The second episode of the fourteen-episode second season of Star Trek: Discovery will be released tomorrow, Thursday, January 24th. It is titled “New Eden,” and now we know what the next four episodes will be titled.
Episodes 3-6 of Star Trek: Discovery Season 2 get titles
CBS has yet to officially reveal episode titles for any episodes beyond tomorrow’s “New Eden,” however due to the series also airing in Canada on the Space cable network, titles are available to see in regular TV listings. The following titles come from the TV listings site TV Passport (first spotted by Trek Collective). We have added some of our thoughts on them, along with matching some previously released official photos with their episodes.
Episode 3: “Point of Light” (January 31)
The point of light referenced in the title may simply reference one of the seven red bursts that are the core mysteries of the second season. It may also be a reference to Boreth, the planet where Klingon monks await Kahless’ return. Kahless is fabled to have said “Look for me there, on that point of light” as he pointed to the star of the Boreth system. From the one publicity image released, we know this episode will feature Michelle Yeoh as the exiled Terran Emperor Georgiou, now working for Section 31. Her costume indicates she will be working undercover on Qo’noS, the Klingon homeworld. It is therefore likely this episode will also feature Mary Chieffo as High Chancellor L’Rell and Shazad Latif as Tyler.
Episode 4: “An Obol for Charon” (February 7)
“Charon’s obol” is a phrase for a ritual where a coin is placed in a deceased person’s mouth by the ancient Greeks and Romans. The coin was to pay Charon, the ferryman who would convey souls into the underworld. The title implies that someone could die in the episode, or possibly come near death, or maybe even return from death (Culber). We also know from the two available publicity stills that this episode will feature Rebecca Romijn in the role of Number One, indicating that the USS Discovery may rendezvous with the USS Enterprise.
Episode 5: “Saints of Imperfection” (February 14)
No real clues about the episode are indicated from the title, except that it fits in with the spiritual aspect of the season’s theme of science versus faith. We know that this episode will feature Michelle Yeoh again, on board the USS Discovery and disguised as Captain Phillipa Georgiou.
Episode 6: “The Sounds of Thunder” (February 21)
Your guess is as good as ours for this title. There is a Ray Bradbury short story titled “A Sound of Thunder” about the risks of time travel. And with no official images released so far, episode 6 will remain a bit more of a mystery for now. CBS has released an image of episode 7 featuring Ethan Peck, possibly indicating the seventh episode of season two has the first appearance of the adult Spock for the season.
Caveat: As the above titles are not yet confirmed by CBS, there is a possibility these are not the final titles. Before CBS started announcing titles in advance during the middle and later parts of the first season, Canadian TV listings did prove accurate and the title for episode 3 on TVPassport (“Point of Light”) matches the title for episode 3 on the official Space.ca website.
Rewatch the trailers
Trailers for the season mainly use footage from early episodes, especially the season two premiere (“Brother”). So, re-watching the three trailers, and using the process of elimination of elements from “Brother,” along with matching the above images to their episodes, may now offer some more insights into the upcoming episodes.
Star Trek: Discovery is available exclusively in the USA on CBS All Access. It airs in Canada on Space and streams on CraveTV. It is available on Netflix everywhere else. The second season debuted on All Access and Space on Thursday, January 17th, 2019, and on Netflix January 18, 2019.
Keep up with all the Star Trek: Discovery news at TrekMovie.
“A Sound of Thunder” is a famous Ray Bradbury story about time travel and its ripple/butterfly effects, so “The Sounds of Thunder” could well go that direction.
I’ve always been a sucker for a good time travel story.
Star Trek is famous for doing amazing time travel stories. Every series in the franchise has done one great story in their runs. And amazing enough some of the best films from TVH to the 09 movie are time travel related.
For me, I can’t get enough of them and partly why The Sanest Man was my favorite episode last season. It wasn’t a straight forward time travel story but involved time loops.
I’m guessing at some point they will do a past Earth time travel story as well. Every show has done them, most of them multiple times.
I agree. They’re always a lot of fun and always seem to work, from TOS through Enterprise.
Right there with you.
