It’s been nearly a year since the first Star Trek: Lower Decks artwork made its way to the world — showcased during last July’s San Diego Comic Con Star Trek Universe panel — but as we inch ever-closer to the arrival of the new animated series, a few new images have just beamed down.
These new looks at the USS Cerritos crew in action — and off duty — accompany a new Entertainment Weekly interview with series showrunner Mike McMahan, where the writer also shares a few more hints about the upcoming show.
Unlike the still-officially-untitled Nickelodeon animated series, which is aimed squarely at kids, Lower Decks is more for the grown-up audience, as the Rick and Morty vet detailed.
It’s definitely not a kids show, but only because it’s a little bit more complex than a kid show would be. The fun of ‘Rick and Morty’ is that it breaks down sci-fi tropes and is told through Rick Sanchez, who has a very specific, chaotic, nihilistic lens.
‘Lower Decks’ treats mythological sci-fi things just as important as a regular ‘Trek’ show, while finding new stories to tell — just from a different angle. It’s not disassembling mythological sci-fi things.
It’s treating them as important for everybody on the starship as it would be in a regular ‘Star Trek’ show.
As we learned last summer, the USS Cerritos‘ “second contact” missions will be lead by the senior staff — like on every other series we’ve seen — but in Lower Decks, the focus will remain on Ensigns Mariner (Tawny Newsome), Boimler (Jack Quaid), Tendi (Noel Wells), and Rutherford (Eugene Cordero) as the “big” story of each episode goes on around them.
The big stories are happening in the bridge crew and there’s more kind of social-emotional stories happening to the ‘Lower Deckers.’ So, it’s like their job, and the world they’re in get affected by these sci-fi stories.
But the funny thing too is that whatever menial job you have to do in ‘Star Trek,’ it might be something that they do every day, but it’s still sort of a fascinating look into stuff that happens onboard that haven’t been highlighted in another series.
So instead of being on the turbolift — the elevators in ‘Trek ‘— our guys are repairing the turbolift. We also spend a lot of time in the bar. You’ll also see the ‘Lower Deckers’ go on away missions doing things that the bridge crew doesn’t have to deal with.
McMahan also shared a bit of insight into the role that Captain Carol Freeman (Dawnn Lewis) will take aboard the California-class starship, as commanding officer of the young main characters.
[Captain Freeman] is sort of trying to do this balancing act that all captains do, where they demand respect and are admired and trusted by the crew, but then they also kind of have to be the bad guy.
A thing we play with a lot is that the ‘Lower Deckers’ don’t always get all the information they’re delegated to, but they don’t get to have a voice and they don’t get to know the context a lot of the time.
In addition to the new official artwork released today, McMahan hinted that we might also see an Andorian crew member aboard ship in response to a fan’s artwork posted on Twitter:
We still don’t know when the series will debut this year, or who from the massive live-action Star Trek canon we may meet again in this animated show — McMahan continued to dance around that question, saying only “You’ll have to wait and see.” — but as soon as we know more about when we can expect to see this series, you’ll know about it.
Keep checking back to TrekCore for all the latest Star Trek: Lower Decks news!