'Star Trek: Discovery' Showrunners Reveal Season 2 Themes

With the first season of Star Trek: Discovery under their belts, the show's producers are now already deep into working on the show's second season.

With the Federation-Klingon war now over, the show will have to redefine itself with a new conflict and new themes. Speaking to Entertainment Tonight, showrunners Aaron Harberts and Gretchen J. Berg explain that these look at these seasons as if they were chapters in a novel.

"Chapter 1 of this novel was war, and right now, we're thinking about Chapter 2," Harberts says. "One of the themes we continue kicking around is the conflict between science and spirituality, and that's something that we're very interested, particularly after you finish a war. How do you rebuild yourself? What's required for that? What we're most excited to do is to continue thematic exploration and philosophical exploration and debate, and these characters are perfectly primed to carry storylines like that. That's one thing that we're thinking about. We have a few things up our sleeve, but we'd be lying if we knew everything, because that's the fun of it is as well. You go into it, you see what's working and you see what's interesting, and you build from there."

Berg added, "The joy is in the journey for us as well in creating it."

It should be interesting to see how the Enterprise works itself into those themes.

Star Trek: Discovery dealt in small part with themes of faith and religion in early episodes, largely through the Klingon lens as T'Kuvma tried to rally his people around the teachings of Kahless and Voq took up the title of Torchbearer. That way of thinking was seemingly defeated when Kol took command of the Klingon forces through more conventional means. Eventually, after Kol's defeat, the Klingons once again became 24 Great Houses rather than a single Klingon Empire, but L'Rell seems determined to make them work together forcibly under threat of the bomb placed within Qo'noS by the Federation.

Star Trek: Discovery will return for its second season on CBS All Access. Pre-production is already underway and filming is expected to begin at Pinewood Studios in Toronto in April.