While Kelsey Grammer will always be best known for playing Frasier Crane in Cheers, the original Frasier spinoff and the Frasier revival accessible to people with a Paramount+ subscription, he also has some impressive genre credits to his name. The most notable of the bunch is arguably his portrayal of Hank McCoy, a.k.a. Beast, in X-Men: The Last Stand, X-Men: Days of Future Past and The Marvels, but Star Trek fans will also remember the time he cameoed in The Next Generation as Captain Morgan Bateson. While speaking with CinemaBlend about Frasier Season 2, which just premiered on the 2024 TV schedule, Grammer opened up about how Jonathan Frakes convinced him to appear on the Star Trek series that ran from 1987 to 1994.
After Grammer spent some time about his experience working on Frasier Season 2 (which sees him reuniting with his Back to You co-star Patricia Heaton) alongside Roz Doyle actress Peri Gilpin, I brought up his cameo as Morgan Bateson in The Next Generation Season 5 episode “Cause and Effect.” That was the first and only time we’ve seen the actor play this Star Trek character, and when I asked him if there had ever been any talks about him reprising Bateson in another show or project, he told me:
[laughs] Not that I know of. He’s a very sought-after character at those conventions these days. I actually did end up doing one, and I have signed some autographs as Captain Morgan Bateman. But the thing that turned me on, Jonathan Frakes was a buddy. He called one day, I was at Cheers, and he said, ‘Will you come over and do a show for us?’ And I said, ‘Well, I don’t know, what’s the deal?’ He says, ‘Well, he’s a contemporary of Captain Kirk’s.’ That was the one that hooked me. So I got to wear the same uniform they wore in the original Star Trek, and that made me really happy.
“Cause and Effect” followed the crew of the USS Enterprise-D getting caught in a time loop where they keep crashing into the USS Bozeman, a Federation ship that disappeared over 90 years ago. With each time loop, the Enterprise’s senior staff experience déjà vu, eventually learn about their predicament and figure out a way to prevent the ships from colliding, thus ending the loop. Kelsey Grammer’s Morgan Bateson appears at the very end of the episode, unaware that nearly a century has gone by, though the episode ends before we can see Jean-Luc Picard break the news to him.
This role afforded Kelsey Grammer the opportunity to wear the same kind of uniform that Captain James T. Kirk and other Starfleet officers wore in the era between The Wrath of Khan to the prologue of Generations, roughly. That was a big selling point for Grammer when Jonathan Frakes approached him, as he liked the idea that Morgan Bateson was colleagues with William Shatner’s character. Alas, no other opportunities came along for Grammer to reprise Bateson, although the character did make a silent cameo in the Star Trek: Lower Decks episode “Grounded” as the leader of the team that exonerated Carol Freeman, the captain of the USS Cerritos.
Revisit Grammer’s brief time in the Star Trek universe by streaming “Cause and Effect” on Paramount+, which you’ll also need if you want to keep up with the latest exploits of Dr. Frasier Crane. Next up on the Star Trek front is the fifth and final season of Lower Decks, which premieres its first two episodes on October 24.
