The USS Cerritos pays a visit to Deep Space Nine, and a pair of familiar voices are there to greet them.
The Star Trek franchise returns to Deep Space Nine for the first time in twenty-three years on today’s episode of Lower Decks — and some of the station’s crew are along for the ride. Deep Space Nine regulars Armin Shimerman and Nana Visitor reprise their roles as Quark and Kira Nerys, respectively, on “Hear All, Trust Nothing.”
In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Visitor and Lower Decks creator Mike McMahon discuss how their show made its journey to the famed space station. The episode’s plot involves the USS Cerritos docking at Deep Space Nine, where the core cast of Brad Boimler (Jack Quaid), Beckett Mariner (Tawny Newsome), Sam Rutherford (Eugene Cordero), and D’Vana Tendi (Noël Wells) come into contact with the station’s Bajoran administrator, Kira Nerys, and the unscrupulous Ferengi business owner Quark while contending with the Karemma, an alien race familiar to Deep Space Nine viewers. The Cerritos’ visit came as no surprise to fans as Lower Decks‘ season 3 trailer concluded with a good-natured jab at the stately nature of Deep Space Nine‘s opening credits.
Both Shimerman and Visitor had no problems stepping back into the shoes of their characters, decades later. McMahon recounts that he was “crying laughing” at Shimerman’s attention to detail in his vocal performance; the actor brought the prosthetic teeth he’d worn as the sharp-toothed Quark into the recording booth and wore them so he’d sound the way in animation that he had in live-action. Visitor found that the character “really never left me. Just simply stepping into her virtual uniform wasn’t really that much distance for me to travel.”
Star Trek: Lower Decks is an animated comedy series that takes an affectionate look at the more ridiculous aspects of the franchise, following a cast of lower-ranking Starfleet members on a ship that rarely gets the glamorous and exciting assignments Star Trek viewers are accustomed to. The series has brought back a number of Star Trek regulars to guest star, including Jonathan Frakes, Marina Sirtis, and John de Lancie. Its third season is currently airing, and it has been renewed for a fourth. Debuting in 1993, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine was the first Star Trek show to fully embrace serialization, with plotlines that spanned multiple seasons, making it a longtime fan favorite. A feature-length crowdfunded documentary on the show, What We Left Behind: Looking Back at Star Trek Deep Space Nine, premiered in 2019, reflecting the level of interest fans still have in the show, which ended its seven-season run in 1999. Says McMahan, “I haven’t met a single person involved in this current era that doesn’t love Deep Space Nine.”
Star Trek: Lower Decks is available on Paramount Plus, and new episodes debut weekly.
