Slight spoilers for Star Trek: Lower Decks Season 2, Episode 1 follow.
Paramount Plus’ Star Trek: Lower Decks has quickly ascended as a fan favorite among the pantheon of shows in the franchise, and now the 10-episode Season 2 has kicked off with Lower Deckers Mariner, Tendi, Rutherford, and, yes, even Boimler (even though he’s off on the USS Titan now) getting up to more wacky, if very deeply nerdy, antics.
Creator and showrunner Mike McMahan is always a ton of fun to talk to, not just for his vast knowledge of Star Trek — he’s a fan himself first and foremost — but also because of his deeply considered approach to writing the show, which after all is the first sitcom — and an animated one at that — in Trek history. Still, as funny as the show is, McMahan seems to always have a bigger purpose to the stories he’s telling beyond just going for laughs. I jumped on a call with him recently to discuss Season 2, and we talked about the process behind bringing back legacy characters like Riker and Tom Paris, the canon that he would prefer to avoid on his show, and much more. (And be sure to read our Star Trek: Lower Decks Season 2, Episodes 1-5 review.)
We’ll Always Have (Tom) Paris, or How to Cast Classic Trek Actors
The trailer for the new season has shown that, as with Season 1 of Lower Decks, we can expect some familiar faces to pop up on and around the USS Cerritos. Whereas last year we got Jonathan Frakes as Riker and Marina Sirtis as Troi, among others, this time around we’re going to see Robert Duncan McNeill’s Tom Paris, of Star Trek: Voyager fame, appear on the show. Or a collector’s plate version of him at least.
McMahan explains that there are several levers that need to be pulled behind the scenes in order to make a guest appearance of a Trek alumnus like that happen.
“It’s a couple different tiers,” he says. “The first one is, is this worth doing, or is it just going to feel like pandering? Are we using a character because it makes sense? Because I never want it to feel like it’s The Muppet Show and they’re like Mark Hamill, the guest star of the week! Or like SNL or something that’s, like, a football player is here this week! Which is kind of what we’re making fun of — a Tom Paris doing the handshake tour, and it’s somebody who’s walking on and they’re all applauding. And at the same time, that’s what we do with species. I really wanted to have a Tamarian [the race from the popular TNG episode ‘Darmok’] in the show. So we talked a lot about what does that mean? And the exocomp [from last season], and those are kind of guess star species in a way.”
I never want it to feel like it’s The Muppet Show and they’re like Mark Hamill, the guest star of the week!
Once the writers decide that the character actual merits an appearance or story that makes sense for Lower Decks, the next step is to e-mail Trek HQ, which is franchise uber-producer Alex Kurtzman’s Secret Hideout production company.
“I’m like, ‘Here’s the story area we’re doing. Here’s the legacy actor we’re thinking of using. Are you guys cool with this/can we just double-check that all the other Star Trek shows aren’t doing the same thing?’” continues McMahan. “And then the next question is, does the legacy actor want to be on the show? We reach out to them. We explain the episode. We tell them why we want to work with them, and we let them decide. If they’re down, then the final step is do we have budget for it?”
Yes, budget of course also figures into things. And Lower Decks is like any other film or TV production, where sometimes the money can go to a more important aspect of making the show better.
“It’s interesting because if we create a new character, that’s a brand new character that [hasn’t] existed in Star Trek,” he says. “There’s all sorts of existing character fees and all this sort of stuff. It’s fine. We can afford all that, but we stay on budget on Lower Decks. And sometimes it’s like, do we want to put this budget into a legacy actor? If it really means something, yes. Otherwise, do we want to make the Cerritos look that much better? It’s always that production balance.”
The Final Frontier… That Star Trek: Lower Decks Won’t Cross
Star Trek: Lower Decks has established that it is willing to pour on the Trek canon references like no show before it, and Season 2 continues that trend (in Episode 1 alone we get Cardassians, Cardassian lights, a Reliant-type ship, a Gary Mitchell call-out, and more). But McMahan says that it all starts with wanting to do something new.
