As Star Trek fans savor the season finale of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds and weather the hiatus until new episodes of the franchise arrive on Paramount Plus, now’s the time to revisit Star Trek: Lower Decks Season 2 as it debuts on Blu-ray and DVD July 12. The animated comedy’s sophomore season went hardcore geek by featuring cameos with Captain William Riker (Jonathan Frakes), Lieutenant Tom Paris (Robert Duncan McNeill), and episodes featuring Mugatos, Pakled, Klingon lower deckers and even Section 31.
There’s no doubt creator and showrunner Mike McMahan is gleeful about getting to cater to his Trekker tendencies almost unfettered. When speaking to IGN recently, McMahan discussed how Season 2 has emboldened him to go mine the best of where the various Trek series have gone before, and to reach for places that the Trek franchises have never explored. He also talked about what to expect from the characters in Season 3 and a little bit of Season 4 too. Read on for the full chat!
What “wej Duj” Unlocked
“In Season 2, two things crystallized for me,” McMahan says of lessons learned. “The Bridge crew might be the top of the USS Cerritos but they're one of the bottoms of the fleet. That makes the Cerritos itself a lower decker. Our ensigns might be looking at the Bridge crew as their bosses but they are in their own head about stuff too. So, [it’s] seeing [Captain] Freeman [Dawnn Lewis] grapple with that and seeing our lower deckers start to realize it and getting that ‘Cerritos strong’ feeling that maybe there's a little infighting and maybe we don't always see eye to eye, but we're family. We've got each other's backs.
“And there was a lot of how to define stories that are driven by Mariner’s [Tawny Newsome] betrayal by Boimler [Jack Quaid] in him coming back,” McMahan says of the second big lesson of the season, which ties into Boimler’s brief departure from the ship. “Mariner obviously has problems with people leaving, with loss, and somebody being more into ranking up than speaking truth. A lot of it was Mariner still likes Boimler but was mad at him, but needed him to address it and not have her [bring it up]. And that culminates really nicely in Episode 5 [‘An Embarrassment of Dooplers’]. I really love that episode.”
Asked his personal favorite episodes of Season 2, McMahan offers "I, Excretus" and "wej Duj.” Of the former, he says Trek honcho Alex Kurtzman and the Secret Hideout executive producers wanted him to make sure that it felt worth doing and wasn't just about comedy beats. “They're always really thoughtful, like why is this a story about Mariner? What are we learning about Boimler here?” McMahan says of his bosses. “They know that the Star Trek, sci-fi stuff is gonna come and fall into place. The only notes I ever get is: Clarify why this is important for these characters and clarify what we're saying about these guys.”
McMahan says his team treats Kurtzman and company as their first audience and an important bellwether. “Luckily, as we were getting to the end of Season 2, that was 20 episodes of proving that we're not doing anything frivolously. If you're only doing 10 episodes, every one of them has to kind of be a big swing,” he explains. “And I think they get that. They're almost annoyingly supportive. They know from making ‘big drama’ Star Trek that we're doing that too, and we have to be funny, and it has to be short and there has to be a reason for being animated. There's a lot of trust on both sides.”
They're one of the bottoms of the fleet. That makes the Cerritos itself a lower decker.
As for why "wej Duj" really worked for him, he says he loved that audiences got to see classic Star Trek alien races, but they're not even talking to humans. “When we were writing that, I was like, 'Alright, let's go watch episodes where it's just Vulcans as the B story.' But those don't really exist,” he says. “You get close to it in Enterprise with T'Pol [Jolene Blalock] and her pals. But there's not a lot of non-human Klingon/Vulcan stuff. You get a little bit more of it in the movies, where you have to understand Klingon politics but it's always revealing bad guy stuff. And so that, to me, feels like, 'Oh, man, we did it. We're making Star Trek here. It's awesome!'”
To Boldly Go… to Season 4
McMahan says he and his writers are currently scripting Season 4 in anticipation of the art team soon returning to work on the show. Because animation has to work so far in advance of its air dates, Season 3 is already in the can, so he’s excited for how audiences will see the series further progress across two more seasons of lower deckers growing. But he also is looking forward to audiences seeing how the show continues to evolve how it tells Trek stories.
