Star Trek: Discovery: all the trailers, commentary, and updates for the new TV series

There are so many streaming options available these days, and so many conflicting recommendations, that it’s hard to see through all the crap you could be watching. Each Friday, The Verge’s Cut the Crap column simplifies the choice by sorting through the overwhelming multitude of movies and TV shows on subscription services and recommending a single perfect thing to watch this weekend.

For the Love of Spock, a 2016 documentary that began as a father/son project between director Adam Nimoy and his father Leonard Nimoy.

CBS All Access has announced that Star Trek: Discovery will return for a third season, and that Michelle Paradise (one of the show’s co-executive producers) will join Alex Kurtzman as a co-showrunner.

Paradise marks the fifth official showrunner for Discovery, following Bryan Fuller (who left the project), Aaron Harberts and Gretchen J. Berg (fired over budget disputes and complaints of abuse from multiple writers), and Alex Kurtzman (current showrunner and lead architect of CBS’ Star Trek TV projects for the foreseeable future). Hopefully, the show will finally enter a slightly more stable phase of production in season 3, after all its previous behind-the-scenes drama.

When CBS’s Star Trek: Discovery debuted last year, it did so with a special premiere on the network’s television channel, a way to drive signups for the network’s streaming service, CBS All Access. While the premiere of the show’s second season has already come and gone, the network has decided to put this season’s debut episode, “Brother,” up on YouTube.

Presumably, the episode is there to remind non-subscribers — or lapsed subscribers — that the show is back and that it’s worth watching. Discovery seems to have done a good job bringing in new viewers when it first premiered in 2017 — CBS claimed at the time that signups for the service broke records after the show premiered on the network.

Warning: spoilers ahead for season 1 of Star Trek: Discovery, and for the season 2 premiere episode, “Brother.”

When Star Trek: Discovery returned for its second season last week, it came with an insurance plan and a risk.

There are so many streaming options available these days, and so many conflicting recommendations, that it’s hard to see through all the crap you could be watching. Each Friday, The Verge’s Cut the Crap column simplifies the choice by sorting through the overwhelming multitude of movies and TV shows on subscription services and recommending a single perfect thing to watch this weekend.

“Yesteryear,” a 1973 episode of Star Trek: The Animated Series. Written by D.C. Fontana (a key contributor to the original 1960s Star Trek, who penned 10 episodes and served as the story editor), “Yesteryear” takes place in the wake of a routine fact-finding mission into a “time vortex.” Though Captain James T. Kirk and the USS Enterprise’s landing party have taken great pains not to interfere with history, when they return to the present, they discover that a minor oversight has inadvertently erased first officer Spock from the timeline. To restore his reality, Mr. Spock must head back through the vortex to his own boyhood on the planet Vulcan to save his younger self from a fatal accident.

CBS has released a new trailer for its upcoming second season of Star Trek: Discovery, highlighting the peril that will face the crews of the USS Discovery and USS Enterprise when the show returns in January.

After the show teased his appearance in two earlier trailers, Ethan Peck’s bearded Spock is front and center, telling his half-sister, disgraced Starfleet officer Michael Burnham, that they’re facing a major challenge — one that could be a “defining moment for multiple civilizations, [and] billions of lives.” Their actions, he says, might determine the future of the galaxy — a fair statement, since Discovery is a prequel set before the original Star Trek TV series.

Earlier this summer, at 2018’s San Diego Comic-Con, Star Trek: Discovery showrunner Alex Kurtzman confirmed that Spock, the beloved half-Vulcan second-in-command of the original Star Trek’s U.S.S. Enterprise, would be appearing in the newest Trek series. After much searching, CBS has announced that the show has cast the role. Ethan Peck, whose previous credits include playing Patrick Verona (the Heath Ledger character) in the TV adaptation of 10 Things I Hate About You — and who also happens to be the grandson of legendary actor Gregory Peck — will fill the TV shoes of the late Leonard Nimoy. (Peck is not related to Zachary Quinto, who currently plays the character in the film franchise, but there certainly is a non-familial resemblance.)

