It's very common for TV cast and crew to do spoiler-y interviews that run after a certain episode airs to address standout moments. Andor did it after Bix's big shocker; The Last of Us did it after Joel's big shocker; the Severance gang did it pretty much weekly throughout season two's many big shockers. But what's not ideal is when a showrunner type has to clarify something from an episode that… wasn't made clear by said episode. That happened this week on Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.
The second entry in the show's two-episode season three premiere, “Wedding Bell Blues,” featured a guest-starring turn by Rhys Darby (Our Flag Means Death). He played a mysterious bartender who's able to bend reality to explore Spock and Nurse Chapel's ill-fated romance. But there was something about him. Something… familiar. As io9's James Whitbrook wrote in his recap:
“Darby's character has reality-warping powers like original Trek‘s godlike being Trelane from ‘Squire of Gothos,' and certainly dresses the part (with the sideburns to match), but the climax of ‘Wedding Bell Blues' instead leans more to suggest that Darby is playing a Q, right down to a voice cameo by John de Lancie himself as a shapeless parent entity who shows up to stop the bartender playing with mortals so everyone can get on with actual reality.”
It all ties into a longstanding fan theory that Trelane is a Q—something that's been explored in Star Trek novels like Q-Squared, and certainly suggested by, but left oddly unresolved in Strange New Worlds itself itself. However, in an interview with TV Insider, Strange New Worlds executive producers Akiva Goldsman has done what the episode did not: confirmed that not only is Darby playing Trelane, Trelane is in fact the son of de Lancie's Q.
“This is confirmation of that very smart piece of head canon that we now have absorbed into canon gratefully,” Goldsman explained, calling Trelane “a great character from The Original Series and also we did feel that was sort of unresolved, dangling, and it seemed intuitively quite smart to connect the two. From the outside, one could say, ‘Look, you have a character created by Roddenberry in one, you've got a character created by Roddenberry in another, he's revisiting a kind of idea, refining it, so why not connect them up when you have the opportunity to do so?' Since someone had cleverly done it without us, we just thought, ‘Well, let us bless that idea because it was a good one.'”
The fans have indeed guided the storytelling here. It's just too bad that some of those fans, even ones aware of the theory, might not have quite followed that through line of “he is Trelane, and by the way, Trelane is Q's son.”
As for Darby, he kept things vague (again) about whether we'd see his take on the mischief-making character again. Talking to TV Insider in the same interview piece, he said, “Will [Trelane] return? I have no idea. Will he have really learned not to play with these people again? I don't know. It's too much fun.”
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is streaming on Paramount+.
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