As he has done with AWN for each of his storied animated sci-fi comedy’s previous seasons, the show’s Emmy Award-winning creator and passionate leader riffs on his newest set of Starfleet adventures, the show’s legacy within the iconic ‘Star Trek’ franchise, and how there’s ample room for at least 50 more episodes, if not more, to ‘boldly, but not too boldly’ go where no one has gone before; now streaming on Paramount+.
After four years of galactic adventures - misadventures maybe? - alien diplomacy, rogue missions and even wedding shenanigans, the crew of Mike McMahan’s animated series, Star Trek: Lower Decks has, sadly, entered its final frontier.
The fifth season of the Annie and Emmy Award-nominated 2D comedy series - the franchise's first animated series since Star Trek: The Animated Series concluded in 1974 - once again joins the support crew and “lower decks” residents serving on one of Starfleet’s least important ships, the U.S.S. Cerritos, this time tasked with closing “space potholes.” These subspace rifts are causing chaos in the Alpha Quadrant and pothole duty would be easy for Jr. Officers Mariner (Tawny Newsome), Boimler (Jack Quaid), Tendi (Noël Wells) and Rutherford (Eugene Cordero) ... if they didn’t also have to deal with an Orion war, furious Klingons, diplomatic catastrophes, murder mysteries and scariest of all: their own career aspirations.
Check out the trailer for the new season:
“The trailer is really just like putting your ear against the wall and hearing just a fraction of the stuff audiences are going to see this season,” says McMahan. “I’ve got to shout out everybody I work with at Titmouse, our supervising director, Barry J. Kelly, and our art director, Nollan Obena. I sat them down and was like, ‘Look, this is probably our final season, and we're not leaving anything on the table.’ I had conversations with Paramount+ and CBS about needing longer episode time on some of these segments, because if you want to have it feel like a satisfying finale it has to be so massive and beautiful. The finale is about eight minutes longer than any other episode.”
This final season, now streaming on Paramount+, celebrates this underdog crew who are dangerously close to being promoted out of the lower decks and into strange new Starfleet roles.
CBS’ Eye Animation Productions, CBS Studios’ animation arm; Secret Hideout; and Roddenberry Entertainment produce the series. Alex Kurtzman, McMahan, Aaron Baiers, Rod Roddenberry, and Trevor Roth are executive producers. Emmy Award-winning independent animation production company Titmouse serves as the series’ animation studio. While only two episodes of the fifth season released on October 24, an additional eight episodes will roll out weekly leading up to the series finale on December 19. In total, Lower Decks will end with 50 episodes.
“When I design shows, I'm like, ‘All right, minimum 100 episodes,’” says McMahan. “So, I'm always thinking ahead. But how often does that even work? How often do you even get to 50 episodes? I've gotten to do so much that I that I never thought I'd be able to do with Star Trek and with these characters. To have that much fun, it feels like a miracle.”
McMahan says, over the course of the series, he’s fallen in love with all the characters. But he’s especially proud of the alien characters they’ve brought onto the show that have changed previous Star Trek perceptions that all aliens from the same planet are essentially clones of each other.
“Star Trek has always done such a great job of having this clarity with these alien species and how they’re metaphors or how they’re good story vehicles,” notes McMahan. “But what that always resulted in was these monoculture planets where you met one alien and they kind of represented the whole planet. And that’s what the Lower Decks logbooks also show in the beginning. But we wanted to show that no one alien, or any one person defines everybody around them.”
He continues, “I think that's something that we all know. And getting to go back to aliens that were this one thing for a while, like Orions, and getting to grow that and see through the eyes of our Orion character Tendi and learning about her family and her history and her path and what she's choosing to do is amazing. I got to do so much more with that than I ever imagined.”
Another stand-out alien character brought back this season is the crew’s favorite Klingon farmer from Season 2’s Episode 9, “wej Duj” (“Three Ships”), where the Cerritos crew gets a break from regular responsibilities during a long voyage - but before long, the story shifts surprisingly to the lower decks of a Klingon Bird of Prey, and then over to the same bottom-rank levels of a Vulcan cruiser.
“We’ve met that Klingon a couple times on the show and you get to see what his life is like,” says McMahan. “I don't think I've talked about this much yet, but it was a cool thing to see a Klingon who isn't a high-ranking warrior in space, who was just a regular farmer. We get to explore more of what that’s like and how a Klingon feels if they're not out in space, chopping people with their bat'leths. We’ve also gotten to bring the lead Lower Decker Vulcan into the show as a recurring lead. When you fall in love with these characters, you can’t help but want to expand on them.”
When creating a new series based on a popular franchise, especially one taking place in galaxies far away, there’s a tendency to lean toward creating new worlds and new races entirely, rather than revisit old ones everyone in the fandom already knows. But McMahan’s decision to touch base with Klingons and Orions was to enrich the fans’ understanding of these aliens, their homes, families and way of life. Because, in McMahan’s words, “There’s always more to explore.”
“We got to look at all the nooks and crannies that the other Star Trek shows just didn’t have the bandwidth to do,” he shares. “We would talk to the Star Trek: Strange New Worlds guys and they would be jealous. Every alien they do costs a fortune. Not only that, but it’s five hours in the makeup chair. Meanwhile, we can throw in new aliens and big sci-fi space stations and crazy new planets. It’s still a lot of work. We’re still drawing and designing all of it, but we don’t need to worry about a prosthetic budget. I can fill Starfleet strips with aliens and go to planets full of aliens. Star Trek has always done a good sleight of hand to make you feel like you’ve been seeing more. But now we can really show everything the live-action series couldn’t and update those alien logs.”
Though the series is ending after five seasons, and McMahan has plenty more ideas for any future opportunities to play in the Lower Decks universe, he says he’s achieved something incredibly meaningful, and it has nothing to do with accolades.
“I’ve had people say to me, ‘I’ve watched Lower Decks over and over and now it’s my comfort show to have on in the background,’” McMahan reveals. “That’s exactly what I ended up doing with Star Trek and that’s what makes me feel like we made it. There is no praise higher for me than to know Lower Decks is someone’s comfort show. That really lands for me.”
As for the future of Lower Decks, McMahan says he has teased some favorite ideas for future stories in this season’s finale.
“I love playing in this world and, honestly, I’d love to do a live-action version of this show, or a live-action movie, with our cast,” shares McMahan. “I would also love to do an animated movie. I’m such a nerd for this stuff.”
He adds, “This is a show that was made by people who love Star Trek, to probably an upsetting degree. Not only are we doing a show that is very willfully and carefully following all the rules of the Star Trek universe - in fact, I've never worked on a comedy with this many rules - but then we're also doing a new show. We're not reusing sets or costumes. We're creating every single thing you see on screen from scratch using all this existing material. But, when you go back and look at it, it should feel like this thing that has always belonged in the Star Trek universe. That's our sleight of hand.”
Victoria Davis is a full-time, freelance journalist and part-time Otaku with an affinity for all things anime. She's reported on numerous stories from activist news to entertainment. Find more about her work at victoriadavisdepiction.com.
