Star Trek: Discovery: Sonequa Martin-Green boldly takes the captain's seat in NYCC trailer for S4

The official trailer for Season 4 of Star Trek: Discovery came in hot like a Starship falling through the atmosphere during the show's panel at New York Comic Con Saturday afternoon. Sonequa Martin-Green's Michael Burnham takes her rightful place in the captain's seat just in time to face new threats and a future of unknowns.

"I'm really excited about so many things about this season. It's really hard to say what I'm most excited about. But being in the captain’s chair, being cemented in history, it’s huge," Martin-Green said just before the trailer was shown to a crowd full of cheering Trekkies (it was then screened again). "It’s unspeakable."

During the subsequent cast discussion, the actress talked about how Burnham experiences "a lot of discoveries" and "a lot of challenges" in the character's new role as captain of the USS Discovery. "I think every relationship is affected by it. Because all of a sudden, there's this bit of distance that's kind of hard to explain. When you take on responsibility for an entire crew on paper, there is automatically a stepping back that has to happen because you have to have a macro vision and a macro perspective, so you can make the best decisions for the whole."

Watch the trailer below:

Getting the chance to watch the new footage, with all the completed visual effects, was quite the thrill for supporting cast member Anthony Rapp, who plays Paul Stamets.

"The experience of doing this past season was so strange because we were in the middle of the pandemic. We were really locked down and living in this bubble," he said. "It felt like this small, personal experience and suddenly, to see it like that just makes it feel huge and epic in a way that was hard for us to know that's what it was while we were doing it."

Indeed, Season 4 of Star Trek: Discovery was one of the first major TV shows to return to set in the thick of the global health crisis. Showrunner/executive producer Michelle Paradise teased that the new episodes will tap into all the uncertainty caused by COVID-19 over the last-year-and-a-half. 

"Star Trek looks at what's happening in the world around us and we look for ways via the show and science fiction to reflect some of those things thematically," she explained. "When we came into the season [we asked ourselves] 'What is happening in the world around us? What are all of us collectively dealing with?' Uncertainty is one of the big things for us thematically because that was happening very much in the world around us for everyone here. We're still kind of in that. Looking at: 'What does that mean for each of our characters individually? What does it mean for our characters in relationship with one another? What does it mean for the Federation and for non-Federation planets? What does it mean as a whole?'"

While the Discovery crew won't be dealing with a deadly contagion, they will have to contend with a destructive gravitational anomaly that threatens people across the universe — whether they belong to the Federation or not.

"I think I can speak for everyone when I say I don't think any of us were expecting to have a threat this big so soon after jumping to this future," Martin-Green said. "I know at least for Burnham it's a lot. It's like, 'Man, here we are again with a threat of great, great magnitude.' Of course, the people in this story, being the honorable people that they are, their true character comes out at that moment of greatest pressure. Beautiful stuff comes out as hard as it might be."

The hit series returns Thursday, Nov. 18 on Paramount+. 

Check out some new key art below...

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