Spoilers I think I cracked "Calypso"

[Lord Garth]

I'm glad they didn't go into detail. With how little time they had, it would've hurt more than helped.

But yeah. I knew they'd address it somehow, someway. I never caved on that stance. But one thing that really clued me in was the glimpse into a possible Future Future earlier in the season.

 

[Lord Garth]

What I like is that even though any sense mystery went away about The Future once Discovery reached Starfleet in Season 3, at least now we still have a mystery about what things are like in The Future Future.

 

[firehawk12]

I doubt it as well, since it was just hastily tacked-on nonsense that they came up with at the last minute when they found out their show was being cancelled.

I get the desire to make that Short Trek more legitimate, but I'm sure that was just a throwaway idea that I can't imagine was meant to be used in the series finale. If they really wanted to make it canon, it would have been better to set the epilogue a thousand years into the future when Discovery is recovered after Calypso, but it should have just been ignored.

 

[Tuskin38]

I'm think ing everything after the wedding is part of the epilogue that was shot after the series was cancelled.

So I imagine they would have liked to tell a longer story in a future season, but cancellation lead to this.

 

[Dukhat]

I get the desire to make that Short Trek more legitimate, but I'm sure that was just a throwaway idea that I can't imagine was meant to be used in the series finale. If they really wanted to make it canon, it would have been better to set the epilogue a thousand years into the future when Discovery is recovered after Calypso, but it should have just been ignored.

I could have sworn that they had mentioned before the season started that they wanted to reference Calypso in some way. The thing is, there wasn't anything at all in season 5 that really had to do with it. People assumed when they saw the Mirror Enterprise that the ship we saw in Calypso was actually the Mirror Discovery, but even that turned out not to be the case (and good thing, because that would have been even more stupid.) So I'm not sure exactly what they had in mind originally, but I'd bet dollars to donuts it wasn't this.

 

[David cgc]

The time to do it was season two, especially once they decided to jump into the future anyway. Let's see... they can't destroy the Sphere Data, but they can transfer it out of the ship. Putting it into another computer won't work, but they figure out a way to store the data organically, so they can split it up and hide it in the crew. They still need to keep it out of reach long enough for Control to be fully dealt with, so they come up with a two-stage plan. First, they jump the ship somewhere isolated and hidden, years away using warp drive. Then, they do some technobabble time-crystal mushroom stuff to jump the crew, but not the ship forward in time a thousand years (they can't jump the ship itself forward for... reasons). Thus, the ship can't move because it needs to be in precise position to catch the crew on the other side of their jump. Season two ends with them popping a thousand years in the future instantly, and ends on the shock reveal that ship can talk, now. Well, talk like a person.

Of course, the real best solution would be to have used one of the other half-dozen Starfleet ship CG models they had and not set "Calypso" on Discovery at all, a tidbit that had no effect on the story (do they even say the name of the ship in dialog? They can still retcon it, just replace, like, two VFX shots) but hung an albatross around the neck of the rest of the show.

 

[eschaton]

Let's be honest: Michael Chabon had an idea for an awesome Star Trek short, and given he's the most prestigious writer who has ever wanted to pen something for Trek, they humored him. And he wrote a banger, up there with the absolute best in Trek. But it was only incidentally discovery-related. The use of the Disco sets allowed them to save a ton on budgeting, which is what made production possible.

The thing is, when Michael Chabon wrote something that moving and incredible, Discovery writers wanted to hitch their wagon to it. And why wouldn't they? If they did that, it could be Disco's The Inner Light, or In The Pale Moonlight. But it was never meant to be a part of the Discovery narrative, so any attempt to fit it in was bound to be disappointing.

 

[Fateor]

Let's be honest: Michael Chabon had an idea for an awesome Star Trek short, and given he's the most prestigious writer who has ever wanted to pen something for Trek, they humored him. And he wrote a banger, up there with the absolute best in Trek. But it was only incidentally discovery-related. The use of the Disco sets allowed them to save a ton on budgeting, which is what made production possible.

The thing is, when Michael Chabon wrote something that moving and incredible, Discovery writers wanted to hitch their wagon to it. And why wouldn't they? If they did that, it could be Disco's The Inner Light, or In The Pale Moonlight. But it was never meant to be a part of the Discovery narrative, so any attempt to fit it in was bound to be disappointing.

