Tawny Newsome excited about some former franchise stars debuting in Star Trek: Lower Decks

Star Trek: Lower Decks continues to hype up the upcoming guest spots for season three.

For better or worse, Star Trek: Lower Decks has steered into the “guest spot/cameo” portion of entertainment. The properties popularity seems most driven more by big names returning to guest star on the show, even if in small cameos or minor roles like with John de Lancie or Robert Duncan McNeill returning to the series as Q and Tom Paris respectively for generally irrelevant parts.

That seems to be what makes Lower Decks what it is, a heavy dose of nostalgia. Some people like it, some people don’t. Regardless, they’re not changing that approach anytime soon. They know a bulk of the Trek fandom that watches the show do so because they are constantly kicking up and bringing back things from past series. This has been no different as of late.

Lower Decks star Tawny Newsome seems to know that this is a big part of the show’s appeal and in a recent interview with Screenrant, really hyped up the idea of more past stars coming back, and more big names popping up;

"Yes. There are. That I’m hugely excited about…  There are actually both [Star Trek and non-Star Trek guest stars]. So I’m really excited about some of the friends and folks I know, the actors I know, who are doing small roles and cameos, and bigger roles. They’re so good at grabbing talent. But then there are also some folks from within the Star Trek universe that I am very excited about."

Star Trek: Lower Decks relying on big names and series stars makes sense but is a bit short-sighted

Star Trek: Lower Decks relying on names from the past really isn’t going to age well, and in 10 or 15 years fans will not view the property the same, as people will wonder why they didn’t focus more on their own creations as opposed to others.

That said, that’s not a problem Paramount+ will even worry about. In 15 years, this show will have long been over, and will no longer be a thing that the streaming service worries about. If it’s still even around in 15 years.

The focus of the series is to get Star Trek fans to watch Lower Decks any way they can, and a good, cheap way to do this is to throw the more popular older names on the show any way they can in any role that’ll fit.

Will it age well in time? Probably not, nostalgia spoils very fast, but if it works during the show’s run then that’s all that matters.