Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Is Guaranteed To Avoid Discovery's Ending Problem

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds wouldn’t exist without Star Trek: Discovery. Following the positive reception to Anson Mount’s Christopher Pike, Ethan Peck’s Spock, and Rebecca Romijn’s Uni Chin Riley in Discovery season 2, Paramount+ ordered a spinoff focused on these three and other crew members from the USS Enterprise in the years before James T. Kirk captained the ship. It’s one of the rare examples of fan enthusiasm paving the way for an official project.

In June 2025, it was announced that Strange New Worlds would end after five seasons. The public is still a ways off from seeing this corner of the sci-fi franchise closed off, as Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 4 still needs to premiere in July. Still, with the show’s cast and crew having finished filming in December, the countdown to the beginning of the end is well underway.

Assuming Strange New Worlds season 5 is released in 2027, it will follow four years after Star Trek: Discovery wrapped its own five-season run. The latter show’s series finale earned mixed critical reception, but the former series is already working with an advantage that guarantees it won’t suffer the same ending problem: more preparation time.

Star Trek: Discovery & Strange New Worlds Both Had More Than 5 Seasons In Them

In an ideal world, Discovery and Strange New Worlds would both have run longer than five seasons. Granted, neither show was ever going to reach the same number of episodes as The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager received, but they still had more than creative material that could have been explored. Fortunately, Paramount+ gave Discovery and Strange New Worlds the time to properly conclude, as opposed to ending on a cliffhanger or with too many lingering plot threads.

In Discovery’s case, however, this was essentially an afterthought. Season 5 filmed from June to November 2022, and the show’s cancellation was announced the following March. Meaning, the cast and crew had no idea during principal photography that this would be the final batch of Discovery episodes. An additional month of filming was scheduled to produce an epilogue to follow the end of the main season 5 arc in “Life, Itself.”

Though it’s great that characters like Michael Burnham and Saru were given that extra time in the Discovery series finale, the end result also felt rushed. That included shoehorning in the title ship being reverted to its 23rd century appearance and being sent on a red directive mission in order to set up the Star Trek: Short Treks installment “Calypso.” The loose ends being tied up was welcome, but it would have been better if the Discovery writers had known ahead of season 5 filming that this would be the final hurrah. That way, the entirety of “Life, Itself” could have felt like a series finale, rather than just the final 15–20 minutes.

Thankfully, Strange New Worlds was given a lot more runway with its ending. Its cancellation was announced in June 2025, shortly before the season 3 premiere, and three months after season 4 began filming. Though Strange New Worlds season 5 will only be comprised of six episodes rather than 10, that’s better than Paramount+’s original plan to end the show after season 4.

Showrunners Akiva Goldsman and Henry Alonso Myers didn’t want Strange New Worlds to be put in the same kind of position as Discovery, so they were able to get the abbreviated final season approved. Since the writers had advanced notice about the end coming, they had more than enough time to wrap up loose ends.

It’s already been revealed that Thomas Jane and Kai Murakami will respectively play Dr. Leonard McCoy and Hikaru Sulu in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ series finale. That’s the extent of official season 5 plot information that’s been revealed so far, given that season 4 hasn’t even begun yet. However, at least the show will be able to suitably lead into the events of Star Trek: The Original Series, which is strengthened by the addition of these two characters.

Whatever ends up happening in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ final six episodes, at least the show’s team went into it with enough time to prepare. If only Discovery (as well as the recently canceled Starfleet Academy) could have been afforded that same opportunity.