Star Trek will see Lower Decks and Strange New Worlds crossover.
Comic-Con San Deigo was a big opportunity for Star Trek to get the word out about what is to come. We saw the first look at the Next Generation cast as they reunite on Picard’s finale season, we got a trailer for Lower Decks’ third season, and we even got an announcement of two new shows. Yet, one thing we didn’t expect, was the announcement of a crossover between Lower Decks and Strange New Worlds.
Now, a crossover is fine, and even a crossover between Lower Decks and Strange New Worlds can work, but that doesn’t mean it will.
See, the show is going to be in both live-action and animation and that can work, as the crossover will only include stars Tawny Newsome and Jack Quaid from Lower Decks and they look enough like Beckett Mariner and Brad Boilmer that they can make that work. As for the Strange New Worlds crew, it is much easier to do voice-over work for animated portions than it would be to make a voice cast look like their characters.
It makes more sense to do it as a stand-alone special and not part of a regular series but no, the brand will be doing this crossover during Strange New Worlds’ second season.
What are the issues the Lower Decks and Strange New Worlds crossover face?
It makes sense in a synergy sense that Lower Decks and Strange New Worlds get tabbed to do the crossover, as they’re two of the three more popular properties within the Trek brand currently. Yet, a Picard and Lower Decks crossover makes more sense time-line-wise. See Strange New Worlds is set over one hundred years before Lower Decks, while Picard is set only a few years after Lower Decks.
So timeline-wise, these characters could easily crossover.
Now, yes, they’ll just do the “timey-wimey time travel” plot to make it work but it’s so played out. So making sure it isn’t just like another Trek episode, say DS9’s Trouble With Tribbles crossover, is going to be key.
Another key that needs to be hammered out, is how they do the crossover with the animation included. Now, they may just open the show with Boilmer and Mariner on the Cerritos in an animated form, only to get caught in some time-travel MacGuffin and end up on the Enterprise in live-action.
Who knows.
What we do know is this is going to be hard to pull off but if it can be pulled off, has great potential to be an all-time classic. Jonathan Frakes is going to direct the project and if he can’t make it work, I can’t imagine that it can be made to work.