We've jumped ahead to this future
to save the universe from Control.
And now the Federation is back.
Starfleet Academy has opened again.
Things are thriving again, we're rebuilding,
and now here comes this DMA, you know.
And I just remember, as Burnham, thinking,
"You gotta be kidding me."
Here we are again with this huge threat
that could wipe us all out.
The DMA, dark matter anomaly,
too much of a mouthful to say every time.
Right.
As we see in our current world,
you always try to find names for things.
If there's something happening,
the scientists and the government people,
they always try to find some way to name it.
I think that helps you feel some sense of power over it.
And this thing is so powerful in and of itself,
that I think anything you can do to try to do that
is helpful because it's this chaotic, enormous cloud
sort of thing that gobbles up whatever's around it.
The DMA anomaly is a gravitational force
that can wreak havoc throughout the galaxy.
It can smash planets, it can smash suns,
it can destroy solar systems.
And it creates this accretion disc around it
that is just flinging all of these things it destroyed,
planets, solar systems.
And it's the Discovery crew's mission
to identify what this is, to hunt it down, and to stop it.
We gathered this data in order to predict its path.
Are you saying we cannot do that?
No, sir, we can't.
It's totally unpredictable.
You know, I think that we have a case in our current world
that we're living through that there's something happening
that we don't know where it came from,
or why it came from exactly.
We have theories, but it still is wreaking havoc.
Lives are at stake!
- Your emotional response
to factual analysis is quite illogical.
Present day themes, present day events,
all of those sorts of things
are just sort of baked into Trek.
And so in conceiving of the season,
this thing was out there,
and it felt like it was having such an impact
on our own psyches and the greater world
that it felt like something natural
that we would treat and that we would talk about in Trek.
So we looked at that,
and then looked at what is our version of that?
And obviously we didn't want to do a one-to-one with COVID.
We didn't wanna tell the COVID season,
'cause we're all living through it,
and no one wants to watch that.
Trek is always built on hope and optimism,
and coming together and we can overcome anything.
And so how do we infuse that into this story as well?
So how do we take the big thing that no one understands,
we don't even know what it is.
We don't know what to do about it.
How do we, step by step, start to identify it,
figure out what it is, and come together
to help solve the problem.
I love what the writers have done with the DMA.
And I love the symbolism there,
and I love the art imitating life of it.
We've gotta figure it out.
Yet again, we have to come together,
and I do love how you see everyone on the ship,
rising to the occasion.
A big part of this show is the discovery of who we are,
and who we are to each other, and what our roles really are.
And you see that with this DMA.
You see everyone rising,
you see everyone cementing more and more
into who they're destined to be
because of the hardship of it all, you know,
and because of the unity it necessitates.
We are going to make damn sure
nothing like this happens again.
Not on our watch.