one thing i actually really like about star stable (and wanna embrace more in my own lore building stuff in my brain) is that it doesn't actually matter at all where your character came from, just that they're on jorvik now

Star Trek: Discovery Season 3 Finale Ending Explained

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This Star Trek: Discovery review contains major spoilers for the end of Season 3.

What a ride! The third season of Star Trek: Discovery was easily its most consistent and, dare I say, best yet? From the get-go, the series’ decision to vault its characters into the far future for its third outing proved itself a smart one, as the crew of the Discovery set about exploring this strange, new reality. The hour-long finale was a solid ending for the season, answering some questions we’ve had since the season premiere. In that way, “That Hope is You, Part 2” really was the perfect bookend to the premiere that started this far-future arc. That being said, the episode also set up some fascinating plot and character arcs for Season 4. Let’s break down all that happened in the Star Trek: Discovery Season 3 finale, and what it means for the bright future of this show.

We Finally Know What Caused The Burn

The big reveal in the Season 3 finale is the confirmation that it was a scared Su’Kal who caused The Burn when he was a small child. With Saru’s support and encouragement, Su’Kal faced the memory of the event: the death of his mother, when he was small. With her death, Su’Kal was all alone on the KSF Khi’eth, on a dilithium planet in an isolated nebula. His mother made Su’Kal promise not to turn off the holo until the Federation came. She couldn’t know that the Federation wouldn’t come for another 125 years.

Su’Kal is a polyploid, aka someone whose genetics were altered based on the environment around him. Because Su’Kal was born on a planet filled with dilithium, it gave him a unique connection to the element. The sonic scream he emitted upon losing his mother sent a shockwave through subspace that caused the Burn. Now that he is no longer in the nebula, it is unlikely a similar event will happen again. “I’d like to help repair what is broken, if I can,” Su’Kal tells Saru, when he learns the truth. Perhaps this isn’t the last we’ve seen of the Kelpien.

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The Bridge Crew Saves the Day

This was another excellent episode for Team Bridge Crew, who use their relative freedom on an occupied Discovery to sabotage the ship’s nacelle, dropping the ship out of warp and allowing the Federation and its allies to catch up. The Bridge Crew does so believing that it will be a suicide mission, as Osyraa has cut off life support to the lower decks of the ship, and they only have one oxygen tank amongst them. It’s Joann, who apparently has very impressive lung capacity, who manages to complete the mission (with an assist from one of those little DOT-23 droids), taking the oxygen tank and leaving her friends to die (per their request). “I love you all,” she tells them, which would have been solid last words. However, once Michael regains control of the ship, she is able to restore life support to the lower decks before her friends/co-workers die. So that’s good.

Are Keyla and Joann Together?

These two have always been depicted as especially close, and the season finale had me wondering yet again if these two might be romantically linked. “You’re alive.” “So are you.” This is their conversation post-nacelle explosion. There are other people there who are also unexpectedly alive. We see them embracing shortly after. I don’t support the cultural reenforcement of romantic relationships as more important than platonic ones, but I do wonder what the nature of this relationship is. Generally, I hope both characters—and their dynamic—get more screen time in Season 4.

Michael Kills Osyrra

Of course dropping the ship out of warp is only part of the solution. The Discovery crew also has to regain control of the ship. This is Michael’s mission. With some help from Book, and via a very cool sequence in the backend of the turbolift, Michael is able to make it to the ship’s data core. She manages to get rid of Osyraa’s goons, but Osyraa gets the upper hand in the fight, literally pushing Michael into the data core. It looks like it might be the end for Michael (though I doubt any viewer actually believed it would be), until shots fire from within the core, taking Osyraa out once and for all.

Michael emerges from the ship itself, telling the Season 3 antagonist: “Unlike you, I never quit.” As a post-murder tagline, it’s not a great one—especially because Osyraa didn’t really seem to be quitting so much as losing in this moment—but the imagery that accompanies it, of Michael literally merging with Discovery to take Osyraa out, is thematically-rich. This has been a season of Discovery really evolving as a character in their own right, and it was nice to see the ship itself have a hand in the crew regaining control of the ship.

Book Can Pilot the Spore Drive

In one of the most game-changing moments of the season, the Discovery crew figures out that, because of ability to communicate empathically with plants and animals, Book can pilot the spore drive. They bet the farm on the conclusion, too, jettisoning the warp core while within Osyraa’s ship Viridian. Book is eventually able to figure out how to jump, but they barely make it away in time. While this was a cool moment in the episode, it is a much cooler reveal for what it might mean moving forward. Book has expressed an interest in joining Starfleet, but it hasn’t been clear what his role in the fleet or on the Discovery might be. His ability to pilot the spore drive certainly makes him invaluable to the Discovery and to the Federation as a whole.

