Mike McMahan Talks ‘Lower Decks’ Tearful Finale, Season 5 Star Trek Cameos, And Future Hopes – TrekMovie.com

At New York Comic Con, TrekMovie spoke with Mike McMahan in a roundtable interview with other media outlets, where the Lower Decks show creator and showrunner talked about what to expect in the show’s fifth and final season, the legacy character he wanted to add to the show but couldn’t, the way he views multiverses, and more. [WARNING: Interview contains some spoilers]

So the fifth and final season is coming up… Can you give us some hints of what to expect this season?

Okay, so 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 Trekked.” And I don’t know if that’s exactly right, because Lower Decks has always Star Trekked more than anybody Star Treks. So we knew it was gonna be the final season pretty early on in the writing process, and I kind of made a decision to move some stuff that 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 through line to make it feel seasonal, so that if you checked out one episode randomly, you’d be like, “Oh yeah, it’s THAT season.” But still, it’s everything you love about Lower Decks, and it’s everything you love about Star Trek. We’ve gotten really good at it—like watching the episodes, it’s like, wow, we really like making these, but also, this isn’t season 1 when we’re figuring out how much can we see the bridge crew, how much can we use from legacy shows… Now we know, and it’s just really fun to watch a team that knows what they’re doing now in a season 5.

You guys know: Watching any Star Trek, you get a couple seasons in and you’re like, oh, it just clicked. They grew the beard. You know what I mean? This is the season where we grow the beard a little bit, and it feels like a nice culmination of everything we’ve been doing so far. This season is really about now that we’ve been promoted, now that we’re not worried about getting fired all the time, who do we want to be, what paths are we going to pick and who are we? Are we defined by work, or are we defining the work? And it’s kind of a sharpening of what you saw in season 4.

In the first episode of season 5 [“Dos Cerritos”], everyone meets their alternate selves, and it feels like a kind of setup, a way for them to explore their characters. Are we going to see that throughout the season?

Yes. The first episode is a good table setting… They do see alternate versions of themselves that have made different choices. And 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. Like this isn’t the Mirror Universe. This is like a 2% difference… slightly dissimilar.  So it really is saying “Oh, is this a aspirational or a cautionary tale?” And for different people seeing different things, it really does affect them across the season. I’d say T’Lyn isn’t affected because she isn’t affected by anything. She’s almost a rock and [has a] slightly different catchphrase.

But, yeah, it was a fun way to not only set up the character stories, but also to set up an allowance of “Look, we’ve all seen the multiverses and stuff.” Nobody’s begging for the multiverse. And personally, I’m not a big time travel fan. I like watching time travel movies, but by the end of it, it feels like you were, like, running upstairs. I worked on Rick and Morty for four seasons talking about the multiverse every day. So it wasn’t something that I was super interested in when we started the show, but five seasons in, I figured out a way to talk about the multiverse in a way that I had never seen in anything else, and it really 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”  Like they know about it, they’ve read the logs from [TNG’s] “Parallels” as much as we’ve watched that episode. So they’re not going like, “Whoa, oh my gosh, the multiverse.”

I also love that Star Trek with the Mirror Universe was one of the original definitions of what a multiversal story can be, right? And we saw that expressed—in TNG, they never did it, but Deep Space Nine went back there, Enterprise, obviously, some of my favorite episodes did it. And so instead of Mirror Universe, I was like, “What is a way again for Star Trek to talk about multiverse in a way where we know our audience loves sci-fi?” We don’t have to define multiversiality to our fans, like how we don’t have to define what a nanite is, or what a replicator is, or whatever. So it allowed me to be able to write a sci-fi story where the characters are examining the multiverse in a way that we are all where they are also “Really? The multiverse?” like they’ve experienced that in a work capacity. It’s also a great way to see some interesting legacy characters in ways you might not expect.

Sometimes Lower Decks takes on a tried and true Star Trek trope—

Sometimes? [laughs]

Okay, most of the time. So in “Shades of Green,” [episode 2] is that a way of looking at the post-scarcity idea of the Federation?

Yeah! Every time we’re breaking a story, it’s “How is this personal? How is this a story about being in your twenties or thirties? How is this when you’re changing your job or or breaking up with your girlfriend or boyfriend or whatever?” And then it’s also “How is this a Star Trek story that doesn’t have to compete with 800 other episodes of Star Trek, but can reflect back on those and do a story that a bigger live-action show that’s 40 minutes and has to have gravitas? What can we say about that same world that that Picard and Data or Sisko or these guys that they couldn’t really spend the time on? And the idea that some planets in the Federation are gonna become post scarcity and  benefit from replicator technology and the ethos of the Federation, and what is the nitty gritty of that like? And we were just laughing at the idea. Wouldn’t it be great to throw out all the cash? Wouldn’t that be just fucking amazing to not worry about that, it’d be a party! You’d be like, “Yes, we’re not worried about that shit anymore!” And getting to do a little story about that and feeling like the Cerritos, that that’s one of the regular things they do. That was awesome. Only our show could do something like that. As a Trek fan, I had never thought of that, but deep in the recesses of my fandom, I’m like, of course that would have to happen in some places. 100% I love doing that.

You’ve talked about the fun you get to have pushing the envelope with legacy characters. Can you give us hint of any firsts for this season?