“I think every Trek show is wanting to avoid walking down the same path as the Trek shows before them,” he says. “Like TNG didn’t want to do the same stories as TOS. And Voyager, I don’t understand how they wrote that show because it was like, all right, don’t write any stories that feel like TOS, TNG, or Deep Space Nine. And they have to be fresh and new! Because then at least Enterprise jumped back in time [and] that gives them a little bit of a new era to play with.”
That said, there are some specific plot developments that, really, just seem better untouched too.
“For me, I think that the things I mostly avoid are stuff like, if you go at warp too much, you start to destroy the fabric of space,” continues McMahan. He’s referring to the TNG episode “Force of Nature” which established that warp drive was damaging space itself. It was an interesting concept, but it also set up a limit to how starships could travel from that point forward in the franchise, and it was basically dropped from future stories.
There’s some TNG episodes that I feel like create such a big canon thing that I kind of dodge around it.
“There’s some TNG episodes that I feel like create such a big canon thing that I kind of dodge around it,” he says. “There was an episode or maybe two about the species that populated the galaxy, and that’s why everybody looks like humanoids with weird wrinkly noses. [The episode is called “The Chase.” –Ed] I’m like, yeah, that’s fine. Let’s just maybe not pay too much attention to that. Temporal Cold War stuff is tough too because [with] time travel … you have to be really careful to not paint yourself into a corner. But other than that, our audience loves everything about Star Trek that you or I might love. So it’s pretty much how does our show tell our show’s version of those kinds of stories?”
To Reset or Not to Reset
Star Trek has been around for 55 years, which put another way is Star Trek has been around for the majority of the history of television. As such, the various Trek shows have evolved in how they tell their stories, starting with the standalone style of TOS where Captain Kirk didn’t even seem to remember the previous week’s adventure most of the time (Edith Keeler who?) and continuing on with TNG and then DS9 in the 1980s and ’90s as more long-form arc storylines were slowly integrated into the format. For McMahan, there’s a balance that needs to be struck between the two forms.
“You get to have both now,” he says. “You get to have some scenes that are emotional and other scenes that are comedic. Or it’s really always totally comedic. But if you’ve tuned into every episode, you’re on a journey with the characters as well. And my writers, we love when we’re discussing and breaking these episodes. We want to follow our own rules. We want to track these changes with these characters. I never want the audience to be ahead of us.”
As an example, McMahan cites the dynamic between Tawny Newsome’s Mariner and her mom, the Cerritos’ captain Carol Freeman (Dawnn Lewis). At the end of Season 1, the previously dueling daughter/mother duo decided to work together as partners, which seemingly set up a new dynamic between them for Season 2. But by the start of Episode 1 of the new season, things are already falling apart.
“The whole audience who knows our show knows that’s what they’re going to be getting [in Season 2],” he says of Mariner and the captain’s fraying team-up. “So instead, we time-shifted a little bit. Now we’re in the middle of them working together and you’re already getting to see the friction that’s causing instead of having to wait for that to happen. I never want the audience to feel like they’re checking their watch for something they know is coming. But Mariner and her mom in Season 2 feels night and day from Mariner and her mom in Season 1. Because there’s this character friction access point that they’ve worked together to get past. Now, Mariner is still bending and breaking rules, and the captain is still getting frustrated with her, but it’s coming from a place of them understanding each other a little bit better.”
For McMahan, that’s the kind of stuff that keeps him coming back for more on Lower Decks.
“It’s those kinds of serialized elements that I really like to write,” he says. “Because then we still get to have fun, and we still get to tell comedic stories. We still get the characters that disagree, but it’s not in the same way that we saw before.”
Talk to Executive Editor Scott Collura on Twitter at @ScottCollura, or listen to his Star Trek podcast, Transporter Room 3. Or do both!