Yeah, Stamets is Still Pissed at Michael

One of the minor, unresolved character threads left lingering at the end of Season 3 is Stamets’ anger towards Michael for forcibly removing him from the Discovery in the season’s penultimate episode. Frankly, Michael made the right choice. If Stamets had remained on the ship, then Osyraa could have forced him to use the spore drive and the Federation never would have been able to catch up. That being said, I can’t say I wouldn’t be pissed at Michael if I were in Stamets’ shoes. By physically forcing Stamets off the ship, she took the choice to stay and try to save his friends and family away from him. But them’s the breaks when you volunteer to be the universe’s sole spore drive pilot.

Gray Gets a Corporeal Form, Then Loses It Again

One of the chief joys of the Season 3 finale was seeing Gray gain corporeal form while in the holo-program, allowing people other than Adira the opportunity to see and interact with him. (Hugh takes the chance to give Gray a big hug!) The holo gave Gray the form of a Vulcan (if you were wondering, Adira is Xahean here), but, for Gray, it just matters that he can be seen. When faced with the dismantling of the holo, Gray tells Adira and Hugh that he doesn’t want to go back to before. “It’s not enough,” he says. “I’m stuck. Tal’s stuck.” Hugh promises that they will find a way to make sure Gray is seen, but when the episode ends, Gray is still invisible to all but Adira again.

Burnham Becomes Captain of the Discovery

Discovery churns through at least one captain per season and the ship ends the season with a different captain than it started with: Michael has replaced Saru as captain (at least for now). Saru has taken a leave of absence to help Su’Kal settle into his life on Kaminar. It’s unclear for how long. When Michael brings up waiting until his return to decide anything permanently, Admiral Vance pushes back, with Saru’s blessing. So will Michael be Discovery captain forever and ever? Frankly, the show seems to have left enough room for the writers’ room to make that decision later, as they are breaking Season 4.

The Federation is Back on Its Feet

The season finale was a happy ending, not only for the Discovery but for the entire Federation. With Osyraa dead, the source of the Burn discovered, and the Discovery equipped with two spore drive pilots, the future is looking promising. As Michael’s closing voiceover tells us, the Discovery is poised to bring dilithium to the worlds of the Federation that have been cut off since the Burn. With this new source, they will be able to properly rejoin the Federation. With this new mission outlined in the finale’s closing minutes, Season 4 seems to already have a new plot structure, one even more based on discovery and diplomacy than Season 3.

We also learned that Trill decided to rejoin the Federation, and the Ni’Var have opened lines of communication with the Federation back up. The fact that the Ni’Var responded to Michael’s request for help earlier in the episode, effectively coming to the Federation’s aid when they needed it the most, says a lot about their potential willingness to become part of the organization again.

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What Does the Closing Quote Mean?

Star Trek: Discovery Season 3 ends with a tribute to Gene Roddenberry, and to his original vision for Star Trek, exemplified through the following quote: “In a very real sense, we are all aliens on a strange planet. We spend most of our lives reaching out and trying to communicate. If during our whole lifetime, we could reach out and really communicate with just two people, we are indeed very fortunate.”

Why did the series decide to end the season this way? As showrunner Michelle Paradise told Comicbook.com: “It emerged closer to the end of the post process as we were finishing post for the season and just recognizing that this was going to be airing at this particular time. And we just felt like it would be appropriate to have something from him. I mean, Gene Roddenberry, we’re only here because of what he did and because of the show that he created and there’s the baseline, the template that he established. And so it felt appropriate to have something from him, a quote from him at the end of our season. And that was one that resonated with us.”

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Subjectively Us

Approaches to Contemporary Documentary, Georgia Collings

The landscape of modern documentary is an ever-moving and evolving one. Various modalities move in and out of popularity to coincide with the information audiences are craving. At present, post-modern documentary is abandoning cinéma-vérité realism in favor of emotive reenactments and expressionistic film styles, which reflects society’s perception of itself. By tracking the progression of documentary modalities one can pinpoint the subjective turn to the postmodern boom of the 1980s, as well as the coinciding social development that proliferated the consumption of individualistic media. Additionally, through the deconstruction of various postmodern documentaries, it can be seen how subjectivity has become the norm in non-fictional cinema. Finally, the boom in ‘personal’ and biographical documentary further cements the modern, insular focus on ‘self’. Over the past four decades, cinema has seen the results of the subjective turn in documentary. Subjective documentary, in opposition to its objective counterpart, generally follows one line of argument, without the necessity for showing counter-perspectives. The current trend for both non-fiction television documentary series and standalone films is to follow a person’s journey through some part of their lives that is deemed unique or interesting. Overall, documentary has become less about learning and more about experiencing. People are using these programs not to become informed on a topic as they may have in the past, but to immerse themselves in said topic, and feel as if they themselves are a part of the events. Media has reached a point where it is embracing the fact that it is “in an era in which there is a remarkable hunger for documentary images of the real” (Williams, L. 1999). The proliferation of reality television, which now takes up more air time than fictional shows, is indicative of this “hunger” for real images. Reality serials such as TLC’s My 600lb Life and Dance Moms are examples of massively popular biopic documentary series that follow individuals on their journey, be it to massive weight loss or towards Broadway stardom.

