Star Trek Icon Makes Surprise Return to Franchise

A Star Trek: The Original Series star just made a surprising return to the Star Trek franchise. SPOILERS for the Star Trek: Lower Decks episode “Crisis Point 2: Paradoxus” follow. As the sequel to the original “Crisis Point,” “Crisis Point 2: Paradoxus” again turns . Toward the end of the episode, there’s a scene that’s a reference to one from Star Trek Generations. In the original scene, Jean-Luc Picard finds himself in the Nexus, where he walks inside what appears to be a mundane suburban home and meets James T. Kirk.

In “Crisis Point 2: Paradoxus,” Ensign Brad Boimler has a similar experience. After passing out during the holodeck program he created to outdo Ensign Mariner’s original “Crisis Protocol,” Boimler wakes up in front of a suburban home. But despite the mailbox outside the home having Kirk’s name on the side, he finds another Star Trek icon in residence.

George Takei Returns as Sulu in Star Trek: Lower Decks

Boimler meets Sulu, voiced by Star Trek: The Original Series star George Takei. It all turns out to be a dream in the end, but Sulu tells Boimler he took the place over after Kirk went off time-traveling or something.

Sulu provides Boimler with the wisdom he seeks in dealing with the death of his clone, William Boimler. After that, Boimler begins to barrage Sulu with fan-at-a-convention-style questions until Sulu warns him that the horse (presumably left behind by Kirk) is going to bite him. When the horse does, Boimler wakes up and finds himself in sickbay aboard the Cerritos. It turns out he got dehydrated while freaking out in the holodeck.

Sulu’s Star Trek future.

When Star Trek fans last saw Sulu, he had finally been given his own captaincy and command of the USS Excelsior, as seen in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (and later in the Star Trek: Voyager episode “Flashback”). Star Trek: Picard Season 2 later confirmed that Sulu remained in command of the ship for hundreds of exploratory missions until it was finally decommissioned. Speaking of Star Trek: Picard, would Takei return for a similar series focused on Sulu? In a 2020 interview with StarTrek.com, he said he thought it was a “good idea” and recalled how Star Trek VI seemed to tee up such a spinoff series or movie.

“That’s what the fans thought it was going to be,” he said. “They mounted a huge tidal wave of letter writing, and by then we were in the email age, too. When we were on television, they were fan mailing us with pen and paper, but after that movie, fans inundated Paramount with email pleas for a new spin off series called The Excelsior with Captain Sulu. Those executives at Paramount didn’t see and didn’t hear, [so] they missed that opportunity. But the fans thought it was a great idea, and it surely would have been a huge, monstrous, galactic success.”

Star Trek: Lower Decks debuts new episodes Thursdays on Paramount+.