Strange New Worlds Season 3 First Look Teases Answer to Lingering Star Trek Mystery

As a prequel to The Original Series, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds squeezes a lot of references to that groundbreaking show in its season three trailer. We get to see Paul Wesley’s Kirk toast Martin Quinn’s Scotty. The team’s holodeck mystery feels closer to the gangsters of “A Piece of the Action” than they do the gumshoe Dixon Hill in The Next Generation. We even see Jess Bush’s Chapel and Melissa Navia’s Ortegas in 1960’s style costumes and hairdos.

But the most shocking nod appears for just a split second. For one brief moment, Rhys Darby of Flight of the Conchords fame appears on screen and snaps his fingers. And as excited as we are whenever Darby is present, the more notable thing is the way he looks. Darby’s character has long sideburns and a Victorian coat. More importantly, he looks like something reality-changing is going to happen when he snaps.

We’ve known for a while that Darby would join Strange New Worlds in season three. Furthermore, producer Henry Alonso Myers teased at a convention that Darby would play a “very familiar character.”

There had been some speculation that he would play another member of the TOS crew, but the teaser essentially confirms it. He’s playing Trelane, the mischievous godlike being who troubles the Enterprise crew in the classic episode “The Squire of Gothos.”

But is he actually Trelane? Yeah, his clothes and hairstyle are similar to the Trelane we saw there, but Darby doesn’t actually look that much like William Campbell, who portrayed the character first. Sure, we’ve seen some differences in look and style of characters between their original and recent incarnations. Rainn Wilson sported brown hair and more traditional facial hair when he took over for Roger C. Carmel as Harry Mudd in Discovery, Celia Rose Gooding changes the hairstyle of their Uhura more than Nichelle Nichols ever did, and Martin Quinn is Scottish while James Doohan is not.

So, sure, he might be playing Trelane with a slightly different look, something that’s not out of the question for someone so powerful. But he might also be playing someone who is similar to Trelane, something that has huge implications for Star Trek in general.

Trelane may have only appeared in on TOS episode, but there was a character with the same personality and power set who debuted in TNG. The pilot episode “Encounter at Farpoint” introduces John de Lancie as Q, a trickster god who tests the Enterprise-D and then returns to annoy Jean-Luc Picard and other captains time and again.

Q describes himself as just one manifestation of an entire Q collective, and we do see other members from time to time throughout the franchise. But as much as Q has in common to Trelane, no series has ever made the connection canonically explicit. Sure, there was the delightful Peter David novel Q-Squared from 1994. And sure, a line from Mariner in the Lower Decks/Strange New World crossover episode “Those Old Scientists” suggested that they were the same. But given that Trelane has never reappeared in canon, the question remains open.

Now, Strange New Worlds has a chance to change that. By bringing in the actual Trelane, or at least someone who looks a lot like him, we’re bound to learn more about him and his species. Add in the fact that season three will also explore the early days of holodeck technology, another Trek standard introduced in TNG, and we can expect to finally learn about this The Original Series and The Next Generation connection.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season three premieres this summer on Paramount+.

The post Strange New Worlds Season 3 First Look Teases Answer to Lingering Star Trek Mystery appeared first on Den of Geek.