Star Trek: Lower Decks Mid-season Trailer Confirms Q’s Return

As part of Tuesday’s Star Trek Day celebration, CBS All Access released a new midseason trailer for Star Trek: Lower Decks. The trailer shows what the USS Cerritos crew is going to be getting up to in the final five episodes of the series’ first season. The trailer also confirms that the mischievous and powerful alien entity Q will be making an appearance, with Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s John de Lancie providing his character’s voice. Fans of Star Trek: The Next Generation may remember that de Lancie debuted as Q in the pilot episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, “Encounter at Farpoint.” He returned throughout the series to pester Jean-Luc Picard, and also appeared in episodes of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: Voyager. You can watch the new Lower Decks trailer above.

While speaking to ComicBook.com ahead of the show’s premiere, creator Mike McMahan explained how Lower Decks uses past Star Trek canon throughout the series. “The more you reference Star Trek stuff, the more to a new fan it’s just going to sound like sci-fi stuff,” McMahan says. “There’s nothing in a Lower Decks episode that will keep a new audience member from understanding what the emotional stories are and what the sci-fi story is if they don’t know the term that you’re using that reflects back on an existing Star Trek episode. That being said, nine times out of 10, when we’re doing a sci-fi thing, we come up with the story we want to tell, and then we’re like, ‘Alright, well hold on, is there anything in Star Trek canon that this could just be that we can be careful with?’ And luckily, there’s quite a few Star Trek episodes and movies out there to pull from.

“Everything is on the table. It really just is what do we think the characters might know? Some stuff that happens in Discovery is off the books. We have big arguments about Section 31. How many characters in Starfleet actually know about Section 31? Or do they know it’s a known thing that some people think is a rumor and some people think is real or is it out there? The Disco era stuff, all of that, that’s fair game as long as we believe that it would be something that our character would have learned about at Starfleet Academy, that they would have been able to watch on the holodeck, that they would have been to read logs about. In every episode that you’ve seen, it leans more heavily on TNG because we’ve been finding as we’ve been writing it that each season — because we’ve been working on Season Two as well — and the Season One flavor is really like TNG.”

New episodes of Star Trek: Lower Decks premiere Thursdays on CBS All Access.