Star Trek Gets Its First Post-Credits Scene

Star Trek has its first post-credits scene and it’s kind of a strange one. The post-credits scene is included with this week’s release of the Star Trek: Short Treks episode “The Trouble with Edward.” The episode reveals the secret origin of tribbles’ prodigious reproductive capabilities. It stars Rosa Salazar as Lynne Lucero, the captain of the Starfleet science vessel USS Cabot, and H. Jon Benjamin as an Edward Larkin, an eccentric science officer aboard the Cabot who goes rogue. Larkin is studying tribbles as a potential solution to the food shortage on a planet near Klingon space. Despite Lucero’s orders for him to discontinue his research, Larkin injects his own DNA into a tribble, causing the tribble to breed asexually at a rampant rate.

The episode ends with the tribbles overtaking the Cabot and Larkin seeming to die as he’s caught in a wave of tribbles. The rest of the crew escapes while the Cabot careens into Klingon space, setting up the remaining history of tribbles as we know it.

After the credits roll, viewers can see what looks like a bootleg advertisement for Tribbles cereal that reproduces itself just like tribbles do. The commercial even mentions that the cereal is infused with Larkin’s DNA.

The scene has raised a lot of questions about whether this is meant to be canon or not. If it is canon, then it raises several additional questions. More likely, this scene was held back until after the credits because it was intended to be more of a “just for fun” scene. Some fans on social media have interpreted it as something in-between, perhaps a fever dream in Larkin’s mind before he’s crushed or suffocated to death by the tribbles flooding the Cabot.

“The Trouble with Edward” is the closest Star Trek has come to a straight comedy story. It comes from a writer and director who have both worked on comedies such as Portlandia and stars a comedian, Benjamin, in its lead role. ComicBook.com spoke with Benjamin about bringing comedy to the Star Trek universe.

“I always think comedy is probably better when it has a good foundation, like characters that are more nuanced and more drawn out,” Benjamin said. “There’s a benefit in having Star Trek, being this sort of long, long-running franchise where they really do put a lot of character development into all their prior work. Comedy always plays a little better when you have that. It works to the benefit of doing stuff like this. But essentially, yeah, it was a good comedy concept and a good idea that was well executed. But yeah, I think having the benefit of it being a Star Trek product makes a difference… And I think they did want to keep the tone the same and play the comedy that way so it’s not goofy or silly in a way, but true to a real, actual Star Trek episode.”

What do you think of Star Trek‘s first post-credits scene? Let us know in the comments. “The Trouble with Edward” episode of Star Trek: Short Treks is now streaming on CBS All Access.