We’re nearing the end of Star Trek: Lower Decks Season 4, but before the Cerritos crosses this year’s finish line, series creator and showrunner Mike McMahan beamed into New York Comic Con to present a special screening of this week’s “Caves,” and share some tidbits with the assembled crowd — including confirmation that T’Lyn will remain with the series into Season 5, and that the show will revisit the Orion homeworld as well.
 
After October 14’s presentation, TrekCore and a group of assembled outlets sat down with McMahan to discuss this season’s stories, Star Trek hot takes, the Strange New Worlds crossover — and a missed opportunity Lower Decks will be revisiting during next year’s Season 5 episodes.
 

Q: Why do you feel like you need to make monsters like Moopsy so cute?

MIKE MCMAHAN: (Laughs) Well, we’re playing it for comedy, right? And inherently, it’s hard to draw something really scary in the Lower Decks animation style. It’s almost easier to draw something cute, and then have it drink your bones!

That bone-drinking thing, actually, came from a movie I saw in high school called Deep Rising with Treat Williams and Famke Jansen, and the tagline in the trailer was like “It drinks you!” or something. So I always wanted to do a creature that drinks you.

But it’s harder to get something that looks scary – but if you go back to “wej duj,” the Klingons look intense and scary, which is awesome work from the animators, artists, and character designers.

McMahan shares that #LowerDecks will return to the Orion homeworld in Season 5.#StarTrek #NYCC pic.twitter.com/O3yPWvTfNV

— TrekCore.com 🖖 (@TrekCore) October 14, 2023

Q: What kind of challenges do you face when you set out to explore some of the lesser-known areas of Star Trek that the other shows may have barely covered — like the visit to Orion this season?

MCMAHAN: My first question is always, “What have other people done?” And the answer is always, “Way less than you think!” Imagine a sketch that’s unfinished, where you can almost connect the dots and fill in the blanks… there was zero Orion. Like, I couldn’t believe it; we had nothing to work from.

With Ferenginar, Deep Space Nine did so much that we could just go have a blast, and then just edge things slowly forward. Rom has probably heard from Nog about just how much he loves Starfleet, so I can understand why Ferenginar would be moving in that direction. That all made sense to me.

I like to take monocultures and build them out so it’s all less ‘mono.’ I try to honor what’s there before, and then logically expand it to where it might go in a way that surprises. But for Orion, we had to make this all whole-cloth, which is crazy… and I’m NOT making it about a bunch of people who control men with pheromones, because that’s frickin’ weird!

The other part was that we needed to figure out how a visit to Orion would tell us about Tendi. My wife’s favorite movie is Kenneth Branagh’s Much Ado About Nothing, so we made Tendi’s family house that castle from Florence and built things out from there.

They’re space pirates — but at home, they have a code; they have honor systems; they’re matriarchal. I loved all that. I loved the groom being walked down the aisle… so I tried to honor the stuff we had seen before about powerful women, but make it less of a sexual thing. Less about control; less “episodic,” in a way.

Q: You made a decision about Tuvix a few weeks ago —

MCMAHAN: Oh, Janeway made the decision!

Q: You called her a monster!

MCMAHAN: Well, sometimes, when you’re stuck in The Iliad, you need to be a monster to preserve characters that you have TV season deals with. [Laughs] Tuvix is so funny, and I think I’ve thought about Tuvix more than I’ve seen the episode. But that’s the power of Star Trek, it sticks with you even if you don’t agree with it.

But once she got rid of Tuvix, I was like, “All right, I can breath again. This is great.” I didn’t want that motherfucker sticking around! I was going to have to tune in every week to see Tuvix learning about pie, and shit like that? That guy was going to be the new Data, but he’s fuckin’ Tuvix?

And they made him weirdly likable! You didn’t have to do that, you didn’t have to make Tuvix likeable if you knew where the story was going! It was like, “Hey everybody, it’s Tuvix! Tuvix is so cool, Tuvix can do a kick-flip!” You know what I mean? No, no, why are we doing this? I don’t like Tuvix!

I was happy Janeway killed Tuvix just because I didn’t want to see his ass anymore. But I love that we’re still arguing about Tuvix. That’s real Star Trek shit! I see why people hate it, but get Tuvix the fuck outta here. Oh, you don’t like what happened to Tuvix? Show “The Tuvix Show.” You wanted to see more Tuvix? Get the hell outta here. (Laughs)

Q: It seems like there are a few new names in the credits this year. Can you talk about some of the newcomers to the Season 4 writers room?