Yeah. I mean, we finally got Harry Kim with Garrett Wang on the show, and that guy was made for animation. He comes in with so much exuberance and he’s a comedy guy!  It was so great. [Jonathan] Frakes is like that too, when you’re working with Frakes and he’s just, they’re [both] able to just switch from their live-action sort of tone to still being the character, but doing a comedy version of it. We did get some dream legacy cast in this season, but you’re gonna have to wait and see. There’s a bit of a season-long thread that allowed us to, without time travel, have people that are harder to get into this this specific time period of the show. So we got to work with some really cool people. I was actually really surprised that we could get who we got.

I love Star Trek: Prodigy, I was sad to see it go, but I was always also glad to see Lower Decks mentioned here and there… How are you feeling being part of the entire legacy?

Look, Star Trek animation for life, right? Like we all have to stick together. Anytime we were gonna use legacy characters or do a big plot line, or even if we had the season kind of figured out, all the showrunners from all the Trek shows would get together and talk through everything, and if there was something that was sounding a little similar, we’d be like “Okay, hold on, when you’re doing that, how are you going to express that?” Because we don’t want somebody to sit down and be like “I just watched this on another Trek.”

Now, 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, right? So every once in a while it does kind of mix up. But seeing those moments in Prodigy where they’re referencing Lower Decks stuff, like I was gonna have The Doctor from Voyager come on to the Cerritos and tutor Tendi, that was gonna be a thing. And they were like “Oh, we actually were planning on using him.” And I was like, “Well, that makes a lot of sense, because you guys really are like the Voyager show.” So then I went down a different path with Tendi which I really like, with T’Lyn this season, and getting to see them reference us is kind of like a hey, we we all really like each other, we’re all having fun in the same sandbox. I thought that was really cool of them to kind of include us

You guys are good at playing the long game. I know we had the William Boimler clone being part of Section 31, I don’t know if that’s something you can tease or discuss.

Section 31 is a mysterious group. They don’t even tell ME about that stuff. Starfleet is very tight-lipped about it. I would love to see more about William Boimler, but, you know, I’m just on the Cerritos. They don’t let us play with the big boys, so I can’t speak anymore to that.

Will the finale feel like a series finale, will viewers’ hearts swell a little bit more than usual?

I’ll tell you. I know this is gonna sound ridiculous, but the finale WILL make a lot of people tear up. I’ve been making the show for like, six or seven years, and when I first met my wife, when we were 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. So I was like, I’m sure we’ve missed something, you know? And we watched it all together and when we finished TNG and moved on to 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. And that’s what ultimately became Lower Decks. And so showing her the finale… She had to turn it off. She was like “I can’t watch this anymore” because it was like losing a piece of us.

But at the same time, the finale is bonkers. I love finales, and if you watch other Lower Decks seasons, you know that the finale is always about the Cerritos being a character and the people protecting it within it. Like in one season we strip the hull… There’s always something celebrating the Cerritos in the finales. And this is the ultimate expression of that. And it’s a series ender and it’s a season ender, and it’s a love letter, and it’s a thank you to Star Trek and a thank you to fans and a thank you to Tawny and Jack and Noël and Eugene and everybody but it’s also—it’s  not The Sopranos. It’s not the end, right? Instead, like my wife loves Taylor Swift, it’s an era. The show is an era for these characters, and we got to experience an era from beginning to end.

And I have stories I could tell from before, like, I would love to tell Billups growing up in that part of Starfleet, what a weird thing to do that. Or young Ransom, or Captain Freeman as an ensign, like, is she getting stabbed in the heart like Picard? I don’t know. But also the way the show ends, while it does feel final, it also blooms into all these other opportunities that we could either make shows, or we could do comics or write books, or fans could just 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’s gonna feel like we pulled the rug out from under them. You’re gonna be really happy, I think, at the end of it.

Do you have a favorite moment from the series that really sticks out in your mind?

Oh, my gosh, working with George Takei really stood out. Not only just how fun that moment was in the show, but also how funny and kind he is and there’s something literally generational about him still doing Trek with us.

There’s moments from the first season, like doing the trial episode and just finding the comedy there. There was a moment for a season where we did this bit within the episode, it’s in the trial episode [“Veritas“], where Tendi is doing this cleaner stuff, and they’re afraid of these Romulan warbirds that are showing up, it’s the D’deridex class ships that are scanning for them. And we keep popping in and out. We’re like, “No, they’re scanning again!” That’s when you find the balance of Trek and comedy and it doesn’t feel like we messed up either of those things? I love that.I love the “Caves” episode. I’ve been wanting to do a caves episode since, I mean, the way we executed it, I just really loved it.

There’s so many, it’s hard to pick. Everything on this show feels a bit like a miracle, you know, like getting to define new stuff about Orions, building the California class as a part of the fleet, and also the other ships we’ve created, like the Obena class. And it’s almost hard to focus on little things, because every season it feels like “Are they really gonna let us get away with this?” And then every season we do and then, and then I watch it a couple years later, and I’m like, “Wow, we really had fun. We really did this”

The fifth and final season debuts with two episodes on Thursday, October 24 on Paramount+ in the U.S. and internationally. Following the premiere, new episodes of the 10-episode-long season will drop every Thursday on the service leading up to the series finale on Thursday, December 19.

More from NYCC

Check out our coverage of the Star Trek Universe panel, which also included the Section 31 movie, Starfleet Academy, and Strange New Worlds.

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NOTE: Interview has been edited for clarity.