Star Trek: Discovery season 2 will see the crew of the U.S.S. Discovery encounter some of the Starfleet officers on board the franchise’s most iconic ship, the U.S.S. Enterprise. We’ve got Anson Mount’s Captain Pike and Rebecca Romijn’s Number One to look forward to meeting, as well as Ethan Peck’s Spock, so we should expect to explore some new dimensions of these familiar characters.
What’s more, this new featurette for the upcoming run suggests we’ll find out some fresh info about the Enterprise itself. The Discovery Twitter account shared a 74-second video which sees Sonequa Martin-Green speaking behind the scenes and talking about how great it is to come back for a second round. If you study the BTS footage closely though, it reveals some details about the ship that’ll be captained by Kirk in the future.
"We were over the moon about coming back." 🖖 We missed you too, @SonequaMG! ♥️ #StarTrekDiscovery pic.twitter.com/Bg3CndakYJ
— Star Trek on Paramount+ (@StarTrekOnPPlus) December 17, 2018
If you look at the read-out display in the background behind Martin-Green at the 0:19 second mark, some info on the Enterprise is given, and the most notable thing it reveals is that the first captain of the ship was Robert April. This fits with April’s introduction in Star Trek: The Animated Series. The canonicity of that show has long been called into question by fans, but this background easter egg confirms that April’s part of the official timeline. This is actually the second reference to the character on Discovery, too, as he’s named as one of Starfleet’s most decorated captains in season 1.
In the featurette, we also overhear Martin-Green reciting some of her lines, which includes her saying that the entire crew compliment of the Enterprise consists of 203 people. This is a neat detail as that’s the exact same number established to be on the vessel in The Original Series‘ pilot “The Cage,” an episode that also introduced us to Pike, Number One and Spock.
Be sure to catch Star Trek: Discovery season 2 when it hits CBS All Access on January 17th.