It was meant to be a part of Discovery's narrative, before they re-tooled everything in the middle of season 2.

After that it just didn't/couldn't fit.

 

[firehawk12]

It was meant to be a part of Discovery's narrative, before they re-tooled everything in the middle of season 2.

After that it just didn't/couldn't fit.

What was the original intent?

 

[NCC-73515]

How they did it was exactly right. Lead into it, but leave the details open for a potential comic, novel, whatever. The only thing that went a little far was namedropping Craft like that

 

[Commander Troi]

This.

My personal head canon is that Zora and/or the spore drive couldn't really be decommissioned, so they sent Discovery away to keep it out of "the wrong hands" with the intention of retrieving her eventually.

 

[Captrek]

How they did it was exactly right. Lead into it, but leave the details open for a potential comic, novel, whatever. The only thing that went a little far was namedropping Craft like that

Craft is not what she was sent to wait for. He just coincidentally shares a name.

/my desperate attempt to head canon this away

 

[Ar-Pharazon]

What was the original intent?

Wasn't the very original plan for the show to be some sort of analogy anthology that took place in multiple timelines throughout the ST history?

 

[fireproof78]

Considering it ignored.

Wasn't the very original plan for the show to be some sort of analogy that took place in multiple timelines throughout the ST history?

It was supposed to be an anthology and move from crew to crew and period to period. That was declined by CBS.

 

[Precious Tritium]

According to Paradise, season 6 would have been all about Calypso, had it happened.

“We always knew that we wanted to somehow tie that back up,” says Paradise, who joined the writers’ room in Season 2, and became showrunner starting with Season 3. “We never wanted ‘Calypso’ to be the dangling Chad.”

So much so, in fact, that, as the show began winding down production on Season 5, Paradise had started planning to make “Calypso” the central narrative engine for Season 6. ​

Personally, I was never a fan of them trying to desperately tie Calypso back in. It's a beautiful little one-shot that really doesn't need explaining. Let the mystery be.

 

[valkyrie013]

The whole thing is that Zora is a sentient entity, and asking or ordering a sentient to just wait for a 1000 years is just cruel and unsuall punishment..
Now if they did what I think they were thinking, at the end of S2 they have to leave the ship BEFORE it was sentient, and over the intervening years it became sentient, and it got recovered by the crew and everything moved on like it did. Owell..

 

[Tuskin38]

Craft was originally going to be in season 3 based off the naming on the earliest concept art for Book's ship.

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/1xa213

 

[Lord Garth]

According to Paradise, season 6 would have been all about Calypso, had it happened.

“We always knew that we wanted to somehow tie that back up,” says Paradise, who joined the writers’ room in Season 2, and became showrunner starting with Season 3. “We never wanted ‘Calypso’ to be the dangling Chad.”

So much so, in fact, that, as the show began winding down production on Season 5, Paradise had started planning to make “Calypso” the central narrative engine for Season 6. ​

Personally, I was never a fan of them trying to desperately tie Calypso back in. It's a beautiful little one-shot that really doesn't need explaining. Let the mystery be.

I guess I would've spent Season 6 disagreeing with everyone else in the forum. Dodged a bullet there!

Well, I hope one day to disagree with everyone about a Calypso TV Movie.

 

[Yistaan]

The whole thing is that Zora is a sentient entity, and asking or ordering a sentient to just wait for a 1000 years is just cruel and unsuall punishment..
Now if they did what I think they were thinking, at the end of S2 they have to leave the ship BEFORE it was sentient, and over the intervening years it became sentient, and it got recovered by the crew and everything moved on like it did. Owell..

We got it wrong in Enterprise the whole time. Future Guy wasn't the villain. He was the hero fighting Daniels/Kovich, a villain with a penchant for cruel and unusual punishment.

As for explaining Calypso, my guess is that Craft's people got involved in the Temporal Wars (obviously they wouldn't know/care about a memo not to engage in time travel, not knowing they were always destined to ignore such a mandate anyway) and young Daniels met Craft during the wars who told him all about being rescued by Discovery. Kovich then sends Discovery on track to meet Craft in the 43rd century to keep the timeline stable, and that's all there is to it.

 

[Aragorn]

After Zora rescues Craft, he goes on to invent the device that the Progenitors discover 4 billion years ago.