Star Trek: Discovery Features A Secret Big Bang Theory Easter Egg Most Fans Missed

In the "Star Trek: Discovery" episode "Choose Your Pain" (October 15, 2017), Captain Lorca (Jason Isaacs) and Ash Tyler (Shazad Latif) are captured by Klingons in an inter-ship fracas, and locked up in a Klingon prison. By coincidence, they are thrown in a cell housing the familiar "Star Trek" villain Harcourt Fenton Mudd (Rainn Wilson), a notorious con man. Mudd explains that his only crime was "loving too much," and that he resents Starfleet officers for being "no fun." Lorca and Tyler hate him immediately. The original version of Harry Mudd is also hated by Trekkies. 

The prisoners have no food, and they begin to get hungry. Harry Mudd, however, already has a helper who has been secretly bringing him bites of food here and there: Stuart. Stuart is an palm-sized insect, seemingly of a dog's intelligence, that perches on Harry's shoulder. Stuart is able to crawl through a hole in the wall, seek out crackers, and bring them back to Harry. A brief close-up of Stuart reveals a cute little smiley bug face. 

Trekkies might assume that Stuart was named for Patrick Stewart, the longtime "Star Trek" actor that played Captain Jean-Luc Picard on "Star Trek: The Next Generation." "Choose Your Pain" aired before the debut of "Star Trek: Picard," so the reference would have been cute in 2017, and not a direct cross-promotion. As it so happens, though, Stuart was not named after Patrick Stewart, but Stuart Bloom, the character played by Kevin Sussman on the hit "nerd" sitcom "The Big Bang Theory." This was confirmed by writers/producers Gretchen J. Berg and Aaron Harberts on the post-"Discovery" chat show "After Treks," which initially aired the same day. It seems that Berg and Harberts were fans of "The Big Bang Theory," and wanted to drop in a winky reference. 

"Stuart" was also an alteration from the original script. And, in the writers' minds, an improvement. 

In the original script, Stuart was, perhaps uncreatively, called Bugsy. The writers liked "Stuart" better, though, because it was funnier. Rainn Wilson is perhaps best known for his comedic performances, so it was kind of the writers to give him better material. 

Stuart appeared in his second and final episode two weeks later, in "Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad" (October 29, 2017). In that episode, Mudd proved his deviousness by temporarily taking over the U.S.S. Discovery. He treated everyone poorly, and admitted that he loved gloating. In that episode, Stuart helped Mudd escape from prison, but then wandered off into the wilderness, fulfilling his own little buggy needs. 

Stuart Bloom on "The Big Bang Theory" is, of course, one of the show's semiregular characters, and the owner of a comic book store, The Comics Center, in Pasadena, California. He doled out relationship advice to the other nerd characters on the show, before finally finding a girlfriend of his own in the form of Denise (Lauren Lapkus), an alt-comix artist. Sussman wasn't credited as a main part of the show's cast until its sixth season. He's also the subject of an upcoming "Big Bag Theory" spinoff called "Stuart Fails to Save the Universe." The writers of "Star Trek: Discovery" don't say why they liked Stuart in particular, other than to say that they liked the name, and thought having a trainable bug on the show with that name was funny. 

Stuart has not returned for any of the subsequent "Star Trek" shows, which may be a good thing. I would hate to think that little bug was having its little buggy life interrupted by the concerns of some boring old humanoids.