8 Ups & 1 Down From Star Trek: Strange New Worlds 3.2 — Wedding Bell Blues

8. UP — Trelane Thing Going On

"Don't yell Q! They haven't met him yet," scolded Beckett Mariner in Those Old Scientists. "They had kind of a Trelane thing going on." Well, with a good deal of finger snapping and snappy dressing in Wedding Bell Blues, it seems like they always had both.

When it was announced at New York Comic Con last year that Rhys Darby would be joining the cast of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds as a "legacy character," high on the list of speculation was Trelane, the mischievous, quasi-omnipotent being from The Squire of Gothos.

The teaser trailer all but confirmed it with that outfit. Whilst the episode itself doesn't definitively say anything either way, it is heavily implied that the wise-cracking, finger-clicking wedding planner IS, indeed, Trelane, and that Trelane, long-suspected, is a Q (more on that later).

If Darby is 'Trelane,' he was the perfect choice for the role. He plays the character with the precise amount of camp and childish hubris — at once old and much younger than his 8,020 'Earth years'. The zingers and one-liners roll off the tongue. We, the audience, are as "happy as a Ternaran bat," whatever one of those is.

Doubly clever — no one aboard the starship or the starbase ever sees Darby's face in William Campbell-style Trelane/Q form (save for as an energy cloud near the end). That was a great way to keep in check with canon. Hardly a piece of cake, yet very well done!