When I was younger I was a sucker for any time travel story. But I’m forced to admit I’m getting a little tired of it. I can deal with it only if the story line is a really good one. From my point of view, Trek hasn’t had a good time travel plot since Trials and Tribblations or First Contact. I hope Discovery doesn’t go there. If characters are aware of it it would invalidate what was said in “The Naked Time”. Where they JUST discovered that time travel was theoretically possible. I guess Archer really did keep his mouth shut about Daniels.
Part of me wants to grouch about time travel being overdone and boring, but then I think of my favorite TOS episodes (including all the time travel ones), my love for Quantum Leap and Doctor Who, the countless times I’ve watched & analyzed the Back to the Future trilogy, the fun of the Mudd episode in DSC Season 1…
Yeah, I’m a sucker for them too, I guess! :)
@PaulB — if it’s time travel, that would go a long way to defining how Kurtzman views the QM MWI theory that Orci claims forms the basis for how time travel should be viewed going forward. In which case, a new universe must be created to eliminate the grandfather paradox. Otherwise, it’s traditional time travel rules which overwrite the previous timeline (or something else), and if so, calls into question everything about the KU and PU and it’s relation to this series.
Curious Cadet, KU and PU are separate. Always has been, always will be.
@Tiger2 – I disagree. In Trek 09, we see the Prime universe intrude into the Kelvin universe, so canonically we’ve seen Orci’s version of time travel existing in the PU because that’s where Prime Spock/Nero came from. In the film itself, PU time travel sends P-Spock into the KU, not into his own past.
ST09 wasn’t really time travel so much as reality/universe hopping, but Orci insisted…sigh…and now we’re stuck with confusion for no good reason.
That’s not correct. Nero didn’t hop realities, he went into the Prime timeline’s past, which caused the Kelvin timeline to splinter off of it in that precise moment. They didn’t hop into another reality, they created it *with* time travel.
I consider that explanation the correct one, Scott. In that time theory there are an infinate different timelines possible from an infinite number of decisions. For Trek 09 purposes, they exist at the same time. And did NOT wipe out the prime time line. And there is no “hopping” from the KU to the prime.
Nobody here implied anything about the prime timeline being wiped out. Nice straw man, though.
@PaulB — I did, because Orci made it intentionally ambiguous, and therefore the movie did based on the rules of Time Travel which have always existed in Star Trek.
You are being extremely pedantic. ST09 is an alternate reality which starts, as you say, when Nero appears in the past. At THAT moment, it becomes a new reality, which is why they can’t return to the Prime universe from there.
Thus, effectively, they’ve “hopped realities.” At the moment they arrive in the past (in Abrams-Trek), they begin existing in an alternate time/reality from which they cannot return to their original place/time/reality.
However you want to pedantically parse the syntax, the fact is that the Abrams movies establish time travel that is essentially “reality hopping” because they can go back in time but at that instant they are in an alternate reality/timeline/etc, so they cannot return to their original reality. They have, for all purposes other than pedantry, “hopped universes.”
Your syntax-splitting doesn’t change any of what I said in relation to the comment to which I was replying.
@PaulB — and while I’m happy to accept that interpretation, and personally think it was a brilliant way to reboot Trek, without rebooting it; the fact remains it is not canon, but merely Orci’s theory of time travel, which he intentionally avoided clarifying in the film.
@Scott — except that’s not canon per se. That’s Orci’s off-camera spin. Without explaining that KU is in fact a different universe, traditional rules of time travel in Star Trek imply that the KT is overwriting the PT. And Orci admits he did that on purpose so the average viewer could view it in a less complex way, a la BTTF.
So did Jane way create a new timeline when she went back to help get Voyager home sooner?
Not new but altered. Most time travel stories typically boil down to altering an existing timeline and then restoring or correcting it:
– City on the Edge of Forever
– The Visitor
– Endgame
Two timeline’s running concurrently would involve multiple universes as was presented in the TNG episode “Parallels” where we see a desperate Riker in a universe where the Federation fell to the Borg, the Borg were defeated but Picard was lost in battle, Worf and Deanna were married and had a child and so on.
