Star Trek: Discovery Season 2 Release Date, Cast & Everything We Know

Star Trek: Discovery’s first season ended with an image meant to tingle your fan ganglia, as the USS Discovery, en route to pick up its new captain, responds to a distress call from the starship Enterprise. The season finale ends with the two ships facing each other in space, promising adventures to come.

So, what will that look like? Surprisingly, we already know quite a bit about what to expect Star Trek: Discovery Season 2.

It’s Mostly Written Already.

Writers for Star Trek: Discovery have been working since November.

Season 2 Begins Filming In April.

That’s according to producer Alex Kurtzman.

The most likely premiere window for Star Trek: Discovery Season 2 is January 2019.

Or, as Kurtzman told Express, “the early side of 2019.”

Season 2 will have a serial arc about “science versus faith,” but also more one-off adventures.

Co-showrunner Aaron Harberts told AV Club that “we have time to do things like more away missions, newer planets. These are stories that might fall a little bit more into a framework of allegory that people love to get from Trek. But we will always continue to have that overarching serialized thread.”

You know what would be perfect for an exploration of “science versus faith”? A classic Star Trek god-like being. Maybe even… Q? Maybe even… JEFFREY COMBS AS Q?

While answering questions on Twitter, Discovery writer Ted Sullivan agreed Combs would be a great addition to the cast. Then, apropos of nothing, Sullivan added, “I’d be curious to see how the team dealt with a Q.” Combs is a horror movie legend, starring as the titular Re-Animator and a bunch of other Stuart Gordon movies, including the incredible, sleazy Castle Freak . But he’s also known for his many, many appearances in Star Trek, especially as Weyoun 4, 5, 7 and 8 on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. He’s also played Ferengi, Andorian and several other one-off aliens.

Combs is a great character actor and would probably offer a much more menacing interpretation of a member of the godlike Q Continuum than John de Lancie, who played a Q character in Star Trek: The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and Voyager.

Unfortunately, Sullivan casually endorsing both Jeffrey Combs and Q as much as proves it won’t actually be a part of Discovery Season 2.

The Enterprise will return in Season 2 and clear up canon questions.

The ending to the Discovery finale wasn’t just fan service. Instead, the Enterprise will have a big part to play next season. “People have a lot of questions about how we’re adhering to canon. The arrival of the Enterprise suggests they’re going to begin to get answers. Those answers will not come immediately, they will trickle out over the course of the season,” Kurtzman told Entertainment Weekly. “The show is still called Discovery. The show is not called Enterprise. So figuring out a way for the Enterprise to work in that framework is the task of our story-breaking for Season 2 right now.”

Spock will not appear, others will.

“We certainly aren’t confirming that we’re even going to introduce Spock and we certainly are not casting that role either,” Harberts told The Hollywood Reporter.

But Kurtzman hinted that other familiar characters will pop up. “Obviously, they’re going to be wondering who’s on board the Enterprise. I think there will be some surprises there. We will maintain consistency with canon, but there will be surprises.”

Expect Captain Pike and maybe Number One, the original basis for Michael Burnham, to appear. Captain Kirk was still serving aboard the Farragut at this point in the Star Trek timeline.

If people were mad about the updated Enterprise, wait until they see the interior.

“We have to stay consistent design-wise with the Enterprise, obviously we can’t mess around with that. That being said, the technology and the look of Discovery is so far past TOS merely as a function of the time. Our goal is to be interpretive in a way that feels it’s protective of what the Enterprise would look like if, in theory, if were to build any Enterprise sets,” Kurtzman said.

More of the USS Discovery interior will be revealed, too.

Sullivan confirmed Paul Stamets is not the Chief of Engineering. His spore drive lab is a private workspace, not the Engineering section of the ship. “We’ll definitely see more of engineering in S2,” Sullivan said, suggesting that not only will we meet more Discovery crew members in future episodes, but will also see more of the interior of the ship.

The spore drive (and Stamets’ relationship with it) will return.

The spore drive was one of the more continuity-breaking of Star Trek: Discovery’s innovations, introducing a stardrive more warp-capable than anything Starfleet has more than a hundred years later. So when the Discovery finale suspended use of the spore drive until a navigational system that doesn’t violate United Federation of Planets law on genetic manipulation could be developed. It sounded like the writers putting the spore drive in a box and shoving it up on a high shelf, never to appear again.

Not so, co-showrunner Gretchen Berg told IGN: “You don’t get a Maserati and then put it in the garage. I think we got to figure out some things, for the ship to run the way we love to see it run.”

“Stamets is gonna have to figure out what’s next for him,” Harberts added. “I mean, at the moment he’s not driving that ship, and he’s, more importantly, lost the love of his life, so he’s got a lot of soul-searching coming into Season 2.”

Tilly is likely to be a key part of the mycelial network story in Season 2.

Remember that shot right after they use the spore drive for the last time, when a single, green spore falls on Tilly’s shoulder? According to Kurtzman, it wasn’t just visual lyricism, but a hint at things to come. Or, at least, he hints in that direction with a smirk big enough to see on the page in his interview with EW.

Deposed Terran Emperor Georgiou will probably be back.

“You won’t find a single person on our writing staff or on our production who isn’t a massive fan of Michelle Yeoh — we adore her,” Berg told THR. “We want her coming back just as much as everybody watching the show does, so I would say keep watching.”

L’Rell, Ash Tyler and Klingon politics will be back too.

“We love Shazad. He’s capable of absolutely everything we throw at him and we have great plans for his character in Season 2,” Kurtzman told EW. “Yeah, there will be fewer Klingon scenes, but there will still be Klingons.”

Prime Lorca is in the mix.

After Captain Gabriel Lorca was exposed as a Terran from the Mirror Universe, many wondered if Star Trek: Discovery would ever show us the actual Lorca, from the Prime Universe. That didn’t happen in Season 1. But while there’s no confirmation that Jason Isaacs will return to play Lorca, Sullivan said that the writers have put serious consideration into how to handle the character moving forward. “Every avenue has been discussed/explored,” Sullivan tweeted.

Expect more LGBT representation in Discovery Season 2.

“Everything is on the table,” Sullivan said in response to a question about exploring “queer relationships amongst other alien races” and/or introducing more human LGBT characters.

The Discovery writers room “is intent on going where no Star Trek has gone before,” Sullivan said.