Noting in the official CBS press release that Spock “remains the only member of the original bridge crew to span every era of Star Trek” — Spock technically did not appear on the early aughts’ Star Trek: Enterprise, but the man can be forgiven for overlooking the least-beloved Trek series — Kurtzman explains that the showrunners were looking for an actor who could “effortlessly embody Spock’s greatest qualities, beyond obvious logic: empathy, intuition, compassion, confusion, and yearning.” Kurtzman says Peck seems “aware of his daunting responsibility to Leonard, Zack, and the fans, and ready to confront the challenge in the service of protecting and expanding on Spock’s legacy.”

When Star Trek: Discovery’s original showrunner, Bryan Fuller, first met with CBS executives about bringing a new Star Trek series to the small screen, he proposed the new property as an anthology series, similar to the format and style of Ryan Murphy’s American Horror Story. That would allow a much wider lens on the larger Trek universe than any of the previous series or films had been able to accomplish. CBS was reportedly interested, but suggested he start with a serialized story first to test the waters.

With his exit from the show in October 2016 went any chance of a more eclectic take on Discovery — until now. This afternoon at the Discovery panel at San Diego Comic-Con’s Hall H, co-creator and current showrunner Alex Kurtzman announced Star Trek: Short Treks, a series of monthly short-form stories that will function like bonus content and air on CBS All Access in conjunction with the larger Star Trek: Discovery series. CBS says Short Treks, which will air in installments of about 10 to 15 minutes, is “an opportunity for deeper storytelling and exploration of key characters and themes that fit into… the expanding Star Trek universe.”

CBS held a big panel on Friday for the latest installment of the Star Trek franchise, Star Trek Discovery, offering the first look at the upcoming season of the show on CBS All Access.

Star Trek Discovery launched last year on the channel’s much-maligned digital platform, and it was a new look for the Trek franchise: it broke a number of the series’ traditional conventions and ended up being a much darker show than previous series installments, a move that has divided the fandom. The show, set about a decade before the original 1966 Star Trek aboard the eponymous USS Discovery, follows the disgraced Starfleet officer Michael Burnham after she’s found guilty of mutiny, stripped of her rank, and sent to space jail. When her services are abruptly commandeered by an unorthodox captain (Jason Isaacs), she struggles to redeem herself, a journey that includes traveling with the Discovery’s crew to a Mirror Universe and encountering a brutal version of their world.

When Star Trek: Discovery launched on CBS last September, it went where no Star Trek show had gone before. Instead of focusing on standalone episodes like its predecessors, its first season was a single, extended story arc about a war between the Klingons and the Federation. Rather than scientific exploration, cultural exchange, and diplomatic missions, the USS Discovery’s captain, Gabriel Lorca, was hell-bent on defeating the Klingons, even when it meant venturing into ethical gray areas. Over the course of the first season, the show repeatedly pushed the crew (and sometimes the audience) beyond their comfort zones, with episodes that dealt with rape, torture, and the systematic exploitation and consumption of intelligent races. Even scientific and technological advances, which had so often gone hand in hand with utopian visions of the future, was refocused on military research.

Star Trek: Discovery marked a huge tonal change for the long-running franchise, but it’s only the latest in a series of science fiction revival shows that have taken a darker, more serious tone to reinvent themselves for a new era. The 2003 reboot of Battlestar Galactica and the last entry in Syfy’s Stargate franchise, Stargate Universe, followed the same course by taking familiar themes into grittier and more unfamiliar territory. The Battlestar reboot was hailed as a new classic, while Stargate Universe was compared to shows like Galactica and Lost. In each case, the show’s creators stepped away from the familiar concepts of an existing series and reinvented them for a new audience.

With all the betrayals, torture, time-looping, and universe-hopping crammed into the first season of Star Trek: Discovery, fans can be forgiven for missing subtler story points aboard the Federation vessel Discovery. From the personalities of the ship’s bridge crew to the finer physiological points of “species reassignment,” many of the show’s smaller details traveled painlessly under the radar, though season 2 — tentatively scheduled for 2019 — might expand on them. But one downplayed element of this season’s grand, multidimensional adventure can’t go unmentioned. For the sake of the show’s larger narrative and emotional impact, and the sake of justice in the Star Trek universe, the show needs to spend more time with Saru, the alien played by frequent Guillermo del Toro collaborator Doug Jones.

