Trelane Was a Q All Along: Strange New Worlds Finally Makes the Squire of Gothos Q's Son

Trelane, the Squire of Gothos, was a Q all along, and Strange New Worlds has now made that canon. In the season 3 episode "Wedding Bell Blues," John de Lancie, the actual Q, voices the father of a wish granting bartender played by Rhys Darby, and executive producer Akiva Goldsman told TV Insider that this means Q is Trelane's father.

A lot of us held that theory for decades with nothing on screen to back it up. To show how the show finally got there, I want to start in January 1967. Later in this piece I will also get to the one line from Voyager that still does not fit, and my own way around it.

The Squire of Gothos gave Star Trek its first all powerful spoiled child

In January 1967, the Enterprise is crossing what the crew calls a star desert, a stretch of space with nothing in it, when a planet shows up that is not on anybody's charts. Kirk orders the ship away from it, and then Kirk and Sulu vanish right off the bridge. Four hours later a message comes up on the main viewer reading "Greetings and felicitations," and somebody on the bridge reads the sign off and says, "I believe it's pronounced Tally Ho."

That is "The Squire of Gothos," season one, episode seventeen, and it is one of my favorite episodes of the original series. It is the first time Star Trek ever met a being with nearly unlimited power who acts like a spoiled kid, which should sound a little familiar to anyone who knows The Next Generation.

The landing party beams down and finds Kirk and Sulu inside a big old manor house that should not exist on a planet with a toxic atmosphere. A man in a frilly shirt introduces himself as General Trelane, retired, then a minute later corrects himself: he is just Squire Trelane now, and they may call him Squire. He has been observing Earth through some kind of telescope and is obsessed with us, but he has the history wrong by about 900 years, because the light he has been seeing left Earth that long ago.

Trelane's parents end the game and reveal he made Gothos himself

He is charming, he is rude, and he decides the crew of the Enterprise are his new toys. For most of the episode, Kirk cannot beat him. The food has no taste and the fire gives off no heat. Trelane challenges Kirk to a duel, then puts him on trial and sentences him to hang. Deciding a hanging is not any fun, he turns it into a royal hunt with Kirk as the prey.

Kirk breaks his sword, Trelane screams that he cheated, and right then two voices from nowhere call his name. Kirk and the audience are stuck in the same place, wondering who is talking. It is his parents, and to me this scene is the whole story. Trelane complains that they always stop him when he is having fun, and they call him disobedient and cruel and tell him it is time to come in. Then they say, "If you cannot take proper care of your pets, you cannot have them at all."

Then comes my favorite line in the episode: "Stop that nonsense at once, or you'll not be permitted to make any more planets." He made the planet. The parents appear as two green glowing lights and apologize to Kirk: "You must forgive our child. The fault is ours for indulging him too much. He will be punished." And that is it. They take him home, and the Enterprise flies away.

Q looked like Trelane's dad from Farpoint, and True Q made the fit better

Twenty years later, the very first episode of The Next Generation, "Encounter at Farpoint," introduces an all powerful being who calls humanity "a dangerous, savage, child race" and then puts us on trial, the same as Trelane did to Kirk. He goes by one letter: Q. The first time I saw him, I thought, that is Trelane's dad. The more Next Generation you take in, the better the fit gets.

In season 6's "True Q," we find out the Q can have kids. A young intern on the Enterprise named Amanda Rogers turns out to be a Q, and Q explains that her parents had assumed human form to visit Earth, he supposes for amusement, and "in vulgar human fashion, they proceeded to conceive a child." So two all powerful beings come to Earth for fun and end up with a kid, which sounds like a family we know.

Then the episode gets dark. Amanda's parents died when she was a baby, supposedly in a tornado, which is a weird thing to happen on a planet that controls its own weather. Picard asks Q straight out whether her parents were executed by the Q Continuum, and Q does not deny it. That makes "He will be punished" from 1967 sound a lot less like a timeout.

My favorite little detail from that episode is that Q says he was sent to deal with Amanda because he is "an expert in humanity." Back on Gothos, Trelane called Earth "the very planet that I've made my hobby." The kid's hobby is the father's job.

Peter David's Q-Squared made Trelane a Q back in 1994

I was not the only one who thought Trelane belonged in that family; a lot of us did. Back in 2021 I put together a whole case called "The Evidence That Trelane Was a Q," and the problem with that theory was always the same: nothing on screen tied the two together. It was a really good theory without a single line of canon behind it.

Somebody else had already made the jump, though. In July 1994, Peter David wrote a Next Generation novel called "Q-Squared," in which Trelane is a Q. He is a teenager in the Continuum, and Q is assigned to mentor him, which is apparently a job every grown up Q has to take on at least once. Trelane does not take it well.

The book runs three versions of the Enterprise side by side: one where Jack Crusher lived and is the captain with Picard as his first officer, one where the Federation is still at war with the Klingons, and ours. Trelane gets his hands on real power and starts smashing those universes together, and Q has to go to Picard for help putting them back. The kid who got sent home for playing with his pets is now playing with entire realities.

