Star Trek: Discovery S3 goes back to the future in first trailer

It's Star Trek Day today, marking the 54th anniversary of the TV debut of Star Trek: The Original Series. CBS All Access celebrated by streaming an entire day of programming related to the franchise, including several panels for its ongoing and forthcoming series. Among other tidbits, CBS dropped the first trailer for Star Trek: Discovery's third season.

(Spoilers for first two seasons below.)

Discovery is a prequel to the original Star Trek, set roughly 10 years before Captain Kirk and his crew took over the USS Enterprise and boldly went where no man had gone before. It stars Sonequa Martin-Green as Michael Burnham, an orphaned human raised on the planet Vulcan by none other than Sarek (James Frain) and his human wife, Amanda Grayson (Mia Kirshner)—aka, Spock's parents, which makes her Spock's adoptive sister.

As I've written previously, in S1, Michael had a promising career as first officer of the USS Shenzhou under Captain Philippa Georgiou (Michelle Yeoh)—until a desperate act to prevent a war with the Klingons drove her to defy orders and essentially commit mutiny. Casualties aplenty ensued. The season's broad narrative arc was partly her redemption story, as she joined the crew of the USS Discovery at the behest of Captain Gabriel Lorca (Jason Isaacs). The rest of the season involved fighting the Klingons and traveling to a mirror universe, with some major consequences. The final shot showed Discovery meeting up with the USS Enterprise.

In the second season, Christopher Pike (Anson Mount) temporarily replaced Lorca as captain of the Discovery while the Enterprise was undergoing repairs, with Rebecca Romijn making her debut as Number One. There was more of a return to the classic standalone episode structure, with a season-long arc involving the mysterious appearances of a "Red Angel" and a rogue Starfleet AI called Control who sought to wipe out all sentient life in the universe. That's where Spock came in: he'd had recurrent visions of the Red Angel since childhood and teamed up with his estranged sister, Michael, and the rest of the Discovery crew to foil Control's nefarious plan.

The big reveal was that the Red Angel was actually a time travel suit worn by Michael's mother. She had accidentally jumped 950 years into a bleak future in which all sentient life has been destroyed by Control and had been traveling through time leaving signals (the Red Angel visions) in hopes of altering that future. In the S2 two-part finale, Michael donned a copy of her mother's suit to lead Discovery over 930 years into the future. The crew of the Enterprise told Starfleet that Discovery was destroyed in the battle and were ordered to never speak of it or the crew again. Spock was unable to join Michael and the rest of the crew on that journey, if for no other reason than to preserve the canonical timeline. The good news is that a spinoff series featuring Pike, Number One, and Spock, together on board the USS Enterprise, is already in development—likely also a prequel to TOS, given what we know of Pike's ultimate fate.