Discovery’s only senior officer who isn’t a human or cyborg had a remarkable character arc in season 1, rivaling that of the show’s star, Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green). Saru’s leadership was quietly responsible for the crew’s ultimate salvation — and yet he wasn’t awarded the promotion to captain he so readily earned over the course of the season, and his character has been woefully underappreciated by viewers and other characters alike.

Star Trek: Discovery has staked a lot on the idea that it was telling a different kind of Star Trek story — a tighter, more plotted-out version of Trek instead of the crisis-of-the-week style of earlier shows, which were designed to meet the needs of cable syndication. But Discovery — which just wrapped up its first season on Sunday — didn’t embrace long-arc storytelling. The creators and writers divided the season and its story into disparate pieces, and crammed them so full of flashy plot twists and reveals that the series rarely reached beyond hammering home its core conceit: that war is bad, and morals are good.

And boy, does Discovery want its fans to feel the weight of that motto. The show’s cycling plotlines looped from the pilot (almost unrelated to the larger story), to the nearly standalone middle episodes, to the larger Klingon war arc, the Mirror Universe detour, and then the slightly different second Klingon war plot. And throughout, the writers’ room seemed willing to try any tactic to get that central point across. But by shattering the season into fragments of stories, Discovery ended up with characters who barely changed over 15 episodes. They spent the whole season going through the same motions in whatever Mad Libs scenario a given episode required.

Warning: major spoilers ahead for Ash Tyler’s plotlines in Star Trek: Discovery.

Shazad Latif can freakin’ cry.

2016 might have been Star Trek’s 50th anniversary, but 2017 was the year when no less than three shows reinterpreted, reimagined, or paid homage to Gene Roddenberry’s classic science fiction series. Each one follows the show’s familiar blueprint, joining the diverse crew of a starship as they zip around the universe. But each show also has their own new take on what Star Trek means, taking the classic form of the franchise and molding it in some new ways.

Star Trek: Discovery, the first official Star Trek show in over a decade, launched last fall on CBS, while Seth McFarlane’s interplanetary comedy The Orville debuted on Fox. And then there was Black Mirror’s dark take on the franchise in the episode “USS Callister.”

There’s a saying in business that you can have things good, fast, or cheap — pick two. CBS’s dedicated streaming service, All Access (the exclusive online home of Star Trek: Discovery) has often seemed like the answer to a different question: what if you had none of those three things?

Although All Access has been around since 2014, the subscription service made its biggest splash yet in September 2017, with Discovery’s debut. It was the first Star Trek show in more than a decade, and it seems to have been designed specifically to drive interest in CBS’s service. Although international audiences can watch the show — which just returned after a two-month holiday hiatus — through Netflix, cord-cutters in America had to pay for All Access to see Discovery, fueling a record number of sign-ups, and a record number of people annoyed by the idea of paying $6 a month to watch a show with commercials.

Spoilers ahead for the mid-season premiere of Star Trek: Discovery, “Despite Yourself.”

Reception to Star Trek: Discovery’s first season has been mixed since it premiered back in September 2017. But its two-month mid-season break might have made a significant difference for the Trek franchise’s first foray into the golden age of television. January 7th’s mid-season premiere episode arrived at an optimal moment, unburdened by competing fall lineups. It’s the dead of winter, when people are staying in more. And it arrives on the heels of the fourth season of everyone’s favorite technological bummer, Black Mirror, which includes a particularly depressing but noteworthy Trek homage.

Spoilers ahead for the first half of season 1 of Star Trek: Discovery.

”Context is for kings,” Jason Isaacs’ Captain Gabriel Lorca intones in the third episode of Star Trek: Discovery, arguing that sometimes, Federation rules need to be broken if the situation warrants it. His declaration stands as a statement about the series in general. In its first half-season, Discovery broke many of Star Trek’s past TV rules, abandoning the familiar syndication-friendly episodic style in favor of a more plot-heavy, long-arc storytelling approach, offering more mature content than the franchise ever has before, and seemingly setting aside the long-established series canon.

