Last Saturday’s Star Trek: Discovery event at WonderCon Anaheim brought all of the creative team leaders behind the show out for a look back at last season — along some minor glimpses ahead to Season 2.

Yesterday, CBS rolled out the entire hour-long panel on YouTube for those of you who couldn’t make it in person (unfortunately region-locked to the USA), which you can watch right here:

After the panel concluded, the Discovery guest speakers dropped in to the Wondercon press room, where many of the team sat with members of the media to discuss their role in the show, and what’s yet to come, in more detail.

Executive producers Aaron Harberts and Gretchen Berg spoke with Whedonopolis (believe us, despite the odd thumbnail above!), covering a wide range of topics — from the benefits of producing the first season ‘in a vacuum’ from fan feedback (allowing the team to commit to decisions in production and writing without second-guessing) to confirming the length of the upcoming season (13 episodes).

One of Harberts’ primary discussion points was about the newnew through-line of Star Trek: Discovery for year two.

“This season, for lack of a better word, is sort of about spirituality in ‘Star Trek.’ What is the role of serendipity versus science? Is there a story about faith to be told, leaps of faith? We are dealing with space; we are dealing with things that can’t be explained and you have a character like Michael Burnham who believes there is an explanation for everything.

So one of the things we’re very interested in is tackling that idea as it sort of rolls out — and it doesn’t just mean religion, it means patterns in our lives. It means connections that you just can’t explain. It’s about who enters your life, and who leaves your life, and these indelible impressions that people make and the journey that you take – and you don’t realize that along the way, you gather things up that you need.

That’s one of the biggest ideas right now, and it’s threaded through all of our characters’ lives.”

But not all of Season 2 will be those kind of hopeful-sounding moments, as Harberts also noted that more of Michael Burnham’s backstory will be revealed — especially the aftermath of her near-death as a child on Vulcan at the hands of Logic Extremist terrorists.

“We are going to discover a little bit more this season about what happened after the Learning Center bombing; there are some pretty big things that Michael took away from that.

There are some things that we are going to uncover that not only talk about what happened then, but what are some of the ramifications are from that horrible terrorist event that was waged on this innocent child.”

Berg and Harberts were quick to jump on a question about Airiam — the augmented-human spore drive ops officer played by Sara Mitich — and the fan desire to learn more about her character.

Berg: “Her special ability is that everybody loves Airiam — I’m not kidding, everybody loves Airiam!

She is a character we will learn a little bit more about this year, and it is because she sort of captured everyone’s imagination — so I don’t want to give too much of it away — but you will learn a little more about Airiam this year.”

Harberts: “We love our bridge crew. What are the chances that you find these actors that come in, and they do such an incredible job, they’re such incredible people, and they’ve got such a spirit that it draws the audience in.

One of the things we hear a lot is, ‘Tell us more about them! Who are they, fill it out a little bit more!’ We have an opportunity to do that this year, and Airiam is part of the bridge crew. We have a lot of thoughts about who she was, what the Augments are all about, and we’ll dig into it.”

Their response shows they’re well aware of the attention the character received during last season, and they also seem to indicate Airiam may not be the only one of her kind…

Discovery‘s production designer Tamara Deverell, who joined the show mid-season last year, talked about one of her contributions to the Mirror Universe — the Emperor’s ship Charon — in this video from Terence Johnson.

“I started mid-season… and wham, I had to design the Terran ship – which was this giant ship – and I was like, ‘Guys, I really haven’t done this before!’ But I have great ship designers [on staff] here in LA and in Canada, all over the place. So that was a pretty exciting challenge.

When we designed the ship, I suggested that it needed its own power source; I wanted to put a [sort of] sun in — and then the writers went, ‘Oh, that’s cool, let’s make it a myceliam sun!’ and then they started writing it into the story, which was very exciting for me as a production designer to have designed something that then gets put into the actual story, instead of the opposite way around.”

Deverell also revealed how the USS Discovery sets are being subtly modified and expanded for production on the second season of the show.

“In Season 2, we’ve added more ways in and out [of the sets] for the [filming] crew, and for the actors, the characters to flow through — so the mess hall used to have one door, now it has two; we’ve added another corridor, we call it the ‘loop corridor,’ so that on our stage sets characters can go around and around.

The directors were finding that — there were a lot of running scenes with Tilly, and there’ll probably be more — and just by the time they’d get up to speed they would have to stop and start again. So now we’ve got more halls, and more corridors.”

Those kind of minor set modifications aren’t new for Star Trek; for the second season of Deep Space Nine, a second walkway was added around the upper level of the Promenade set (outside of Quark’s Bar), and the Enterprise-D sets went through a number of changes between first and second years on The Next Generation.

When asked about the Constitution-class Enterprise seen in the final moments of the season, Deverell just smiled and answered coyly:

“Are you saying that we’re building the Enterprise?” [laughs]

In this video recorded by Bleeding Cool, series composer Jeff Russo shared a view more details about the upcoming soundtrack release featuring music from the second half of the season.

“We’re releasing a Volume Two, a CD and digitally, with music from episodes 10 through 15… and then there will be a deluxe vinyl edition which will have music from Chapter 1 and Chapter 2, but it’ll be selects because you can’t fit it all on four [records].

I think the vinyl will come sometime in June, but I think the digital version might come out in the next few weeks. And then the CD sometime right after that.”

Of course, we’ll have our review of the Lakeshore Records album as soon as it debuts.

Property master Mario Moreira and costume designer Gersha Phillips also sat with Bleeding Cool, and discussed a lot of topics relating to the props featured in the first year of the show, like the thruster suit seen in “The Vulcan Hello” and the Klingon weapons used across the season.

Moreira spoke about how Discovery follows in the footsteps of the Original Series, which had props that so clearly inspired real-world technologies — and how he wants to continue that legacy.

“What I want to do with prop design is not just not to the [Original Series]… the Original Series inspired the cell phone, inspired medical [scanners], it inspired so much — that’s what we want to do now, going in to the future with this series.

We want to invent something that will inspire someone to go, ‘Hey, you know what? That could work!'”

Keep coming back to TrekCore for all the latest in Star Trek: Discovery news!