All good things must come to an end and that adage certainly applies to the fifth season of the acclaimed Star Trek: Lower Decks animated series which will also be its last. Given the track record of the series (and The Beat‘s review of the new season), fans can hopefully go in knowing that the Lower Decks final season will indeed stick the landing.
Ahead of the season premiere of the Lower Decks final season, The Beat had the pleasure of participating in a press roundtable at New York Comic Con with Star Treks: Lower Decks creator showrunner Mike McMahan. During our conversation, McMahan discussed the past and potential future of Lower Decks.
Q: Can you give us hints of what’s to come in this Star Trek: Lower Decks final season?
Mike McMahan: It’s so funny, some people on the crew who are big fans too are like, “This is the most Star Trek we’ve ever Star Trek-ed.” I don’t know if that’s exactly right because Lower Decks has always Star Trek-ed more than anybody has Star Trek-ed. We knew it was going to be the final season pretty early on in the writing process. I made a decision to move some stuff I had planned forward. But for the most part it’s still hilarious. It’s still standalone episodes with just a little bit of a throughline to make it feel seasonal. It’s everything you love about Lower Decks and Star Trek. This isn’t season one when we’re figuring out how much can we see the bridge crew or how much we can use from legacy shows. Now we know. It’s really fun to watch a team that knows what they’re doing now in season five. It feels like a nice culmination of everything we’ve done so far.
Taimur Dar: Lower Decks is great at playing the long game. In season three, we saw Brad Boimler’s transporter clone, William Boimler, join Section 31. Anything you can tease for fans on that plot point in this Lower Decks final season?
McMahan: I mean, Section 31 is a mysterious group. They don’t even tell me about that stuff. Starfleet is very tightlipped about it. I would love to see more about William Boimler. But I’m just on the Cerritos. They don’t let us play with the big boys. I can’t speak any more to that.
Q: You spoke about using legacy characters. Any new legacy characters for this Lower Decks final season?
McMahan: We finally got Harry Kim with Garret Wang on the show. That guy was made for animation. He comes in with so much exuberance. He’s a comedy guy. [Jonathan] Frakes is like that too. They’re able to just switch from their live-action tone to still being the character but doing a comedy version. We did have some dream legacy cast in this season. But you’re going to have to wait and see. There’s a season long thread that allowed us, without time travel, to have people that are harder to get into this specific time period of the show. I was actually really surprised we could get what we got.
Q: Over the course of the several seasons, do you have a favorite moment that sticks out in your mind?
McMahan: Working with George Takei really stood out. Not only how fun that moment was in the show but also how funny and kind he is. There’s something literally generational about him still doing Trek with us. There are moments from the first season like doing the trial episode and finding the comedy there. In the trial episode there’s a moment where Tendi is doing this cleaner stuff and they’re afraid of these D’Deridex Class Romulan Warbird ships that are scanning for them. We keep popping in and out, “No! They’re scanning again!” [Laughs]. When you find the balance of Trek and comedy, I love that. I love the “Caves” episode. I’ve been wanting to do a caves episode. The way we executed it I just really love. It’s hard to pick. Everything on this show feels a bit like a miracle.
Q: In the first episode of the new season, everyone meets their alternate selves. Will we see that character exploration continue throughout this Lower Decks final season?
McMahan: The first episode is good table setting for [the season]. They do see alternate versions of themselves that have made different choices. Unlike aspiring to be like your boss that you like or your hero, they’re being presented with who they could literally be with only slight changes. This isn’t the Mirror Universe. This is like a 2% different or slightly dissimilar universe. It’s asking if this is an aspirational or a cautionary tale. For different people seeing different things, it really does affect them across the season. I’d say T’Lyn isn’t affected but T’Lyn isn’t affected by anything. [Laughs]. She’s almost a rock. Just a slightly different catchphrase. It was a fun way to not only set up the character stories but also to set up…look we’ve all seen the multiverse and stuff. Nobody is begging for the multiverse. I personally am not a big time travel fan. I like watching time travel movies but by the end of it, it feels like you were running upstairs.
