Strange New Worlds Season 3 Might Bring Back Star Trek's Most Outrageous Villain
Is that you, Trelane?
In the wacky new trailer for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 3, there are almost too many Easter eggs and references to count. And among the big reveals — like the holodeck murder mystery episode and the metafictional retro episode — there are also a few blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameos in the trailer, one of which could translate to an unexpected return of an Original Series character with a complicated canonical history.
Here’s why it’s possible that Strange New Worlds Season 3 could really feature the retroactive first appearance of the trickster alien Trelane, plus why a nonlinear appearance from this character has a canon precedent. Speculation ahead.
Ahead of the release of the Strange New Worlds Season 3 trailer, it was publicly known that actor Rhys Darby would play some kind of guest role in the show, and now that the trailer has dropped, some eagle-eyed fans think they know who exactly he’s playing.
Because the ornate design on Darby’s jacket in the trailer seems a close match for Trelane’s coat in the TOS episode “The Squire of Gothos,” some fans accounts social media (like Trek Central) are theorizing that the trailer is showing us Trelane himself.
Originally played by William Campbell, the character of Trelane was a quasi-omnipotent alien being who had taken human form in order to lure the Enterprise crew into becoming his playmates. The denouement of the episode revealed that in terms of his species, Trelane was actually a child who was misbehaving and was chastised by his “parents” after Kirk figured out the truth. Twenty years later, in the debut of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Gene Roddenberry created the character of Q (John de Lancie) for “Encounter at Farpoint.” At the time, veteran Trek writers D.C. Fontana and David Gerrold were surprised that Roddenberry would essentially recycle the concept of Trelane in a slightly different guise. Obviously, Roddenberry’s gamble paid off, though, as the immortal, timeless Q became a much bigger deal in the Trek mythos than Trelane.
This brings us to the complicated canon and the relationship between these characters. After Q was introduced in TNG, several books and comics — starting with Peter David’s 1994 novel Q-Squared — have asserted that Trelane was/is indeed and in fact a member of the Q Continuum. In that book, Trelane creates various alternate timelines for Picard and the crew of the Enterprise-D, and its heavily implied that Q himself was Trelane’s “father,” who briefly appeared as a non-corporeal life form in “The Squire of Gothos.” The late-’90s Marvel Comics Star Trek run and IDW’s The Q Conflict (2019) both put Trelane at odds with Q, further suggesting a connection between the two, and in some cases, shared powers. As fans have noted, Darby’s snapping gesture in the trailer is very much reminiscent of something a Q would do.
Q (John de Lancie) snaps his fingers in Star Trek: The Next Generation.
If Trelane is a Q, and Rhys Darby is playing him in Strange New Worlds, why would this Trelane look older than William Campbell’s original Trelane from TOS? Well, that’s an easy one: In Picard Season 2, we learned that Q could change his appearance to look older if he wanted, but also that members of the Q species can age and even “perish.” That said, the appearances of Q throughout the Trek canon are implied not to be strictly linear. In the post-credits scene of Picard Season 3, Q appeared to Jack Crusher on the Enterprise-G after he had supposedly “perished.” Q’s final test for Picard in “All Good Things...” was also all about making the Starfleet captain think in a non-linear way.
What’s the bottom line here? If Trelane is “back” in Strange New Worlds, roughly in the year 2261, that would predate his appearance in The Original Series in the year 2267 by six years. (Yes, that’s how close SNW is to TOS at this point!) But, if this Trelane is from his own personal future, then that means he can be as old or as young as he wants. The Star Trek canon has a long history of effect preceding cause, so if Trelane is in SNW Season 3, the only question becomes: Why didn’t Spock remember him in The Original Series?
