The Big Picture

Mike McMahan discusses the Star Trek: Lower Decks Season 4, the upcoming finale, Strange New Worlds crossover, epic guest stars & the series’ future. McMahan also discusses the delightful geeky connection between Rutherford and Tendi and why their story isn’t focused on romance, and Tawny Newsome joining the writers’ room of Starfleet Academy. McMahan also discusses the crossover episode with Strange New Worlds, a fun collaboration that allowed both shows to celebrate their love for Star Trek.

Star Trek: Lower Decks is well into its fourth hilarious season following the heartfelt and absolutely insane adventures of the USS Cerritos. So far Season 4 has seen new promotions for our favorite lower deckers, the introduction of everyone’s favorite bone-drinking moopsy, and the return of Deep Space Nine’s Rom and Leeta. Ahead of this week’s episode, I sat down with series creator Mike McMahan to unpack all of the wild and wacky episodes we’ve seen so far and to get the scoop about what fans can expect from the last handful of episodes in Season 4.

During our conversation, McMahan spoke about the delicious will they/won’t they vibes between Rutherford (Eugene Cordero) and Tendi (Noël Wells), the excitement of having all-star Tawny Newsome joining the writers room of the upcoming Starfleet Academy series, and working with Deep Space Nine’s Chase Masterson. McMahan also dished on the delight of collaborating with the Strange New Worlds team for that epic crossover episode, and the possibility of future seasons of the animated series at Paramount+. You can read our full conversation below.

COLLIDER: I love this whole season so much, and this upcoming episode is particularly fun, especially the Tendi/Rutherford plot. It’s got huge fan-fiction vibes. It’s really a great homage to all these tropes that basically started with Star Trek. What went into exploring that fun, romantic side of their relationship and leaning full tilt into those fan fic vibes?

MIKE MCMAHAN: I think for me, it’s the feeling of, you have these two characters who clearly love each other, right? They are so different, from different worlds, and they’ve both ended up on the Cerritos, and they have a shared love of the ship and engineering and all the Star Trek stuff. It’s almost like a romance based in geekery and nerdery. It’s like finding, not even a significant other, but it’s like finding that friend in life where you’re like, “Wait, you know the whole Enterprise-D crew? So do I! Wait, are we friends?” You know what I mean? It’s like, I have Star Trek friends. I have people who I’m immediately like, “Oh, I like you, and I know that you’re safe because you love Star Trek, which means you’re a nerd like me.” You know what I mean?

Image via Paramount

Yes, absolutely.

MCMAHAN: Right? And that’s a little bit of the Tendi/Rutherford of it is, originally I was planning on writing Rutherford as a guy that we would utilize for stories that examined what social life on a starship was and that he’d be going on lots of dates and lots of all these…then when I was writing the pilot, I was like, “Ew, this feels bad. This doesn’t feel like Star Trek to me, and I don’t know why, but I don’t want to write this character.” I changed the pilot for him and Tendi to end up becoming friends at the end because she agrees that the date that he was on with the pilot went poorly because the other character that he was dating didn’t have the same response of there being a technological problem. And because that was unexpected, I’ve been learning about Tendi and Rutherford’s relationship this whole time, as well, because that was one of the things I didn’t plan out in advance.

I love their friendship and the love language they have for each other, and it’s so tempting to burst that bubble and just have them be in a relationship, but then they stop being Geordi and Data, and they start being O’Brien and Keiko or something. It just changes the storytelling you do with them, and the stories I want to tell about them aren’t romantic. They’re romantic about the ship and about their adventures, but I don’t have stories that I wanna tell, yet, about them being together. I see that people online or fans or people I talk to, they clearly can read that those two should be together, and it’s a little like an itch you can’t scratch, but that’s what the writers feel, too. We’re constantly like, “God, it would be so fun,” and it’s like, “No! We can’t do that.” And so, their story in this episode is a little bit like brushing against that to be like, “Be careful what you wish for.” Like, “Oh, wouldn’t it be fun for them to be in a relationship?” “No, actually, it would be misery.” [Laughs] That’s kind of the heart of this story.

Well, I loved it, and it played so fun. I can’t wait for people to see it.

MCMAHAN: I hope they don’t turn on me! [Laughs]

During Strange New Worlds Season 2, we got that incredible crossover with Tawny and Jack playing their characters in live-action, and it was absolutely phenomenal. What was it like working with the Strange New Worlds team for that crossover?

