Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Bosses Confirm Headcanon With Rhys Darby's Classic Character

[Warning: The following contains spoilers for the first two episodes of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 3. Read at your own risk!]

Heading into Star Trek: Strange New Worlds' hotly anticipated third season, executive producers and showrunners Henry Alonso Myers and Akiva Goldsman have at this point zeroed in on a philosophy that has helped guide their desire to combine fresh new character approaches and novel story hooks with creative twists on the massive mythology of the beloved sci-fi franchise — including the wildly unexpected return of two legacy characters, previously unconnected except in fan theories.

"We really look at it like: If [Star Trek creator] Gene Roddenberry were making the show right now, what would they try if they didn't have time or energy or the VFX ability to do in the past that we can do now?" Myers tells TV Guide.

Indeed, in the first five episodes of the Paramount+ series' new season, everything old is new again, in terms of Star Trek hallmarks. In the tradition established by Star Trek: The Next Generation, the season kicks off with a lightning-paced conclusion to the previous season's finale cliffhanger while also shedding considerable new light on the The Original Series' classic one-off alien race the Gorn; there are new incarnations of long-canon-friendly faces from '60s episodes like "What Are Little Girls Made Of" and more; there's a nostalgic return to The Next Generation's trapped-inside-a-holodeck-simulation format — a century before the technology became widespread — that also inventively offers sly winks and nods to real-world Star Trek lore; and there's the continued evolution of the Enterprise's crew, offering ever more backstory for characters the audience have either already known and loved for decades or have met for the first time on Strange New Worlds.

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"I feel like we start every season with a similar idea, meaning that we sort of look at what we've left behind and we try to figure out where we want to fall forward," says Meyers. "We started with a very clear sense of what the first episode should be, but a lot of that was you spent a lot of time trying to think about where you want the characters to go, and then we spent a lot of time trying to think about what are individual types of Star Trek episodes that we want to do. And then we also really try hard to think of what are some episodes that have not been done in canon that we could try to do in Star Trek? A la the [Season 2] musical [episode], what can we do to make this be?"

"And we found some things that hadn't been explored," adds Goldsman. "Like can we have a relationship that lasts throughout the course of a season with the lead? Can we dispense with the Gorn [who in The Original Series era had gone unseen by most in Starfleet]? Can we create a new villain and how can we do that? What are our limitations? What are the parameters? We wanted to, at a seasonal level, also do a couple of things that we hadn't done before."

One of those big swings comes in the third season's second episode — SPOILERS AHEAD — which serves as a prequel of sorts to The Original Series' "The Squire of Gothos," a fan favorite 1967 episode that pits Kirk's crew against the seemingly godlike being Trelane (William Campbell), playacting at being an 18th-century aristocrat in alternately petulant and menacing tones, and who is ultimately revealed to be the childlike offspring of omnipotent cosmic beings. 

The new episode, "Wedding Bell Blues," finds Trelane, now played by scene-stealing New Zealand actor Rhys Darby, encountering the U.S.S. Enterprise at a much earlier point, during the command of Chris Pike (Anson Mount). The powerful, if temperamental, chaos agent uses his reality-bending skills to upend the crew with his desire to throw a wedding — between two characters, Spock (Ethan Peck) and Christine Chapel (Jess Bush), whose relationship has recently fizzled.

The idea sprang forth after the producers had seen Darby on Our Flag Means Death outfitted in 18th-century garb that, to two longtime Trekkies, immediately evoked images of Trelane.

"He wore the outfit perfectly and it felt very Trelane," says Myers, who saw even more potential when discussions to use the character opened up to include Darby. "Rhys is just a delightful human being, a really good actor, and he brought a lot of sense of comedy and a slightly different perspective on how he could play the role. He could be both light and dark, and funny, all at the same time. And part of it was just like, 'What can we do that is surprising?' And he seemed to be a good example of that."

Upping the ante on the surprise, as "Wedding Bell Blues" concludes with a callback to Trelane being disciplined by one of his disembodied parents, sharp-eyed viewers may recognize that Trelane's father is voiced by longtime Star Trek guest actor John de Lancie, who's played the similarly omnipotent celestial Q across the franchise since 1987. Many Star Trek junkies have long speculated that Trelane just might be a baby-powered member of the Q race.

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"The truth is this is canon that's not canon, right?" Goldsman tells TV Guide. "It's headcanon for a lot of people, that Q and Trelane are connected, that Trelane is part of the Q Continuum. And it was a really nice idea that people who were not us had, and so we thought we would reward that by making it canon. So now it's canon: Now Trelane's a Q!"

Of course, Trelane's appearance on Strange New Worlds opens up a can of worms or two for the canon-observant, notably why it is that long-serving Enterprise crewmembers who overlap between Pike and Kirk's command tenures — including Spock, Uhura (Celia Rose Gooding), Scotty (Martin Quinn), and Chapel — don't immediately recognize Trelane when he bedevils Kirk a few years down the line?

"He looks different, and they don't say his name," offers Goldsman quickly, with a smirk that suggests there may be more to the story.

Myers appears to confirm this. "These are fair questions," he says, "and don't assume that we haven't talked this through."

Seasons 1 and 2 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds are now streaming on Paramount+.