Star Trek Brings Back Voyager For New Episode
If you’ve watched much Star Trek: Lower Decks, then you know that each season is full of one geeky love letter to the Paramount franchise after another. Now, with the fourth season about to drop on September 7, fans are eagerly scanning the trailer for the show for hints of what our favorite ensigns’ next adventure will be. If you scope out the video below, you’ll see that the crew of the USS Cerritos will be doing something involving the iconic USS Voyager.
Sadly, the trailer doesn’t reveal much of what is going to happen with the characters or the episode. In fact, in typical Star Trek: Lower Decks fashion, we get an almost ironically vague statement from Ensign Mariner: “we get to do something on Voyager!” Her enthusiasm is matched by much of the fanbase who always want to return to the adventures of characters like Captain Janeway and Seven of Nine.
Interestingly, this won’t be the first time that Lower Decks has had a very explicit crossover with Star Trek: Voyager. In the episode “We’ll Always Have Tom Paris,” the show brought back Tom Paris actor Robert Duncan McNeill to reprise his role as the hotshot pilot who helped lead his crew from the far reaches of the Delta Quadrant.
In the episode, Ensign Boimler (who is canonically a Star Trek fanboy) geeked out so much about his Tom Paris commemorative plate that it ended up becoming a real product due to intense fan demand.
How will Star Trek: Voyager be represented in the next season of Lower Decks? We can only speculate, but it’s very likely that we’ll another voice cameo or two in the vein of McNeill’s return.
Kate Mulgrew, for example, has already loaned her voice as Janeway to the criminally-underwatched Star Trek: Prodigy, so she might be a very natural cameo on Lower Decks (allowing her to provide a voice to all of Star Trek’s current cartoons).
Whether or not there is a cast cameo, the Star Trek: Lower Decks preview makes it clear that their adventure will involve the actual starship Voyager. Canonically, it’s not clear what the starship would be up to now: for example, in the Prodigy episode “Supernova, Part 2” that takes place just three years after Boimler showed off his Tom Paris plate, we see Starfleet has already commissioned the USS Voyager-A.
In the Picard episode “The Star Gazer” (which takes place 14 years later), we see Starfleet Academy has commemorated the original Voyager as “one of the most storied starships in the history of Starfleet.”
We know that approximately 17 years after the upcoming season of Lower Decks, in the final season of Picard, the USS Voyager is a museum piece among other famous ships overseen by LeVar Burton’s Commodore Geordi La Forge. So it’s possible that in the timeline of Lower Decks Season 4, the ship has already found its way to the Fleet Museum. We wouldn’t be surprised if the Cerritos crew has to hijack this classic ship to engage in some animated shenanigans.
But will this be the kind of caper that helps them save the galaxy or another one that lands them in hot water with Starfleet? To find out, you’ll need to tune into Paramount Plus on September 7 when this series returns.
