Star Trek: Lower Decks clip brings the crew to iconic Deep Space Nine location

Star Trek: Lower Decks will premiere its third season this week.

Star Trek: Lower Decks’ third season is coming to Paramount+ this week, debuting on Aug. 25, 2022. The series will pick up where season two left off, with the crew of the U.S.S. Cerritos creating a plan to break their captain out of Federation prison after she was wrongfully arrested at the end of season two.

In the clip, we see the four main characters, Beckett Mariner (Tawny Newsome), Brad Boilmer (Jack Quad), D’Vana Tendi (Noel Wells), and Sam Rutherford (Eugene Cordero), sitting around a table trying to figure out a plan to get Mariner’s mother, Carol Freeman, out of jail.

The scene is filled with a host of references and it’s not even 40 seconds long.

Three references in this Star Trek: Lower Decks scene

The hot sauce

Eagle-eyed viewers will notice the hot sauce that Boilmer eats has a very familiar name. It’s called Ketracel, a reference to Deep Space Nine’s Jem’Hadar race of aliens. The Jem’Hadar were created with a key defect that they would die from unless they used Ketracel-White. It allowed the Founders the ability to control the Jem’Hadar, by dangling their only source of sustained life in front of their noses whenever they wanted something done.

Now it’s a very hot, very awful hot sauce apparently.

The clothing

While fans may recognize Rutherford’s outfit as being something that Jake Sisko would wear in Deep Space Nine, it looks like everyone is in something, if not a direct copy of, was inspired by the civilian clothing that the Sisko family wore in DS9. Considering it seems like Lower Decks is going to be doing a salute to the DS9 era of Trek, this makes sense.

The location

Fans of DS9 will recognize the restaurant that everyone is at as Sisko’s Creole Kitchen, a staple location in Deep Space Nine that former station captain, Benjamin Sisko’s father, Joseph, used to run.