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Tonight is the midseason finale of Star Trek: Discovery. The show will return in January, but how many episodes will be left in the first season? Unfortunately, there won’t be as many episodes left as we had for the first half of the season.
Episode 9 is airing tonight. When Star Trek: Discovery returns on January 7, there will only be six episodes left to air in the season. Yes, that means the second half of the season will be much shorter than the first half. The show has already been renewed for a second season, but we don’t know yet how many episodes will be in Season 2.
It looks like all six episodes will air on consecutive weeks, including the night of the Super Bowl. Because the show airs on CBS All Access and many people don’t watch it live, it won’t really be competing with the Super Bowl. The final episode in Season 1 will air on February 11.
Episode 10, the first episode in the second half of the season, will be called “Despite Yourself.” The names of the remaining five episodes have not yet been released.
Minor spoilers below:
The description for Episode 10 reads: “In Chapter 2, while in unfamiliar territory, the U.S.S. Discovery crew is forced to get creative in their next efforts to survive opposing and unprecedented forces and return home.”
This description sounds a lot like Voyager. It’s unclear if this is giving away a big twist for the midseason finale, or if the description is about something entirely new that happens at the beginning of Episode 10. We can guess that this involves some kind of glitch with the spore drive that sends the Discovery crew far, far away. We also know that this drive is affecting Lieutenant Stamets in some strange ways, giving him weird personality shifts ranging from serious to completely goofy. He even guessed that Tilly was a captain when she wasn’t. But if the ship is sent far from known territory, then we can guess Stamets is still being hooked into the spore drive by the time the midseason episode ends.
Of course, there’s always the possibility that “unfamiliar territory” doesn’t refer to this universe at all, but that Discovery will end up in the mirror universe. That would be intriguing, and it’s definitely something fans have been waiting for ever since Stamets had that weird encounter with his own reflection. Of course, we don’t know if Stamets’ issues have anything to do with the mirror universe, but it would be a nice twist if they do.