Star Trek: Lower Decks need to do more with characters like Sonya Gomez

Star Trek: Lower Decks needs to further advance characters we don’t remember.

Star Trek: Lower Decks is currently working on their third season, but one thing that should absolutely be in there is more minor characters from past Star Trek series. The animated series explored the evolution of a former character from The Next Generation in Sonya Gomez, revealing that she was now a captain at the time of Lower Decks.

For those who don’t remember, Gomez was in just two episodes of The Next Generation, serving under Geordi La Forge in engineering. She was a minor character, who didn’t get much screen time and wasn’t someone ever seen or mentioned from again after her last encounter. She also did nothing overly memorable during her time on the show, so it isn’t like she had a dangling storyline that fans wanted to catch up with.

That’s exactly why characters like her should be brought more often in Lower Decks.

Bringing back minor characters on Lower Decks flushes out the universe.

What happened to the woman that Neelix left Voyager for? Is Thomas Riker still in prison? What happened to the other Borg children that Voyager liberated? Who took over Joe Sisko’s restaurant in New Orleans? These aren’t questions that anyone is begging to have answers but doing so helps a vast and never-ending universe feel that much closer.

They’re minor characters but in serving those characters and giving them more to their stories, you give fans not only a nice surprise by bringing them back into the fold but you also give them a reason to go back and revisit their previous appearances.

They may not seem like major characters, and their stories may not have started out in a way that would captivate an audience on its own merits but by giving them more depth and nuance, their minor appearances previously become so much more interesting and the entire process enriches both the new and old content; as long as its done right.

Hopefully Lower Decks and other future Trek series bring back characters that went under the radar. It’s a nice throwback and we’re not constantly resuing every former major character as has been done countless times by this point.