Professor Linda Williams, expert in film, media and rhetoric at the University of California, Berkerley, points out that another feature of postmodern documentary is the role the film maker plays, as and investigator and curator who pulls all the information together. “In place of the self-obscuring voyeur of vérité realism, we encounter, in these and other films, a new presence in the persona of the documentarian,” (Williams, L. 1999).

Cinéma vérité commits to film events as they unfold, but postmodern documentary has a focus on deconstructing the events, often through simulacrum. That is, through reconstruction, reenactment and subjective filtering. Whilst an effective and engaging dramatic device, it can be problematic in that it has the potential to distort the reality of the information. There is still a naivety present in viewers, one which stems from the culture of cinéma vérité, where all information presented is absolute, factual and not enhanced for dramatic effect. The more traditionally objective documentary forms have created a perceived, indexical truth value, one where viewers are unlikely to question information presented in a documentary form. But when filtering factual narrative through the personal lens of the documentarian, as is normal in postmodern styles, reality can become distorted or biased, or simply omit alternative perspective. This is called “subjective reality”, truthful and real, but one-sided. Due to the indexical truth value associated with documentary, viewers of postmodern film and reality television are far less likely to question the bias, or seek out alternative viewpoints. Postmodern documentary, such as it is, has given up objectivity and unwavering truthfulness for the personal and engaging uncertainty of social and individual representation (Williams, L. 1999).

“It has become an axiom of the new documentary that films cannot reveal the truth of events, but only the ideologies and consciousness that construct competing truths—the fictional master narratives by which we make sense of events…films with a special interest in the relation to the real, the "truths" which matter in people's lives but which cannot be transparently represented.” - Linda Williams, 1999

French philosopher Gilles Lipovetsky explains in his book L’ère du vide. Essais sur individualisme contemporain (The Age of Emptiness. Essays on Contemporary Individualism) that postmodern western society hunger for identity, difference and personal fulfilment. By the time of his publication in 1986 he was keenly observing the trend towards abandoning political and social ideologies in favor of individual discourses. He argued that in that time, people turned to media to help them cope with their fragmented sense of self-worth and identity, (Lipovetsky, G. 1986).

At that time, documentary began to set out to say something about the world. It was not a representation of reality, for that was what the public – in lieu of cinema vérité – viewed as fictitious or at the very least unrealistic. Documentary became a discourse, a sum of facts, evidence, personal stories and cinematic verve. The goal was to draw people away from fictional representations and into parts of the real world they had no capacity to experience. This has continued into the 21st century, as people follow the lives of reality TV stars more readily than those of fictional characters, satiating their hunger for “real” images. People’s interest in solid fact diminished as they searched for accurate representations of their own perspectives on social change and modern development (Williams, L. 1999).

One of the early examples of this form of representational postmodern documentary is Errol Morris’ 1988 film, The Thin Blue Line, which tells the story of Randall Dale Adams, an American man sentenced to death for a murder he didn’t commit. Morris created reenactments and used artistic cinematic technique to draw the audience into the story like one would a fictional crime show (Morris, E. 1988). Weeks after the documentary’s release, Adams was exonerated, much of the discovered evidence attributed to the work of film maker Errol Morris. Morris framed this film as a postmodern piece, doing this by contextualizing the past events and accusations against Adams in a present narrative, offering an alternative view of what happened and backing it up with investigation and evidence. Morris’ goal was to show that audiences were as willing to believe his version of events as the jurors were to believe the prosecution’s claims against Adams. Thus, he introduced reasonable doubt into the case (Flores, L. 2012).

Whilst a fascinating exploration of the way in which people can be convinced of facts, The Thin Blue Line is also one of the earlier examples of first-person narrative in a postmodern, subjective context (Flores, L. 2012). More often than not, film makers “resort to the first-person narration to increase the audience’s involvement in the subject matter of their films, hoping the autobiographical approach may help their stories reach a collective dimension,” (Alvarez, I. 2014). In Morris’ case, this was highly effective and paved the way for the continuation of the subjective turn in documentary as well as a trend toward these more autobiographical and personal narrative films.

