At the end of the second episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, longtime fans will hear a very familiar voice. And when this cameo happens, canon from The Original Series and The Next Generation has finally been reconciled. We know that Strange New Worlds is now happening around 2261, but from the perspective of certain immortal, timeless characters, what is their timeline?
Now that SNW’s “Wedding Bell Blues” has firmly connected one TOS character with another TNG character, Inverse caught up with showrunners Akiva Goldsman and Henry Alonso Myers to get their take on how this happened, and if we can ever really keep track of the timelines of omnipotent space gods.
Spoilers for the Strange New Worlds Season 3 premiere ahead.
Throughout “Wedding Bell Blues,” a bizarre wedding between Spock (Ethan Peck) and Chapel (Jess Bush) is orchestrated by a meddling, magical trickster (Rhys Darby), who acts and dresses exactly like the character Trelane (William Campbell) from the Original Series episode “The Squire of Gothos.” Well, it turns out, yes, this is Trelane, bothering the Enterprise crew at a different point in the timeline. And, what’s more, just as in the ending of “The Squire of Gothos,” Trelane is revealed to be a child, and his “dad” is another being of unlimited power, voiced by none other than John de Lancie, the actor who has played Q since 1987 in the debut episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
So now, unequivocally, Q and Trelane are definitely the same species. Meaning that Trelane is a Q, and always has been.
“Greater minds than ours put it together, and we were like, well, let us reward that brilliant thinking by making it canon,” Goldsman tells Inverse. Perhaps the most famous example of a great mind combining Q and Trelane was the late Peter David’s 1994 novel Q-Squared. In that book, Trelane was considerably more aggressive than he is in “Wedding Bell Blues,” but oddly enough, that story also involved a love triangle; instead of Spock, Korby, and Chapel, David’s books had Trelane messing with the love triangle of Jack Crusher (senior), Beverly, and Jean-Luc Picard.
In any case, the clever thing about Trelane, or Q, is that because these characters exist out of time, we can imagine that this version of Trelane is actually from a point in his own personal future, beyond the events of TOS. Or perhaps it's the past? Or some other time? According to Goldsman and Myers, all options are valid and on the table.
“We know that Q can be early Q or late Q,” Goldsman says playfully. “Or proto-Q or old Q. Or are there actual individuals in the Q Continuum?”
Of note, this is the very first time that the John de Lancie version of Q has appeared onscreen in the timeframe of The Original Series and Strange New Worlds. Of course, at this point, Q is a formless green blob, but that doesn’t mean this isn’t the same character who deals with Jean-Luc and the Next Generation crew a century later. And, in Star Trek: Voyager, in the 2001 episode “Q2,” Q hints to Captain Janeway (Kate Mulgrew) that he is aware of the history of Captain Kirk in the 23rd century.
So, does the John de Lancie cameo in Strange New Worlds mean more Next Generation canon will crossover? Or can we imagine that these crossovers have already happened off-screen? Or will we never truly understand the Q timelines?
Myers chimes in on all these questions by saying simply: “The answer to all of those questions is yes.”