The book got popular, spending five weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, right between the end of The Next Generation and the movie Generations. At the end, Picard asks Q if Trelane is actually his son, and Q denies it. Keep that in mind. The obvious objection is that the novels are not canon, and that is right; they never have been. So in 1994 we had a bestseller, a lot of fans who agreed with it, and still nothing on screen.

Rhys Darby's bartender in Wedding Bell Blues is still keeping pets

Then came 2025 and Strange New Worlds season 3, episode 2, "Wedding Bell Blues." There is suddenly a wedding on the Enterprise, even though, as somebody points out, as of yesterday there was no wedding. There is also a bartender, played by Rhys Darby, who seems to be granting wishes. Spock works it out: one night in the ship's bar, he had wished things could be different with Christine, and the bartender, who is somehow also the wedding planner, made it so.

When Spock tries to call the whole thing off, the bartender says, "I can do anything I want," snaps his fingers, and Spock is shrunk down and stuck inside a glass, which the bartender admires as his own little Vulcan terrarium. Sixty years after his parents told him he could not keep pets, he is still keeping them. He threatens to wish everyone to a cornfield, a pretty great joke for a show to make if you know your Twilight Zone. When the wedding falls apart anyway and a guy named Roger turns out to have been a dog the whole time, he decides, "Everybody dies. And I'm starting with the dog." Rhys Darby was born to play this guy.

Then the episode does the thing. With the bartender threatening everybody and deciding who gets to live, a glowing ball of energy shows up and asks what this is. His answer: "Not now, Dad." The father says he has made enough of a mess, the son protests that nobody is listening to him, and the father asks whether he should show him once more the consequence for disobedience. The son promises to be good. It is the same argument Trelane's parents were having with him in 1967, sixty years apart.

Somebody asks whether he is a child. A very young one, the father says, only 8,000 Earth years, and the son corrects him: "8,020, Dad." Honestly, that is the most teenage thing anyone has ever said on Star Trek. He snaps everybody back the way they were, and on his way out he says one word, "Tallyho," the same as the sign off on the Gothos message. I cannot prove that is on purpose, but I would bet a slice of that wedding cake it is.

John de Lancie's voice and Akiva Goldsman's words supply the proof

This is the part people are going to argue about. The episode never says the name Trelane. I went through the whole season, and nobody says Trelane, nobody says Gothos, and nobody says the word Q. With the episode alone, you would have a bartender, a dad made of light, and a lot of hints.

You would also have the voice of that dad, which belongs to John de Lancie, the actual Q. And Akiva Goldsman, one of the show's executive producers, told TV Insider exactly who the bartender is: "This is confirmation of that very smart piece of head canon that we now have absorbed into canon gratefully." He added, "And yes, having Q himself voice his father does mean that Q is Trelane's father."

The next link is mine and not Goldsman's, because he does not name the book in that interview. But when he says head canon, I think Q-Squared is the reason that head canon was so widespread to begin with. The book put the idea in print 30 years ago, and the show finally caught up. In the book Q tells Picard that Trelane is not his son; thirty years later the show lets Q answer for himself, and the answer is "Not now, Dad." So it looks like he lied, which is about the most Q thing he could have done.

Voyager's first child born in the Continuum line gets in the way

There is a problem, though, and it is Voyager's fault. In season 3's "The Q and the Grey," Q decides that "creating a new Q could bring an era of peace" to the Continuum, and by the end of the episode he has a baby whom he is already teaching to knock small planets out of orbit. In 1967, Trelane's parents threatened to take away his planet making privileges; in 1996, Q is teaching his newborn to knock them around. That family does not change.

In season 7's "Q2," the baby is grown up, a teenager, and a disaster. Q drops him on Voyager and admits the kid has been starting wars among innocent species, tampering with primordial gene pools and punching holes in the fabric of spacetime. Janeway tells Q he is not doing his son any favors by indulging him. Indulging is the same word Trelane's parents used in their apology to Kirk: same word, same problem, 34 years apart.

But in that same conversation, Q says, "Q is the first child born in the Continuum, which makes me the first parent." Strange New Worlds tells us Trelane is 8,020 years old with Q as his dad. Those two lines cannot both be true the way they are written. Nothing on screen fixes it, and nobody in 2025 mentions Voyager's line, so as far as the show is concerned, it is unanswered.

My lawyer's reading lets both Q lines stand

Here is my read, and it is mine, not the show's. Look at the exact words: the first child born in the Continuum. Amanda Rogers proves a Q kid can be born somewhere else, because she was born on Earth. Trelane's parents come and get him on Gothos, a planet he made himself. If Trelane was born out there and not in the Continuum, Q's line holds up.

It is a lawyer's reading, and I know it, but Q is the guy who put humanity on trial in his very first episode, so I think he would allow it. So Trelane was a Q. We said it, the book said it, and now the show says it, just with the name left out. I'll take it.

I have a couple of suspects of my own, so who else in Star Trek do you think is secretly connected to the Q?