Discovery Season Two Secrets from the Red Carpet

Season two of Star Trek: Discovery is underway, and at last night’s premiere party, StarTrek.com quizzed the show’s actors about things to come in the series’ sophomore year. Here’s what they had to say:

Doug Jones acknowledged that upcoming interactions between Saru and Georgiou, she of the Mirror Universe and now working for Section 31, might be emotionally charged: “Oh, because she wants to eat my kind in the Mirror world?” Jones said, laughing ominously. “Well, we never do warm up all the way to each other, I don't think. There’s a built-in tension. As the season progresses, she's a part of Section 31 now and we have to trust her some even though she keeps proving herself to be a bit of a loose cannon. So, Saru keeps her at a safe distance, but he has to trust her to some degree, if that makes any sense.”

Mary Chieffo noted that Discovery’s second season incorporates Spock, Pike and the Enterprise into its storyline, in essence reinventing the show. “I think we are looking at what really worked about episodic storytelling and meshing it with what we developed in the first season when it came to serialized storytelling,” the actress said. “We've found an exciting balance in that regard. I think the benefit of episodic in a lot of ways is that you get to meditate on certain characters at certain moments, and that's something I certainly appreciated. You’ll get a few moments of really hearing L'Rell's side of the story, which I appreciated. And it’s not just heightened scenes, basically. It's like, ‘Oh wait, wait, what are we talking about here?’ You’ll see me on Qo'noS, in context. Doug has talked about the fact that you get to go to his home planet. You're seeing a lot of us in contexts that we've alluded to, but haven't seen yet.”

The Mirror Universe figured prominently in season one. Georgiou aside, season two likely won’t spend much time there, if any. However, Sonequa Martin-Green noted that Michael Burnham will see herself reflected in Spock, and vice versa. “I don't want to spoil anything, but there is a lot of Spock in Burnham,” Discovery’s leading lady told us. “There's a lot that still needs to be dug out with that, and so essentially anywhere I go as Michael, and especially in alternate worlds where people are shaped by their surroundings and could possibly be better people if they’d been raised up with better surroundings -- when you think about that, and you think about your tendencies and your inclinations and those things that are shaped by something like a mirror universe -- it definitely makes me think about the wounds of my own past, the mistakes I've made and those times when I was led by my baser instincts. We dig into a lot of that. I think they definitely see each other, and they bring out… Oh man, what can I say? They bring out a lot in each other. I'll say that.”

X-Men veteran Rebecca Romijn will be seen in season two as Pike’s Number One, the role originally played Majel Barrett-Roddenberry. Romijn described herself as a “major” Trek fan as a child. “I watched The Original Series with my mom,” she recalled. “I lost my mom two years ago, and so being on this set, specifically the set I was on, which I'm not allowed to talk about, made me cry. And it made me think about my mom a lot. It was emotional.” How proud would her mom be of her now? “Oh, my God,” Romijn replied. “Well, I made a joke. I was like, ‘She would die, again.’"