MCMAHAN: Well, I’m working on Season 5 right now where we’ve also mixed things up a little — but I’ll tell you, I’ll have people come in on shows, and sometimes they’re great at everything, and sometimes they’re like, “I’ve never seen Star Trek, but I have a crazy relationship with my mom,” so I’ll have them work on those Mariner-Freeman scenes and make them better.

You never know what the kind of match will be for each season… and also, writing Lower Decks is incredibly hard! You have to not only match the tone of Star Trek, but also the tone of Lower Decks which is something nobody ever did before us. The comedy of it, you know, is really specific.

I used to work at Second City as the guy who would clean up at the end of the day, and Second City would do jokes that were very Chicago-specific, but people still got them because most of the crowd would be from the surrounding areas. That’s what you have to do in Lower Decks, but for Star Trek. You know what I mean? Like, you can’t leave “the Chicagoland area” of Star Trek.

There’s never been a “crisis” on Lower Decks – it just takes a long time to write. Sometimes writers are moving on to better stuff, sometimes they’re selling shows. Sometimes people move to live-action work to make a bunch more money, and I’m like “Bye, have fun!”

There’s a little more turnover on Lower Decks just because it’s really hard, but we’re always trying to keep it fresh.

McMahan shares that they originally planned to promote the #LowerDecks gang at the end of S4, but didn’t want to wait to tell that story and explore the impact on the characters#StarTrek #NYCC pic.twitter.com/x8aWHps0Ny

— TrekCore.com 🖖 (@TrekCore) October 14, 2023

Q: Have we seen the last of Jennifer, Mariner’s Andorian ex-girlfriend?

MCMAHAN: I thought I had resolved the Mariner-Jennifer relationship in a way that had spoken to me, because I had never liked their relationship. I thought Jennifer liked Mariner for the wrong reasons, like how she utilizes her with her group of friends (in “Hear All, Trust Nothing”), I thought, was not from a loving place.

They also met each other and had a romance start in chaos, and not in the calmness that I find in relationships that grow and come form a place of support. Mariner’s worst tendencies were being magnified by Jennifer, in a way, and Jennifer kept her from going to visit Deep Space 9.

I thought people would hate Jennifer for that – but unfortunately she’s so funny and fun, and you love seeing them together, that my resolution of having Jennifer react exactly wrong to Mariner getting kicked off the Cerritos (in “Trusted Sources”)… in hindsight, we needed another episode for them.

That should have been in episode seven, have Mariner be gone in episode eight, and we should have had a tougher resolution at the end of the season. These are things you only learn in hindsight, but knowing it now — and I had a long conversation with Jessie Gender about this -– I see the audience’s reaction and their opinion, and I respect it.

So there is a better resolution to Mariner and Jennifer coming in Season 5.

Q: But will they sit weird in chairs together?

MCMAHAN: (Laughs) Mariner canonically sits weird in chairs because I had a long conversation with Andi from Women at Warp back at the Mission: Chicago convention, who told me that there is a meme about bisexual women sitting weird in chairs, so I made sure to have Mariner reference that on-screen for her — and if you didn’t know what that meant, you’d just think she was making a Riker joke.

Q: When originally developing the Cerritos crew, were Mariner and Freeman planned as Black characters, or was that based upon the casting of Tawny Newsome and Dawnn Lewis?

MCMAHAN: I didn’t know who would be playing Mariner, so I didn’t have a particular casting idea in mind. We met with tons of people when we were casting, and Brad Winters — our producer who Brad Boimler is named for — said, “I just listened to this podcast, and you’ve got to hear this girl.”

Tawny came in, and her name got added to the casting list. Like, hand-written onto the printed list of names. I had maybe heard 500 auditions, and when I heard her I sat back and thought, “This is her, this is it.” That moment you hear about, you know? “Tawny has to play this character. I’m going to make sure this character utilizes Tawny’s performance.”

Then at the end of her audition, I asked her to just ramble on about Star Trek. “Just keep the scene going and improvise!” And that’s when I knew that she’s as big of a nerd as I am, and even though she doesn’t seem like it — since she’s so cool — but when she started going… I changed the ending of the Lower Decks pilot to match her rambling from that audition because I wanted that to become a permanent part of the show! Then, once I knew Mariner was going to be Tawny, that’s when I thought of the idea that the captain could be Mariner’s mom. I hadn’t even decided that yet.

And Dawnn Lewis is just, like, a force. She’s an amazing voice actor; I love her on Futurama… it was such a no-brainer to cast her. I think we utilize Tawny really well, but Dawnn is so great that I don’t know if we’ve ever fully unlocked everything with Freeman — because she has to keep it a little locked down as the captain.