Postmodern biographical films can be broken down into three separate categories, (auto)biographies, first person narratives and self fiction. All three look at the relationship between history, memory and self development through the eyes of the subject (Alvarez, I. 2014). Whilst The Thin Blue Line is an example of a biographical film, there are two 21st century documentaries that exemplify first person narratives and self fiction, and show the proliferation of the postmodern biographical genre. Firstly, the 2009 Australian documentary I, Psychopath, by Ian Walker is a first person narrative that follows diagnosed narcissist and self-suspected psychopath Sam Vaknin on his journey through Europe. Throughout the film, he undergoes a barrage of medical and psychological tests as he tries to get someone to tell him that he truly is psychopathic. There is a great deal of personal insight and self reflection from Sam, his wife and the film maker as they broach this difficult and disturbing subject, and follow and immensely personal journey (Walker, I. 2009).

The second film example is My Winnipeg (2007), by Guy Maddin. It is framed as an urban self portrait, a piece of self fiction - otherwise called docu-fantasy – on Maddin’s hometown, Winnipeg in Canada. He uses the film to express both his emotions and the nostalgia he feels in the face of urban change. The main feature of this self fiction piece is that is blends together facts and fiction by creating characters but placing them in real locations to create representations of history and past events (Maddin, G. 2007). The film itself is a visual eulogy for the Winnipeg that Maddin used to know, and the surreal nature of urban development in a small, isolated town. Like first person narrative, self fiction emerged after the subjective turn during the 1980s.  The discourse of these films is based mainly on “subjective perceptions instead of objective facts: the directors use personal stories to make political statements,” (Alvarez, I. 2014).

James Lincoln Collier wrote a book in 1991 entitled The Rise of Selfishness in America, much of which was a response to the subjective turn in media of the 1980s. It focuses on the social history of the wealth that America came into post-Vietnam, and the way it drove the country towards corporate takeover and the birth of the sheltered “me generation” (Collier, J. 1991). Both I, Psychopath’s Sam Vaknin and My Winnipeg’s Guy Maddin are part of this generation, one that has been increasingly encouraged to be introspective, independent and successful. Both left their small hometowns and later returned to urban development, which in turn led to distress over this change. Vaknin believes this contributed to his narcissism and suspected psychopathy, whilst Maddin turned the distress into creative energy, creating a surreal and subjective biopic of the town he was once very attached to (Maddin, 2007), (Walker, 2009). Much like Lipovesky theorized, these men were both searching for identity and personal fulfilment. They then filmed these journeys and shared them with the wider public. This is in no way dissimilar to shows like Dance Moms or Keeping Up with the Kardashians. Puritans may argue that these programs are not documentaries, but they clearly feature the postmodern biopic style, with subjective viewpoints and a lens dictated by the documentarian for dramatic effect (Arneson, K. 2012).

As post-modern documentary moves further away from the objectivity and realism of cinéma-vérité, it proceeds to push the boundaries of traditional documentary modality. Its application travels closer to the poetic and expository, leaving behind the didactics of traditional film. From the early postmodern documentaries like The Thin Blue Line to later first person narrative and self-fiction pieces like I, Psychopath and My Winnipeg, and the the current reality television favourites, the hunger for individualistic reality on screen is clearly growing every year, and people are looking not for factual expositions on history, but for subjective representations of the reality they live in. References Georgia Collings

Álvarez, Ivan. (2014). Cinema as Testimony and Discourse for History: Film Cityscapes in Autobiographical Documentaries. Revue Lisa. Retrieved from <https://lisa.revues.org/5579#ftn2>

Álvarez, Ivan. (2015). Documenting cityscapes. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

Arneson, Krystin. (2012). Representation Through Documentary. Artifacts, University of Missouri. Retrieved from <https://artifactsjournal.missouri.edu/2012/03/representation-through-documentary-a-post-modern-assessment/>

Bondebjerg, Ib. (2003). The Social and the Subjective Look: Documentaries and reflexive modernity. Australian International Documentary Conference. Retrieved from <http://www.modinet.dk/pdf/WorkingPapers/The_Social_and_the_Subjective_Look.pdf>

Collier, James. (1991). The rise of selfishness in America. New York: Oxford University Press.

Flores, Lucien. (2012). The Thin Blue Line and the Ambiguous Truth. Inquiries Journal. Retrieved from <http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/640/the-thin-blue-line-and-the-ambiguous-truth>

Lipovetsky, Gilles. (1986). L’ère du vid: Essais sur individualisme contemporain. Paris, France: Gallimard Press.

Maddin, Guy. (2007). My Winnipeg. Manitoba, Canada: Buffalo Gal Picutres.

Morris, Errol. (1988). The Thin Blue Line. Dallas, Texas: American Playhouse.

Walker, Ian. (2009). I, Psychopath. Australia: Liberty Productions.

Williams, Linda. (1999). Mirrors without Memories: Truth, History, and the New Documentary. Film Quarterly, University of California Press. Retrieved from <http://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft5h4nb36j&chunk.id=d0e7137&toc.depth=100&brand=ucpress>