The Star Trek panel at San Diego Comic-Con 2019 has provided some more details about season 3 of Star Trek Discovery. They include confirmation that the crew did in fact time jump as well as details of a new show regular, played by David Ajala.
Season 2 ended with a skeleton crew, including Burnham, making a jump which saw them appear to become lost in time and space. Alex Kurtzman, executive producer for the show, confirmed that they did in fact take a "radical jump 1000 years in the future."
The time jump is the largest in Star Trek history and is said to change the face of the show. Kurtzman elaborated, "We get to honor canon, but shake it up quite a bit. It's still Star Trek, and it will always be Star Trek the way Roddenberry wanted it."
The panel then introduced David Ajala, who is confirmed as playing a new character called Cleveland Booker, nicknamed Book and he is said to be a rule breaker.
At the end of Season 2 the Discovery crew chose each other. While they didn't expect the jump to be quite so extreme, they went into it knowing there may not be a way back. The new season looks set to focus on those relationships as well as the crew discovering where and who they are.
Kurtzman emphasized the importance of the relationships both between the crew and in the wider universe. He says "People you’ve met will take center stage, there will be a ton of new characters. The thing that defines Trek is that it’s always about the little, always about the humans, the interspecial interaction. Our focus is on what does it mean and what does it do for the characters?"
With Pike remaining behind, the question fans had was who will be captain? The panel has remained silent on this so far, and with no trailer as yet, this looks set to stay a secret, for now at least.
The panel went on to discuss six new episodes of Star Trek: Short Treks as well as details of upcoming spin-off Star Trek: Picard. There will also be a CBS animated comedy called Star Trek: Lower Decks and an as yet unnamed series focusing on the Federation's Section 31.