But Dawnn brought her mom to the first Lower Decks table read, because she was just so proud to be a Star Trek captain! From that moment on, I just knew I was going to love Captain Freeman so much.

Kid Cudi shows off his #StarTrek varsity jacket, complete with “dope embroidery”.#NYCC pic.twitter.com/SV3DM1wzHj

— TrekCore.com 🖖 (@TrekCore) October 14, 2023

Q: This collaboration Star Trek is doing with Kid Cudi —

MCMAHAN: Yeah, I never get a collab!

Q: So if you got a Lower Decks collab, who would it be with?

MCMAHAN: (Long pause) Mattel! (Laughs)

Q: Yeah, where are those action figures, man? [Laughs]

MCMAHAN: I don’t know! I mean, I would love there to be so much Lower Decks stuff, so much that it becomes a problem, you know? But if we had a collab, that’s an interesting question. Let’s collab with Sufjan Stevens, like, a real chill one.

I love the Kid Cudi thing though, because he did Entergalactic… like, I get liking sci-fi so much that it fucks up your other shit. Right? That you like it SO MUCH that even when you have a big career, you keep doing sci-fi because that’s what I LOVE.

Q: What are your controversial ‘hot takes’ about Star Trek?

MCMAHAN: I think the skants should still be worn all the time. There are far too few skants — they look comfortable, and it’s probably super easy to go to the bathroom wearing one.

I think Oberth-class ships are tight. I think they’re great — and actually, I think that the cooler a Star Trek ship looks, the less I like it. Like, if you have a really, really cool ship, I’m like, give me the goofy medical ship with the big ball in the front.

Give me the ship nobody else at the pound is adopting because it’s got just one eye, you know what I mean? I mean, look at the Cerritos. I went through a lot of designs saying, “No, that looks too cool.” Like we all love the Enterprise-D, but when they went into the movies with the Sovereign-class… it’s just too fancy.

I’m with Captain Freeman on that one! (Laughs)

Q: Have you ever been restricted from using certain parts of the Star Trek story in Lower Decks — like, “You can do a lot, but you can’t touch Sisko” or something like that?

MCMAHAN: Oh, no, nothing like that. I mean, I’d work with Avery in a second! But I do try to be really respectful — like, if I run into a legacy Star Trek actor at an event, I mention Lower Decks, and if they get excited I ask if they’re open to talking. I don’t want to just pounce on them.

The only real boundaries I get is to keep Lower Decks from stepping on the other Star Trek shows. I can’t give away anything about Prodigy, but there are characters and some Delta Quadrant stuff in that show that I really wish I had been able to call dibs on. But people are going to love that stuff in Prodigy!

The same thing is happening a little bit with the Starfleet Academy show — we bump up against them, narratively, because like Lower Decks those characters will be people who aren’t at their best just yet, and are still learning. But because Tawny is in the Academy writers’ room, and she knows so much about Lower Decks, she can help make sure that our two shows aren’t showing viewers the same thing twice.

Q: Speaking of Prodigy — that show’s story is just a few years ahead of Lower Decks in the Star Trek timeline; Picard was twenty-something years down the line. Do you know how the Lower Decks characters have progressed during those time periods?

MCMAHAN: …I do know. [Laughs] I’m being very careful!

Q: The Strange New Worlds crossover was fantastic. Would you like to do any more live-action crossover stories?

MCMAHAN: Sign me up! I mean, let’s “Oops, All Berries!” the crossovers, because we need to get the rest of the Lower Decks crew into live-action!

Seriously, though — this was so important to me, and Tawny and Jack Quaid were so excited to do it — but I’ve always struggled with the “live action versus animation” thing. Like, Futurama is a really big comfort show for me, and I wanted Lower Decks to be a comfort show like that, so I was really glad that “Those Old Scientists” began in animation, became live-action, and then ended with animation again, even for the Strange New Worlds crew.

It’s a different medium, but it’s supposed to spark this joy, right? So part of me is like, “Yeah, let’s go!” I want to do more live-action… but another part of me is like, “Folks, please go watch Lower Decks. It’s special, too!” You know what I mean? I don’t want people to feel like, “Yeah, but we could have this other thing.”

It kind of feels like when the band splits up and people go off to do solo projects – because as much as I love the crossover, we need Tendi and Rutherford and T’Lyn there, too. And I love Strange New Worlds… but that’s their show. I don’t want to take away from Uhura and Spock and everybody else, because then you’re competing for emotional storytelling at the same time.

So I would always love to do more live-action – our cast would freaking kill it – but at the same time, I love Lower Decks and don’t want that to go away.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.