Citing "wej Duj" again as a creative benchmark that inspired the team, McMahan adds, “I think we stumbled into a poignant, interesting Star Trek in story and format that they hadn't quite done before, but that didn't feel like it broke Star Trek. And as we're writing Season 4, we're almost imbuing moments across the whole season with that kind of stuff, so we don't have to say, 'Hey, this is the episode where we do that.' Instead, we're saying, ‘This is a part of Lower Decks and you never know what Lower Decks you might be seeing.’”
He also teases that for those who loved the Vulcan T’lyn (Gabrielle Ruiz) from that episode, she will be back. “I wish I had known everybody was gonna love T'lyn as much as I love T'lyn,” McMahan enthuses. “Because T'lyn is basically not in Season 3. You get a little bit with her. But then in Season 4, I went to T'lyn town. I want to know what she's up to.”
Future Roll Call
But what about the core cast? What should we expect from them based on how the Season 2 finale, "First First Contact,” left all the characters? McMahan is only too happy to tease what's to come.
“You'll see at the beginning of the season that Mariner is fired up, but she's not, maybe, directing her energy in the most applicable way,” he smiles. “She might be following her heart more than her head a little bit. She's gonna make some stuff happen, but if it's gonna be helpful is kind of up in the air.
I kind of leaned on the Julian Bashir [from DS9] storytelling about Rutherford’s secret past.
“Boimler still wants to learn about himself and about how he can be the best he can be,” McMahan continues. “He starts Season 3 taking the lessons that he learned from Seasons 1 and 2, and it guides him down a new path. It's not like Tendi’s new job, but he takes on a new thing where he's like, 'This is what I'm gonna try from now on.’ It gives him victories, and it also sets him back sometimes. And oftentimes, Mariner is like, ‘Stop doing that!’ It feels really Boimler and it's really fun to watch.”
Speaking of Tendi (Noël Wells), she found herself on a new path when she was promoted by Dr. T'Ana (Gillian Vigman) to the Sciences division. McMahan says that story turn was born of her stories feeling limited in Medical. “There's not a lot of room for Tendi in Medical, when you're telling stories there. We've told some really funny stories, but the gravimetric poll of T'Ana is almost too fun. I didn't want to fight that, so I wanted to use her gravitational pull to send Tendi in another direction,” he explains. “Something that I think Discovery did that was cool was on-ship training stuff. There are paths you can take, and you see Tilly doing that kind of stuff. You also saw Wes [Crusher] back in the day doing some of that. You saw Troi doing some of it too. You see that people are bettering themselves. They're the best of the best, but they're bettering themselves. Putting Tendi into Senior Science Officer Training is challenging her in new ways. And saying there's a way to train to become Spock – it's almost using a different part of your scientific acumen. And having Tendi start to be challenged by that is a really fun, slow burn. Because while Tendi is amazing at all of this stuff, it's not easy for her to tell the captain that she's wrong. I think we all run into that.”
Last but not least is the slowly unfolding mystery of Rutherford’s (Eugene Cordero) tech implants and missing memory. “Getting to do a mystery around a sincere, likable guy is just very fun to me,” McMahan laughs. “I kind of leaned on the Julian Bashir [from DS9] storytelling about his secret past a little bit for this. This is a thing that society is saying is bad. This is a thing that you had to hide, but your friends are going to be supportive. There's that DNA, no pun intended, in the Rutherford story. He thinks he knows what the implant is all about. But even he doesn't know because it changed his brain. It's a really interesting character piece.”
And he adds, “But Star Trek fans should know nobody in Starfleet just puts tech on their head because they feel like it. It's only if it's necessary. Augmentation is like a dirty word in Star Trek. It should always have made somebody lift an eyebrow that Rutherford had that, and that it seems to be a choice he made instead of a necessity. Finding out what that is in an interesting, fun Lower Decks way is something that Season 3 will show you.”
With the return date for Season 3 still unannounced, McMahan offers, “Keep watching Lower Decks before the next season comes out. Catch up and watch. Honestly, a new viewer popping in will be fine. But if you want to taste every weird little McMahan micro-flavor that we sewed in there, binge the first two seasons before you dive into the next one, And then you're going to have a great time.”