I worked on Rick & Morty for four seasons talking about the multiverse every day, so it wasn’t something I was super interested in when we started the show. But [after] five seasons, I figured out a way to talk about the multiverse in a way that I had never seen in anything else and it fit into the Lower Decks ethos of, “Oh great, we’re dealing with the multiverse again. This is normal work for us. We’re in Starfleet.” They’ve read the logs from “Parallels” as much as we’ve watched that episode. To them, they’re not going, “Whoa! The multiverse!” Stark Trek with the Mirror Universe was one of the original definitions of what a multiversal story can be. We saw that expressed not really in TNG but Deep Space Nine went there. Some of my favorite episodes of Enterprise did it. We know our audience loves sci-fi. We don’t have to define the multiverse to our fans. It allowed me to be able to write a sci-fi story where the characters are examining the multiverse in a way where they’ve experienced it in a work capacity. It’s also a great way to see some interesting legacy characters in ways you might not expect.
Dar: A lot of us Trek watchers at The Beat were delighted to see Lower Decks get referenced in the second season of Star Trek: Prodigy. What was your reaction to seeing Lower Decks get some love in another Trek animated series?
McMahan: Star Trek animation for life, right? We all have to stick together. Anytime we were going to use legacy characters or do a big plotline or even had the season figured out, all the showrunners from all the Trek shows would get together and talk through everything. If there was something that was sounding similar we said, “Hold on.” Because we don’t want somebody to say, “I just watched this on other Trek.” Sometimes when you have Riker show up at the end of a season to save the day, you didn’t know they were going to do reshoots on Picard and have Riker show up to save the day. Every once in a while, it does mix up. Those moments in Prodigy where they’re referencing Lower Decks stuff, I was going to have The Doctor from Voyager come onto the Cerritos and tutor Tendi. That was going to be a thing. They said, “We actually were planning on using him.” I was like, “Well that makes sense because you guys really are like the Voyager show.” So I went down a different path with Tendi which I liked with T’Lyn this season. Getting to see them reference us is like, we all really like each other and we’re having fun in the same sandbox. I thought that was really cool of them.
Q: Will the finale of this Lower Decks final season make viewers hearts swell?
McMahan: I know this is going to sound ridiculous but the finale will make a lot of people tear up. I’ve been making this show for six or seven years. When I met my wife when we first dating, we watched all of Star Trek in order because we both liked it but we grew up where it wasn’t available even on DVD yet. I was sure we missed something. We watched it all together and when we finished TNG and moved onto Deep Space Nine, I was mourning not having more TNG to watch so I started writing the TNG Season 8 Twitter feed just to make my wife laugh. That’s what ultimately became Lower Decks. Showing her the finale she had to turn it off because it was like losing a piece of us. At the same time, the finale is bonkers. I love finales and if you’ve watched other Lower Decks seasons you know that very easily. The finale is always about the Cerritos being a character and the people protecting it within it. One season we stripped the hull. There’s always something celebrating the Cerritos in the finale. This is the ultimate expression of that.
It’s a series ender and a season ender and a love letter and thank you to fans and everybody. It’s not The Sopranos. My wife loves Taylor Swift [so] it’s an era. Lower Decks the show is an era for these characters and we got to experience an era from beginning to end. I have stories I could tell from before. I would love to tell Billups growing up or young Ransom or Captain Freeman as an ensign. Is she getting stabbed in the heart like Picard? The way the show ends, while it does feel finale, it also blooms into all these opportunities where we could make shows or do comics or books. Or fans could very fully imagine that these characters are still doing awesome Star Trek stuff and it’s different. We end with them in a different place but there’s no betrayals. Nobody is going to feel like we pulled the rug out from under them. You’re going to be very happy by the end of it.
The first two episodes of Star Trek: Lower Decks season 5 debut on Paramount+ on Thursday, October 24, 2024, with the remaining new episodes debuting on Thursdays thereafter.
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