@Bob — after Orci presented his revised theory of QM MWI time travel, as the latest and greatest theory which Trek must evolve to embrace, many debated whether this meant every time travel episode in the Trek franchise did just that — splinter off the universe each time time travel occurred, which in turn led to speculation that the opening of ST09 before Nero arrived and split off the KU, looked so different — because it was based on a post FIRST CONTACT/ENTERPRISE universe in which the Borg probe was left behind.
Of course, one could look at the Trek universe that way, but it’s not officially canon, or rather it is one possible interpretation of canon, but not explicit. As far as most are concerned, time travel continues to work the way it always has — going back in time and changing something, changes the future. Therefore, the Kelvin timeline is overwriting the Prime timeline in the absence of any other clarification.
@Curious Cadet – If I had my way, Trek would go back to handling time travel the way it did pre-Orci. They could sidestep this issue by having an episode about the effects of someone else’s time travel, so our characters aren’t the one moving from one time or reality to another.
Orci’s limited comprehension of MWI theory really tossed a hydro-spanner into the machinery, didn’t it? Gummed up the works! :)
@PaulB — yup. I’m happy to accept Orci’s explanation. I just need someone to canonize it, and then there’s no more question. Until then, somebody can always go back in time before Nero arrived, and kill him before anything happens with the Kelvin. Kirk might still be born in space, but otherwise nothing should change dramatically.
I figure time travel is less straight forward than only working one way or the other. I figure it’s entirely possible that different conditions result into different results. Sometimes, a universe splinters off. Other times, you’re merely in your own timeline’s past. Who knows?
I agree, that’s how to handle it. Slingshot around a star? Go back to your own time, no splitting off. Use red matter to rip through time & space? You split off a new timeline.
Since Orci’s version of time travel wasn’t really detailed on-screen, it’s semi-canon and can (and should) be fixed by DSC, the way you suggested here.
Speaking of Janeway and time travel, truer words were never spoken than when she said: “”Time travel. Ever since my first day in the job as a Starfleet Captain I swore I’d never let myself get caught in one of these god-forsaken paradoxes. The future is the past, the past is the future. It all gives me a headache.”
Yes! One of my favorite lines from Voyager.
I loved that line and her attitude in general towards time travel. It was a brilliant way of basically telling the audience: “don’t think about this too hard, it’s just a fun story!”
It still needs to make some sense. Star Trek should never be modern Doctor Who in “oh we’ll explain it in some fast edited technobabble save the day”.
This a good spot PaulB, could this be the episode that ties in to ‘Calypso’?
Also reminds me of what my five year old nephew was like after lunch sometimes.
I really wish you’d get rid of these stupid pop ups that block the bottom corners of the page. Its really annoying.
Look into Pi-hole. Best decision I ever made.
At least they decreased the size. For a short while they were twice as big!
(The ISS) Charon was also the name of the Emperor’s ship in the MU.
Not to mention Pluto’s major moon.
Re episode 4: if someone is going to die, perhaps it’s Number One. That would be an in-universe explanation of why we never heard of her again after “The Cage.” But I’d regret not learning more about her.
Doubtful, in our interview with Romijn she says she’s in multiple episodes.
https://trekmovie.com/2019/01/19/interview-rebecca-romijn-says-number-one-knows-her-sht-on-star-trek-discovery/
Ok, thanks, Matt. That shoots down that rather obvious theory. Just as well for her character development!
(Still think there needs to be a Pike series aboard the Enterprise w Number One, Spock, etc. Make it so!)
Rather than someone dying, I’m guessing “An Obol for Charon” will relate to Stamets and Culber somehow.
Oh, that makes a lot of sense! It’s a metaphoric ransom payment.
The title “The Sounds of Thunder” made me think of the Johnny Cash song “The Man Comes around” which starts with him saying “And I heard, as it were, the noise of thunder
One of the four beasts saying, ‘Come and see.’ and I saw, and behold a white horse”.
“The Sounds of Thunder”
Maybe George Kirk shows-up? 😏
Sound of Thunder? Time travel?