Jonathan Frakes Won't Take Credit For Star Trek: Discovery's Next Gen-Inspired Finale

The fifth and final season of "Star Trek: Discovery" aired on May 30, 2024, marking the end of an era. "Discovery" was the "Star Trek" series that launched CBS All Access back in 2017, signaling the return of the franchise to TV after a 12-year hiatus. It also was the first of six new "Star Trek" shows that were to run simultaneously on the service; "Discovery" soon shared time with "Short Treks," "Star Trek: Picard," "Star Trek: Lower Decks," "Star Trek: Prodigy," and "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds." There were grand plans afoot to add "Starfleet Academy" and "Section 31" to that roster, making "Star Trek" constant and ubiquitous. 

Thanks to the caprices of the Streaming Wars, however, the expensive all-growth-all-the-time model proved to be untenable, and many of the above shows came to an end. As of this writing, only "Lower Decks" and "Strange New Worlds" are returning, while "Section 31" was shortened to a single TV movie. "Starfleet Academy" is currently finding its cast. 

"Discovery," meanwhile, exited on a season devoted to an Indiana Jones-style adventure, with its characters galavanting across the galaxy, trying to locate an impossibly ancient alien widget with unknown properties. The unknown widget, possibly a weapon, belonged to a species called the Progenitors, a race of aliens first introduced in the "Star Trek: The Next Generation" episode "The Chase" (April 26, 1993). 

As it so happens, "The Chase" was directed by longtime Trek actor Jonathan Frakes, now an experienced director with a decades-long career. He also, by coincidence, directed "Lagrange Point," the penultimate episode of "Discovery." Earlier this year, Frakes talked to IndieWire about the end of the series and how it was merely a coincidence that one of his episodes of "NextGen" inspired a whole season of "Discovery." He takes no credit.

To catch up any non-Trekkies: "The Chase" was about the Federation racing with the Klingons, the Romulans, and the Cardassians to uncover a mysterious ancient secret on a distant planet. There is a lot of double-dealing and intrigue, but the search will ultimately find representatives from each group beaming down to an uninhabited world and uncovering an ancient holographic message left there eons ago. A member of the Progenitors appears and explains that her species was the very first sentient species in the galaxy. When they had mastered space travel, they were bummed out to find that they were alone. They proceeded to seed millions of worlds with their own DNA, hoping that Progenitor-like species would eventually evolve on each one. 

"The Chase" provided a handy sci-fi excuse as to why all the aliens in "Star Trek" looked more or less like humans (one head, two arms, bipedal, walks upright, etc.). While Frakes directed multiple episodes of "Discovery," he didn't develop the story for the show's fifth season, and had no input into the "Chase"-based story. That was the decision of showrunner Michael Paradise. Frakes said very directly: 

"It's just by chance that 'The Chase' was my episode. [...] In the old days on 'NextGen,' you were assigned episodes based on people's availability. I'm very proud to have been a part of it, though, and very excited that Michelle Paradise chose it as sort of the tipping off point for the season. But it was clearly by happenstance that it happened to be an episode that I had directed then, and now I'm involved with the finale of, so it's thrilling." 

Paradise could have taken any episode from any Trek series as his jumping-off point, but decided on "The Chase." As one can see, Frakes was certainly pleased.