a pre-warp society. If you leave now, you cannot come back and share what you know with them. So here’s your decision.’ So he knew what it was like to leave everything behind once before.”

Star Trek: Discovery debuts new episodes Thursdays on CBS All Access.