'Star Trek: Discovery': Mirror Universe Defiant Easter Explained

The latest episode of Star Trek: Discovery casually makes a deep dive into hardcore Trek lore with a bunch of original series references, but it also drops a super deep-cut plotline from a 2005 episode of the prequel series Star Trek: Enterprise. The USS Defiant referenced in this new Discovery episode is not the ship from Deep Space Nine, and for the uninitiated, it does have a slightly confusing history in the Trek canon. So much so, even the showrunners of Discovery knew bringing this old ship into the fold would be trickier than Captain Lorca’s Scotty impersonation.Spoilers ahead for Star Trek: Discovery episode 10, “Despite Yourself.” And oddly, spoilers for Back to the Future II as well.In “Despite Yourself,” the crew figures out that in order to get back to their own universe, they might need some other intel on another Starfleet ship that crossed over into this dimension: the USS Defiant, registry NCC-1764. As Burnham explains: “It’s unclear but data suggests that in the future...