Will Star Trek: Discovery Season 2 Connect To The Kelvin Timeline?

Star Trek: Discovery season 2 will introduce the one and only Spock, as played by Ethan Peck, into the equation. The prequel show, set a decade or so before The Original Series, will see the Vulcan’s adoptive sister Lieutenant Michael Burnham searching for the Enterprise’s science officer after he’s gone missing while investigating mysterious “red bursts” that are appearing throughout space.

The trailer (above) teases that these could be of the gravest importance, as Michael suggests in the opening voiceover that the red signals represent “a secret made of space and time.” The teaser doesn’t give away much more than that, but ComicBook.com has put forward a revolutionary theory that says these red phenomena could link Discovery with the alternate Kelvin timeline of the movies.

CB reminds us that 2009’s Star Trek saw Spock use “red matter” to create a black hole, which in turn opened a wormhole to the past. This inadvertently caused the destruction the U.S.S. Kelvin, thereby splitting the timeline. Later, the Romulan villain Nero used red matter to wipe out Spock’s home planet of Vulcan. Seeing as it’s powerful enough to destroy whole worlds, perhaps when Spock used the red matter to open the black hole it also reverberated throughout time, causing these red matter pockets to appear in the era of Discovery. 

This is a pretty high-concept theory, and you might say it’s wishful thinking that the TV series would sync up with the movies, but it’s worth considering that Discovery‘s new showrunner Alex Kurtzman co-wrote 2009’s Star Trek and its sequel Star Trek Into Darkness, so he’s one of the creators of the Kelvin timeline. Who better to connect the two Trek continuities, right?

Still, we’d best not get ahead of ourselves, as there’s plenty of other neat connections coming to Star Trek: Discovery season 2 without going as ambitious as making sense of the Kelvin timeline. Anson Mount is joining the cast as Captain Christopher Pike, for one, with Kurtzman explaining that we’ll see how TOS pilot “The Cage” links in with the canon as we know it.

You can expect to dive into all of that and more when Discovery returns to CBS All Access in early 2019.