MCMAHAN: It was like looking in a mirror and being like, “Weird. You guys are big Star Trek nerds as much as I am, and in the exact same way.” I love the Stranger Worlds guys. Henry had me do a little bit of punch-up on the first season whenever they had a bit of a silly episode, and that was so fun that then when they were talking about doing a crossover, they really pulled me in and involved me, not only in getting to do passes on the scripts and with the character voices. Getting to write Spock and Uhura lines was so cool. It was just really, really fun and they didn’t have to involve us as much as they did. They let Tawny and Jack improvise on set, and they had a blast, and their cast was doing it, too, and it wasn’t usually like the vibe. We went from making important Star Trek to making fun Star Trek, and sometimes you can do both, you know what I mean?

Image via Paramount+

Absolutely!

MCMAHAN: And I love that they can switch hats like that. It’s very TNG/TOS. Star Trek is great at doing that. And then they let me be in the edit bay, and Tawny was texting me photos from set the entire freaking time because I couldn’t be there, which drove me crazy. There was COVID stuff at the time, and I just couldn’t be on set, and I’m getting texts of her hugging [Jonathan] Frakes at dinner, and I’m like, “Ahh!” So it was really just a party. We were all so happy to be involved in it, and we’re all such fans. They were fans of our show, and obviously, we were fans of Strange Strange Worlds, so whether everybody else liked the episode, that was one for us. We just had a blast, and Kathryn Lyn, who was a writer on Lower Decks and wrote “wej Duj,” was one of the writers on this episode. The whole thing was so comfy. I think you can feel, when you see the episode at the end, that it wasn’t like trying to force something to happen.

My one note about it was, I was like, “Wow, I wish we had more time to make the stakes even bigger.” But everybody with Strange New Worlds was like, “No, no, no. This is feeling good. We don’t need more. We’re having a blast. The stakes are that they are on the ship, it’s not the Orion stuff.” And they were right. The episode came out really charming, and everybody says it’s a love letter to Trek. You hear that thrown around all the time, but it really was a synergy between two different Trek shows loving Trek at the same time. So, it wasn’t like the Deep Space Nine episode, which I love, where they go back to “The Trouble With Tribbles,” “Trials and Tribble-ations.” That was Deep Space Nine loving TOS, but doing it on their own. I don’t know if there’s ever been a Trek where it’s like two shows are merging for one moment, almost like a freeway merge, and then we split apart again, and that was really special.

It was fantastic. So Tawny, I think, is set to join the writers’ room of the new Starfleet Academy show. Is there any chance we’ll get to see her write a Lower Decks episode in the future?

MCMAHAN: She’s been on Academy for a while, obviously not during the strike, but she is loving it. I don’t know if she’s ever gonna write on Lower Decks. I would almost love to keep that separate because there’s a magic that she has when we get into the booth where she has the script, and then she gets to interpret it in a way that’s one extra layer. She gets to bring even more Tawny into it, and I like that freedom. I also don’t know, like, Lower Decks is really, really hard to write, so I want her to have the fun of just having a fully thought-out script appear in front of her instead of the excruciating process of going from nothing to something, you know?

But what I say about that is, I’m a huge fan of Tawny’s. I think any comedy show should hire Tawny. She loves Star Trek. Don’t tell [Alex] Kurtzman, who is her showrunner right now, but I’m the first one to be like, “Number one, everybody should hire Tawny to write on their show; number two, everybody should hire Tawny to star in their show because she’s a fucking star.”

She’s fantastic.

MCMAHAN: I feel so lucky to have her, you know what I mean? So anyway, that’s my answer to that. I don’t think I’ll have her write Lower Decks because I want her to like me, so I’ll spare her from that.

Image via Paramount

Lower Decks really able to push the boundaries of Star Trek a lot in really unique ways. Is there anything from this season that you look back at and you’re like, “I can’t believe we got away with that?”

MCMAHAN: Oh, that’s a good question. Yeah, I think, but let’s let the season end. There’s some really cool stuff in [Episodes] 9 and 10 that I’ve purposefully held back from everybody that is a big swing for the fences. Cool, conceptually wild stuff that I’m really proud of and I have a good feeling about. So that’s some of how I would respond to that, and I know that’s a cop-out because you haven’t seen it yet.

I guess the more fun answer would be, I love that we got to go to Ferenginar and say that this was the beginning—this is what happens this week, now that you’ve seen it obviously—that we see the first steps into the Federation of Ferenginar applying to join the Federation. It feels like a nod to Nog’s experience, that Rom’s seeing what Nog experienced, and having had his time on Deep Space Nine that he would have as he went in to be the Grand Nagus—god, I’m hearing how nerdy I am as I’m saying this, but anyway—that he’s seen the value to other Ferengi being a part of the Federation. I think it’s really cool that we got to do that, even though it’s kind of a small piece of it.

