Posted in: Star Trek, TV | Tagged: discovery, star trek, strange new worlds

Star Trek: Discovery Editor/Director on Growth, Signature Moment, SNW

Editor/Director Jon Dudkowski spoke with Bleeding Cool about navigating through five seasons of Star Trek: Discovery and much more.

Few ever get to live their dream like editor Jon Dudkowski did to become part of a franchise they grew up idolizing, like Star Trek. He came at a time when the franchise faced uncertainty in 2005 as Enterprise wrapped its fourth and final season and the franchise's final run on network television. While Star Trek did make its return to the big screen starting with 2009's J. J. Abrams Kelvin Universe film, also titled Star Trek, there wasn't a clear path to TV; then came the big opportunity when Paramount released its streaming service, Paramount+ with Discovery embarking on its maiden voyage as one of its original flagship shows to lead the way in 2017. Dudkowski was involved in 18 of the 65 episodes across all five seasons, from the premiere episode "The Vulcan Hello" to the finale "Life, Itself" in 2024. The editor and director spoke to Bleeding Cool about a variety of subjects, including how the series changed from its 23rd-century origins to the 32nd, becoming part of the series' biggest moments, including how season two would become the backdoor pilot to Strange New Worlds, and star Sonequa Martin-Green's signature Michael Burnham moment that would set the tone for season three to the end fo the series.

Star Trek: Discovery Editor Jon Dudkowski on Series' Best Moments

Bleeding Cool: 'Discovery' had come a long way from the premiere episode 'The Vulcan Hello' to the finale, 'Life, Itself". How would you describe your experience working on that journey as you did over the span of the five seasons?

That's interesting. I've never thought about it in terms of a journey from point A to point B. I've been a lifelong Star Trek fan. This was literally my dream job. I'm certainly not alone, but I've been fantasizing about Star Trek for a long time. To get the opportunity to work on 'The Vulcan Hello' was a big deal for me. The director, David Semel, was the person I had the best relationship with. I had worked with (EP) Alex Kurtzman in the past, but we weren't working together at that point.

It was David, who was working on the pilot, and he brought me in. It had a lot of personality and his creative voice. Getting a pilot off the ground is a Herculean effort – and especially something that big. The thing about Star Trek is you must fabricate. There's a world that exists you can go to with everything from the way the tricorders look to the sets. Everything had to be constructed, designed, and conceived of. It's this monumental task. You can't just go to a location and say, "OK, this is what it is." Getting it off the ground was the struggle, trying to make a story people would want to engage in. What had Star Trek evolved into? That first episode was a dark war story. Sonequa [Martin-Green]'s Burnham ends that episode in a very dark place, committing mutiny.

When you jump forward to the final episode, and you have a whole new team of people involved, you have [Dir] Olatunde [Osunsanmi], [EP/writer] Michelle [Paradise], and Alex, who had been a voice through the whole thing. The ship had taken so many turns along the way that by the time we got to that final episode, tonally, the show was very different. Burnham had been on this radical journey as a character that Sonequa had evolved the character through. You have voices in it like Olatunde and Michelle, who are very different than David Semel. Basically, it was such a wild ride. Every year, Star Trek: Discovery did something new. We had a lot of new voices with writers and directors. I was always involved, and there were a few of us who were in the trenches from the beginning. There were a couple of women in (EPs) Dana Wilson and (producer) Kirsten Byers. Alex was always in the background in the day-to-day operation of the show. He was involved as the seasons went on.

It was this wild ride with lots of crazy turns, and you can see it. If you watch that first episode and then you watch the last episode tonally, the premise is the same and the character names are the same, but it's a very different show. Even the timeline has changed; there are a thousand years that separate those two stories, so it was a bit of a trip. We held on for all we were worth, took each episode at a time, and tried to make it as good as we could. I don't know if there was any idea of where the show was going to end at the beginning. The writers might have had some concept of it, but it's not like we were aiming for that last episode from the beginning.

Was there one stand-out episode more difficult to edit together than the rest?

The hardest episode to edit was my first as a director. So that was 307 ('Unification III'), that was Ni'Var, and that one was difficult because I never had to edit my directorial work, and that was a creative challenge; I didn't anticipate how hard it would be because as an editor, a lot of times you're sitting with the producers, you're working with the directors, and you're like, "We can do this, or we can't do that." When you're the director as well, I wasn't going to say at any point, "We can't do that." I always had to find a solution as an editor. I say, "Of course, we've got the material to do that," and then I start sweating, and I must figure out a way to make it work.

It didn't help Covid was difficult at a logistical level. We shifted over from working in offices to working from home, and that was very different because we used to walk into other people's offices and say, "Hey, what do you think about this? What kind of music do you think? Do you have any good sound effects for this?" We're using Slack and had to invent a whole process, but the two episodes that I will say are my favorites, which include the second episode I directed (season five's 'Erigah').

Those are special, but the two episodes from an editing standpoint, the first episode of season two ('Brother'), the one Alex directed. That was the one where we introduced Pike, you can feel the tone of the show changed. It laid the groundwork for the tone that 'Strange New Worlds' developed, and Anson Mount came in with that character fully baked and that episode has humor, adventure, and heart.

Season one of 'Disco' had all those things, but rarely did it have all of them in one episode, episode 201 was the first time I was like, "OK, this is tonally, what we're all aiming for." I don't think it's an accident that that's the first episode that Alex directed. Episode 301 ('That Hope Is You, Part I') that Olatunde directed was Burnham and Book's (David Ajala) episode, but it was Burnham in the new future, coming to terms with having around. They shot in Greenland, and that one was a stunning cinematic. Every scene, I got the dailies, and my jaw would drop, and I'd call Olatunde, and I'd be like, "Oh my God! This is incredible!" He'd be like, "I'm glad you like it," and then he moved on to the next one.

Every scene in that episode, Olatunde came with A+ game. and there's one scene specifically to talk about Sonequa for a second, where she's on the side of the volcano. She's just crash-landed, alone, trying to figure out the communicator and if there's life in this new world while having an existential crisis moment. My understanding is they were out in Greenland and hiked to the top of this volcano. There were these physical challenges, and then they were losing the light. It was the end of the day, and they had time for two takes.

Olatunde put his cameras in and got his lenses right, and he's like, "This is what I want," and he had a much larger design for what he wanted to do with that moment. He didn't have the time and put the camera there. He said, "Sonequa, I trust you can do this," and it's three and a half minutes of little dialog, just Sonequa going through action, emoting, and carrying this crazy story of somebody who just traveled a thousand years in the future in the Red Angel suit. There was so much interesting story happening, and it was just cameras on Sonequa, and she just killed it. It was such a good example of how she is the most remarkable actress.

I have nothing but glowing praise for her as a person and as an actress. That was a make-or-break moment in that instance. You couldn't go back and reshoot it. The whole series hinged on how well that scene came across, and they didn't have any time to do it again. It was like, "All right, turn on the camera, and you got to hit a home run right now on the spot, "Go," and she did. [Sonequa] stepped up and nailed it. That was probably the most nerve-racking, even as an editor, to watch because I was like, "Oh, my God, if we don't have it here, I don't know what we're going to do, and we had it, which was really cool."

All five seasons of Star Trek: Discovery, which also stars Anthony Rapp, Doug Jones, Mary Wiseman, Emily Coutts, Wilson Cruz, Patrick Kwok-Choon, Oyin Oladejo, Blu del Barrio, Tig Notaro, and Michelle Yeoh, are available on Paramount+.

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