Star Trek: 10 Secrets Of Strange New Worlds' Enterprise You Need To Know

When the Enterprise is first properly introduced in "Will You Take My Hand?" and "Brother" (she's only mentioned in dialogue in "Lethe"), the ship has suffered a catastrophic systems failure while investigating the first of the seven Red Angel signals.

Paraphrasing Paul Stamets, the Enterprise is an impressive ship and something major would've had to go down to disable all of her systems (except life support). Unfortunately no episodes actually explain what happened to the Enterprise other than to say something bad happened while investigating the signals. Was it a future Red Angel-suited Michael Burnham setting things into motion? Or maybe the OG Red Angel Doctor Gabrielle Burnham?

Obviously the point was simply to get Pike on board Discovery, but this part of the Red Angel arc and the Enterprise's story (for now) remains muddy and we simply don't know how or why the Enterprise was taken offline. Except for reasons.

Earlier adventures of the Enterprise as she relates to the Discovery crew, of course, occur in semi-non-canon Star Trek fiction, namely the novels "Desperate Hours" and "The Enterprise War". Both books cover the Enterprise's missions in the time leading up to Star Trek: Discovery, with Pike and the Enterprise even meeting up with Captain Philippa Georgiou and the USS Shenzhou.