Beloved Star Trek Actor Not Appearing In New Spinoff?

This came up in a recent interview where Wilson Cruz was mostly focused on the different aspects of his Culber character that the actor would have liked to explore if Discovery had gotten another season. The interviewer then asked the natural follow-up question of whether fans could at least expect to see Culber in the upcoming Starfleet Academy spinoff.

Unfortunately, Cruz confirmed that he hasn’t been asked despite the fact that “they know that I would come back,” and Paramount knows who his different representatives are and has both his email and his phone number.

Honestly, this is a shame for many reasons, including the fact that Wilson Cruz was effortlessly one of the best parts of Discovery throughout its every season. Plus, Paramount has confirmed that Robert Picardo will star in Starfleet Academy, and we can only guess he will be reprising his role as the effectively immortal holographic Doctor from Voyager.

We’ve rarely had the opportunity to see how different show’s doctors would interact with each other, and it would be quite entertaining to see how Culber’s warm enthusiasm would bounce off the legendarily prickly personality of the Emergency Medical Hologram.

Speaking of Culber’s bubbly personality, that was one of the things that Wilson Cruz elaborated on in the interview. He discussed how early in Season 5, Culber’s body is briefly inhabited by Jinaal, a Trill who hadn’t been able to enjoy corporeal life for 800 years. According to Cruz, the Trill had “a joy of being alive again that [Culber] understood but never allowed himself to live it.”

This seems to be alluding to Culber’s shocking death in Season 1 and his even more shocking resurrection in Season 2. On a very fundamental level, Culber is like the Trill: someone who was dead and then unexpectedly brought back to life and able to enjoy it in all of its messy glory. In Season 5, Wilson Cruz’s character served as both counselor and medical officer, and he experienced a newfound fervor for embracing all the weirdness the universe threw at him, a fervor that he worried his cynical husband Stamets would not appreciate.

Stamets was, of course, surprisingly chill about the whole thing, but that final Discovery season never fully confirmed what had caused this change in Culber’s personality.

According to Wilson Cruz, this is the ongoing influence of Jinaal, who gave Culber “ the ability to be like, ‘Yes, this existence is amazing and can be exciting and fun, and I need to embrace that part of it.’” While the actor felt there was more story to tell with his character, he acknowledges that the character had become “completely three-dimensional,” someone that he could take “anywhere.”

That includes Starfleet Academy, but based on his comments in the interview, it sounds like we shouldn’t expect to see Wilson Cruz in the first season of the new spinoff. That’s particularly disappointing because his character’s arc as a counselor has made him into the perfect character to help shape the minds of young cadets. Or maybe just their bodies…given how legendary Wilson Cruz’s physique is in real life, he could very well be the hippie physical education teacher that the new generation of Starfleet cadets desperately needs.

Source: Cinemablend