I’ve also wanted to work with Chase Masterson forever. I met her when I was an assistant in, like, 2011 when I was writing the TNG Season 8 Twitter feed. I snuck into a party at Comic-Con, and security came to kick me out, and Will Wheaton and Chase vouched for me and said that I was there with them even though they had literally met me like five minutes beforehand. But Will was a fan of the Twitter feed, and Chase, you know, I’m a huge fan of hers, and she treated me like an equal, and I was just an assistant that snuck in. Years later, I re-met her at Star Trek Day after Lower Decks had already started and I went running up to her, and I was like, “Chase, I’m the showrunner of Lower Decks, and I need to have you in an episode. Please, will you be on the show?” And she was so flattered, and I literally wrote this Ferenginar episode to have her be in the show. So I kind of can’t believe that, like, over a decade later, I finally got to repay that kindness in a way that honored the character that she made that I loved her for. Does that make sense?

Absolutely! That’s fantastic. The crew got their promotions at the beginning of the season, and this season really balances that character growth with the humor even more, I think, than past seasons, and there’s this overarching plot. Can you talk about getting a little bit deeper in this season?

MCMAHAN: When you start every season, you know you want to do this stuff, but to us, it’s hard because I spend every day thinking about Lower Decks, and then the audience spends 30 minutes watching it, so you have to balance. But then, I’m working on it all year, and you guys are only seeing it once a year, so how much forward movement feels natural to me versus you guys? I don’t want to jump ahead and make the show not feel like what it is, but I also don’t want to Bart Simpson it and have our guys not feel like these experiences are having an effect on them. You get the Bart Simpson stuff when you’re on linear TV when you don’t know what episode you’re gonna catch. You used to write TV, assuming that the one episode you’re making each time might be the only episode somebody’s ever seen. With Lower Decks, you can go on Paramount+, click on Episode 1, and catch up in a week. I don’t have to wonder. It took me years to get to see all of Star Trek: [The Next Generation] in order when they finally released a DVD box set I could afford. It was something you chased forever, and now it’s something readily available.

Image via Paramount

I try to keep in mind that, like, yes, it has to feel episodic, like TNG, but also, I get the benefit of getting to grow with these characters, and I’m not gonna get to spend forever with them, right? If there’s something I wanna do with them, I’m probably not gonna get seven seasons of this show, so what I need to accomplish with them in a natural way I should do if I’m feeling it. That’s why, in the first episode of the season, I just decided to jump ahead. It wasn’t originally gonna be the first episode of Season 4; I was gonna kind of slowly build up to it, and then I was like, “You know what? You only live once. Let’s get them promoted. Let’s make them deal with it, too, on screen.” You know what I mean? And I hope as you’re watching this season it’s gonna become clearer that Mariner sounds like she’s resolved her problems with being promoted.

Something in Lower Decks I see the fandom not quite grasp, I’ve seen people kind of complain that it’s like, “Oh, it feels like they’re undoing stuff they’ve done before,” is character growth isn’t linear. You can hear a lesson, you can learn a lesson, you can change, and then you can slide back. Or you can change and be different and feel like you’ve moved forward, but it’s a different expression of the same thing you haven’t dealt with yet. So, you know, you have bold Boimler feels like it would resolve, and he should just be bold from now on, but that’s a Dumbo feather. Like, has he fully gotten to the person he’s gonna be? And for me, this episode that’s airing this week for Mariner is really important because there are starting to be hints of what her endgame this season is in regards to being promoted, that there’s something that’s still weighing on her that, in this season, is unresolved that you’re gonna be seeing across the coming episodes. That’s gonna become trouble.

Well, that is so exciting, and I can’t wait to see the final two episodes when those are out. I would love for this show to get seven seasons, so I am rooting for you guys. Thank you so much for sitting down and chatting with me today.

MCMAHAN: Of course. I mean, listen, I have more than seven seasons worth of story. I would love to get seven seasons to have that TNG look. I would say if you want seven seasons of the show, I would rather you get more people to watch it now than assume you’ll do a letter-writing campaign if we don’t get more because right now we only have five seasons. We’re working on Season 5, but there’s no clear picture in the future. So if you love Lower Decks, get somebody else to sign up for Paramount+ and watch it, even if it’s for free. [Laughs] Please, please! But thank you. I love it, too.

Star Trek: Lower Decks Season 4 is currently streaming on Paramount+ with new episodes hitting the streamer every Thursday.