It’s been a long time since a Star Trek television show felt like it was really going where no one had gone before — or even to relatively infrequently visited places. Although the original 1966 series dared to feature an interracial kiss, the franchise as a whole missed the boat on LGBT representation until it was already mainstream. And between Star Trek: Enterprise and the reboot films, the Trek series has spent the last decade flailing around in lackluster retreads of its own tropes.

But in the November 12th episode “Into the Forest I Go” Star Trek: Discovery explored a subject that few mainstream shows have had the guts to tackle meaningfully: the rape and sexual abuse of men. The subject is even more important amid the current conversation about sexual assault, inspired by an avalanche of accusations in the entertainment industry, which are still rolling out at a feverish pitch.

CBS will air Star Trek: Discovery’s last episode of 2017, “Into the Forest I Go,” on Sunday, November 12th. After it airs, fans will have to wait until the new year to see what happens next. Fortunately, the hiatus won’t be that long: the show will return on January 7th.

Set roughly a decade before The Original Series, Star Trek: Discovery follows a disgraced Starfleet officer named Michael Burnham. When war breaks out between the Federation and Klingons, she’s assigned to serve on the USS Discovery, where she’s tasked with helping the ship and crew bring the war to a conclusion. When the network announced the series’s September release date, it revealed that the first season would be split into two “chapters.” The second chapter begins with the show’s 10th episode, “Despite Yourself.”

The USS Discovery will continue to explore the galaxy. CBS announced this morning that it has renewed the latest iteration of the Star Trek franchise for a second season.

CBS noted that the show has been successful at bringing in new subscribers to its streaming service All Access, and has earned acclaim from fans and critics. Following the season’s premiere, CBS announced that sign-ups for the service had reached their highest level to date. CBS did not announce an episode count for season 2, nor when it would begin airing.

The third episode of Star Trek: Discovery aired this week, and at one point in the episode, Sonequa Martin-Green’s Michael Burnham is tasked with reconciling two suites of code by Lieutenant Paul Stamets (Anthony Rapp).

Minor spoilers for Star Trek: Discovery below

There’s never been a Star Trek show entirely like Star Trek: Discovery.

It’s been more than 10 years since Star Trek: Enterprise left the airwaves, and in that time, television as a medium has changed a lot. And for a Star Trek show to survive in today’s day and age of so called “peak TV,” Trek was going to have to change too.

Ahead of its debut tonight, CBS has released the main title sequence for Star Trek: Discovery. While the show has had a bit of a rocky production, the opening credits are really fantastic.

Discovery’s title sequence start out looking like rough design plans and x-rays, which then blend into planets, starships, gadgets, and eyes, looking as though it fits in the style of True Detective or The Expanse, rather than that of a traditional Star Trek show. It’s a cool, modern take on the opening titles sequence, something that often feels neglected in this day and age of streaming television.

Star Trek: Discovery is the first new Trek show in more than a decade, and fans will be watching this weekend’s premiere closely to see how it manages the weighty expectations that come with any new entry in one of the most storied science fiction franchises of all time.

The show is set chronologically in an era of Star Trek following Star Trek: Enterprise, but before the 1960 Star Trek that fans now refer to as The Original Series. Discovery is a rare new piece of Trek media that takes place in the franchise’s original continuity, instead of in the spinoff “Kelvin Timeline” of the big-budget J.J. Abrams films that have served as the only new Star Trek properties for the last decade.

When Star Trek Discovery begins airing later this year, it’ll bring some new changes to Gene Roddenberry’s world, including an overarching, serialized story, rather than an episodic season. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, former showrunner Bryan Fuller explained that his original pitch for the show was even more ambitious: an anthology that would to do to Star Trek “what American Horror Story [did] for horror.”

According to Fuller, his vision would begin with a prequel series (Discovery is set before Star Trek: The Original Series), and would continue through the eras that followed in Voyager, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and beyond. CBS instead decided to move forward with a serialized season, and would see how audiences responded. Fuller stepped down from running the show last October, which was explained at the time as a result of his other duties running American Gods for Starz and Amazing Stories for NBC. EW reports that there were other reasons as well: As production began, Fuller’s relationship with CBS deteriorated with disagreements over budget, production schedule, and crew selection. Interestingly, Baby Driver’s Edgar Wright said that Fuller approached him to direct the pilot, while CBS opted to hire veteran television director David Semel instead.