Introduction

“New Eden” is the 2nd episode of season 02 of the American television series Star Trek: Discovery, which is set roughly a decade before the events of the original Star Trek series and follows the crew of the USS Discovery as they investigate seven mysterious signals.

The season was produced by CBS Television Studios in association with Secret Hideout and Roddenberry Entertainment, with Alex Kurtzman serving as showrunner.

Sonequa Martin-Green stars as Michael Burnham, along with the returning Doug Jones, Anthony Rapp, Mary Wiseman, and Shazad Latif; they are joined by former recurring guest star Wilson Cruz as well as Anson Mount as original Star Trek captain Christopher Pike. Ethan Peck recurs as another original series character, Spock. These characters and their starship, the USS Enterprise, were included as part of the series’ attempt to explain its connections to the larger Star Trek franchise.

The season was officially ordered in October 2017, and filming took place in Toronto, Canada, from April to December 2018. Gretchen J. Berg and Aaron Harberts, the first season’s showrunners, returned for the second but were fired during production; co-creator Kurtzman replaced them.

The 14-episode season was released from 17 January to 18 April 2019, on CBS All Access. A third season was ordered in February 2019.

Outline

Burnham confronts Pike about Spock’s nightmares and his personal leave and learns that Spock had committed himself to a psychiatric unit and requested that Starfleet not inform his family.

Discovery detects another of the signals and uses its spore drive to instantly travel to a planet, Terralysium, with a previously unknown human population.

A looped transmission suggests the population departed Earth during World War III. Pike and Burnham lead an away team to the planet’s surface and find a primitive society with a religion combining multiple human faiths.

During the team’s investigation, an anomaly produces an extinction-level radiation shower. Ensign Silvia Tilly, after receiving advice from a medical staffer, uses a fragment of the non-baryonic asteroid to avert the catastrophe, later recognizing the staffer as classmate May Ahearn, who died five years earlier.

Returning to Discovery, Pike reviews footage from a helmet camera recovered on the planet to see that the population had been taken from Earth by the Red Angel from Burnham’s vision.

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Production & Filming Details

• Director(s): Jonathan Frakes.
• Writer(s): Akiva Goldsman and Sean Cochran.
• Release Date: 24 January 2019.
• Running Time: 50 minutes.
• Country: US.
• Language: English.