Q is a fictional character, as well as the name of a race, in Star Trek, appearing in the Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, Lower Decks, and Picard series and in related media.
Despite his vast knowledge and experience spanning untold eons, he is not above practical jokes for his personal amusement, for a Machiavellian or manipulative purpose, or to prove a point.
Beginning with the pilot episode "Encounter at Farpoint" of The Next Generation, Q became a recurring character, with pronounced comedic and dramatic chemistry with Jean-Luc Picard.
Q debuted in "Encounter at Farpoint", where he puts Captain Picard and the Enterprise crew on trial, arguing that humanity is a dangerous race and should be destroyed.
In "Hide and Q", he forces the Enterprise crew to participate in a war game against monsters he summoned, then makes a wager with Picard.
Picard argues that Q's services are unneeded (and unwanted), and Q rebuts him by teleporting the USS Enterprise to a distant system for their first encounter with the Borg.
In "Deja Q", Q is punished by the Q Continuum by being made mortal; his committing of an uncharacteristically selfless act (sacrificing his life so that a race attacking him will not destroy the Enterprise) garners the return of his powers.
He transports everyone to Sherwood Forest and casts himself as the Sheriff of Nottingham, Picard as Robin Hood, the crew as the Merry Men, and Vash as Maid Marian, then challenges them to rescue her.
Janeway refuses, and after she and her crew bring about a ceasefire in the Continuum, Q eventually mates with a female Q (Suzie Plakson) with whom he had been involved (referred to in Star Trek novels as 'Lady Q'), producing a son.
Q asks Janeway to mentor his son, and the two adults agree that the boy will remain on Voyager, without his powers, and either learn how to be a responsible, accountable, and productive inhabitant of the cosmos, or spend eternity as an amoeba.
In the Star Trek: Lower Decks episode "Veritas", Q appears in a flashback, challenging the senior crew of the USS Cerritos to an inexplicable 'game' to prove humanity's worth, dressing them up as chess pieces facing a football field filled with anthropomorphic cards and soccer balls.
Q admits to saving Picard and his crew from the explosion of the Stargazer and making sure they all remembered the original timeline to give them a chance to change it back.
After Q departs, Picard meets his crew and they work with a captured Borg Queen, who can detect temporal anomalies and says this future was caused by a change in Los Angeles in the year 2024.
In the next episode, "Watcher", Q appears in Los Angeles in 2024 (before First Contact), observing a woman working on a planned spaceflight to Europa.
Q later visits Kore and gives her the permanent cure even though Soong did not fulfill his end of the bargain, allowing her to leave her home and escape her controlling father.
The Borg Queen reveals the change that caused the dark future: In the original timeline, Renee found an alien life form on Europa, paving the way for the formation of the Federation.
In "Farewell," after the original timeline is restored, Picard leaves the skeleton key behind a loose brick in the wall for his younger self to find, then encounters Q in his home.
When asked about his supposed death, Q simply states that he'd hoped that the next generation wouldn't think so linearly and that while humanity's trial has ended for Picard, it has only just begun for Jack.
Where Q always offers his opponents a sporting chance to win his challenges, 0 is ultimately shown to use his 'tests' as just an excuse to torture other races, to the extent that he basically changes the rules of his games so that the subjects will inevitably lose.
The young Q ends up bringing him into the Milky Way galaxy through the Guardian of Forever while looking for something new to do with himself, and 0 assembles other seemingly omnipotent beings from the original Star Trek, including Gorgan (the entity who turned children against their parents in "And the Children Shall Lead"), The One (the being who impersonated God in Star Trek V: The Final Frontier) and (*) (the entity from "Day of the Dove", which thrived on violent conflict).
However, although intrigued at 0's words about testing lesser races, Q loses his taste for 0's methods when 0's group provoke the Tkon Empire- an advanced civilisation millennia in the past- into decades of civil war and then blows up their sun just as they were about to exchange their dying old sun for a younger, fresher one, the Tkon having completed their Great Endeavour despite the war.
0's group was later defeated in a battle with the Q Continuum, though the dinosaurs were left extinct as a result when Q diverted an asteroid from one of the combatants so that it would strike Earth instead.
With Q having abstained from most of the conflict, he was thus put in charge of watching over Earth and its inhabitants as a possible rehabilitation project, while (*) and Gorgan escaped and The One was trapped at the heart of the galaxy having been reduced to just his head.
0 in particular was banished to just outside our galaxy and the galactic barrier erected to keep him out; as Picard observes, with 0's crippled state preventing him travelling faster than light, 0 was essentially reduced to a shipwrecked survivor cut off from the nearest inhabitable land and millennia away from anywhere else.
In the course of the trilogy, 0 is temporarily released from his banishment beyond the galaxy and sought revenge on Q, having manipulated a dying scientist to complete an artificial wormhole experiment intended to let starships breach the barrier that would allow 0 to regain access.
In the Voyager novel The Eternal Tide, Q's son sacrifices himself to save the universe, inspired by the example of the resurrected Kathryn Janeway, prompting Q to declare himself her enemy.
However, he swiftly gets over this hostility 'off-screen', and by the later novel A Pocket Full of Lies, it is revealed that he acted to save the life of an alternate Janeway created during the events of "Shattered".
The 1996 computer game Star Trek: Borg was primarily made up of live action segments directed by James L. Conway and featured John de Lancie as Q.