Everything Star Trek: Discovery Has Revealed About Season 4’s Anomaly

Warning: SPOILERS for Star Trek: Discovery Season 4, Episode 5 – “The Examples”.

The major revelations Star Trek: Discovery season 4, episode 5 unveiled about the Dark Matter Anomaly (or DMA) confirms it’s greater than any threat the United Federation of Planets has faced before. The gravitational anomaly came out of nowhere and destroyed Book’s (David Ajala) home planet of Kwejian in Star Trek: Discovery‘s season 4 premiere. Since then, the Discovery’s top minds have tried to unravel the mystery of the DMA, which has defied every scientific explanation conceived by Commander Paul Stamets (Anthony Rapp).

After their initial analysis of the gravimetric anomaly registered it as being a staggering five lightyears across, Stamets and Lt. Sylvia Tilly (Mary Wiseman) worked under the hypothesis that the anomaly is a naturally occurring cosmic event. Stamets first believed the anomaly to be a roving binary black hole. Some of the science fit their guess but after Book piloted his ship into the anomaly to gather more data, Discovery’s geniuses were stunned to learn that the anomaly could change direction at will, which cancels the idea that it could be a roving black hole. After more brainstorming, Stamets was adamant that the anomaly is a primordial wormhole but the Vulcans of the Ni’Var Science Council debunked Stamet’s theory because President T’Rina (Tara Rosling) found no tachyons in Book’s memories of Kwejian’s destruction during their mind-meld.

In Star Trek: Discovery season 4, episode 5, “The Examples,” introduced Ruon Tarka (Shawn Doyle), a Risian scientist hailed as one of the 32nd century Federation’s top scientific minds. To Stamets’ chagrin, Tarka came aboard the Discovery and dismissed most of the spore drive navigator’s findings. Instead, Tarka boldly constructed an incredibly dangerous working model of the Dark Matter Anomaly that used up so much power, it could have destroyed the USS Discovery. But the Risian genius uncovered some big answers about the DMA before First Officer Saru (Doug Jones) literally pulled the plug on Tarka’s experiment. For starters, the anomaly is a mass of dark matter guided by a controller device at its center, which denotes that it was made by someone. Further, that same someone created a wormhole across spacetime to bring the DMA into the Alpha Quadrant. This adds up to the DMA being made by some sort of intelligent design and it’s being used as a weapon against the galaxy.

Tarka also learned that the eye-shaped Dark Matter Anomaly has an energy source equivalent to a hypergiant star. The DMA requires a staggering amount of power, and thus, this eliminates most of the species and races that are known to the Federation as the culprits behind its creation. However, as Tarka told Book when they met at the USS Discovery’s bar, he doesn’t think any of them are behind the DMA anyway. Starfleet naturally considered which of the immensely powerful cosmic beings it encountered in the last thousand years could have been responsible for the DMA, including the Iconians, the Metrons, and the Q Continuum. But it seems there’s a completely different threat somewhere beyond the galaxy, which Starfleet has classified as Unknown Species 10-C, that has bad intentions towards the Alpha Quadrant.

Star Trek: Discovery did its due diligence by exploring the possibility that one of the cosmic god-like beings the franchise has already introduced is behind the Dark Matter Anomaly. Trekkers have also considered the possibility that the DMA is a living machine like V’Ger from Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Meanwhile, Star Trek: Picard established there are new, unknown enemies from far beyond the galaxy who want to attack the Alpha Quadrant, such as the race of villainous synthetic beings seen in Star Trek: Picard‘s season 1 finale. Perhaps that same unnamed race built the DMA to finally exact revenge on the Federation 800 years later. While “The Examples” dropped the biggest hints about the DMA so far, the truth behind this ultimate weapon of unimaginable power is still to come in Star Trek: Discovery season 4.

Star Trek: Discovery streams Thursdays on Paramount+.

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