It’d be wise to bring back Mary Chieffo for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds

Mary Chieffo wants to reprise her role as L’Rell on Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.

It’d be a smart move to bring in Mary Chieffo’s L’Rell onto Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. If for nothing else, you’re going to be bringing in characters from across Star Trek’s current crop of shows, which was part of the winning formula for the ’80s, ’90s, and ’00s era shows. It’s an idea she likes as well, as she stated in a Q&A earlier this week. Chieffo went to on to put over the idea, saying;

"Someone was asking if I would want to reprise my role [of Chancellor L’Rell] in the Pike series. I would be so down! [laughs] I just wanted to let everyone know, I am 100 percent on board, if they’ll have me."

This was an idea that worked for Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: Voyager and Star Trek: Enterprise. Each series borrowed characters from other shows, like DS9 bringing in Lwaxana Troi, as well as Gowron, both characters introduced in Next Generation.

Even Star Trek: The Next Generation did this with the original series when they brought in DeForst Kelley to reprise his role as Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy for their inaugural episode of the series. A huge move to not only establish a timeline of sorts between the two generations of shows but also a great gesture to the original cast, crew, and fans of the series as it moved on to new adventures.

So it would be a smart, prudent, and dare it be said; a logical move to bring in characters from across the current crop of Trek shows. Granted, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is already doing just this, using three core characters from season two of Star Trek: Discovery to set up the new series, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t do more with these characters.

Especially since the series it spawned from, Discovery is going so far into the future that these characters established on Discovery may not have any more opportunities to appear. It just makes sense to take the best elements of Discovery that the crew is moving on from and integrating them into the new show.