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

4. UP — Who? Q!

Well, that was a surprise! John de Lancie is Rhys Darby's Wedding Planner's Dad. Credited in the subtitles simply as "ENERGY BEING," we can all read between the lines. This is Q (Senior), making Darby Q Junior, thus making Q Junior also very likely Trelane.

These connections are hardly new, though they've never before been made in canon (unless you include Mariner's comment in Those Old Scientists). On the invention of Q in the first place, Star Trek: The Original Series and Star Trek: The Next Generation writer David Gerrold once commented, "It's Trelane all over again".

The similarities between Darby's Wedding Planner and Trelane of The Squire of Gothos (especially in that episode's ending) are too striking to ignore. Finally, though non-canonical, Peter David's novel Q-Squared confirmed that Trelane was a member of the Continuum.

As for Q Junior, we first met him in the Star Trek: Voyager episode The Q and the Grey. He returned, several years older, and played by de Lancie's real-life son Keegan, in Q2. In the latter episode, on Captain Janeway's suggestion, Q leaves to spend time with his son, years, in fact, "in Q time," though less than ten minutes on Voyager's "temporal plane". Could that timey-wimey gap be the 'Trelane years' for Q Junior? Could one of those parents at the end of The Squire of Gothos be Suzie Plakson's female Q?

In Wedding Bell Blues, John de Lancie's Q says to son down below, "Shall I show you once more what the consequence is for disobedience?" That has echoes of what father said to Trelane at the end of The Squire of Gothos — "You're disobedient and cruel". It is also reminiscent of the 'punishment' inflicted by Q and the Continuum on Q Junior for his misbehaviour in Q2 — "life as an Oprelian amoeba," or "How's that for consequences?"