Warning: This Interview Contains SPOILERS for Star Trek: Lower Decks Season 3, Episode 1 - "Grounded"Season 3 of Star Trek: Lower Decks features more hilarious antics, more classic Star Trek guest star voices, and more bold outer space adventure masterminded by executive producer and creator Mike McMahan.
Star Trek: Lower Decks season 3's premiere picks up and resolves season 2's cliffhanger, but the episodic comedy series will launch into new all-new adventures, including a highly-anticipated visit to Deep Space Nine. Then, in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 2, Ensigns Beckett Mariner (Tawny Newsome) and Brad Boimler (Jack Quaid), will cross over and board the USS Enterprise in live-action!
To celebrate Star Trek: Lower Decks season 3's premiere, Screen Rant interviewed Mike McMahan about the big Star Trek: First Contact guest voice in the premiere, what season 3 has in store for the USS Cerritos' Lower Deckers, and we get some exclusive behind the scenes info about how Lower Decks' crossover with Strange New Worlds came about!
Congrats on season 3. I think it's your best season yet. I feel like you followed classic Star Trek TV rules and hit a new stride in season 3.
Mike McMahan: Oh, thank you. Well, you know, it's funny, I would never have described myself as a rule follower, but I think if you follow just enough of them that Gene Roddenberry set out, you get to have a pretty good show.
He seemed to know what he was doing.
Mike McMahan: (laughs) Yeah, he seemed to know what he was doing. And he seemed to know when to let [Star Trek] grow and change. Without, without the animated show and the movies and, and Next Gen and so on, if he hadn't been able to grow, adapt, and if he hadn't come up with [Star Trek], I never would have gotten to do this stuff.
I loved all of the Star Trek: First Contact jokes in the season 3 premiere. And you guys got James Cromwell back at Zefram Cochrane. I think that was the first time he played that role since Enterprise. What was he like to record?
Mike McMahan: Oh my god, he was so chill. I love him on Succession. We had to work around his Succession shooting schedule. And his protesting. He's always out protesting. We recorded him in his house over Zoom, and I directed him. Honestly, he's so talented and so game. He just immediately got back into [playing Cochrane]. I asked him if people brought up Zephram Cochrane to him, and he was like, "Usually, it's Babe!" But the guy has such an amazing spirit. And he's so talented. He's Star Trek through and through, and it was awesome to work with him.
Lower Decks is going to Deep Space Nine later this season. But there were some awesome Deep Space Nine jokes in the premiere, like visiting Sisko's Creole Kitchen. That was great.
Mike McMahan: Yeah, we wanted to celebrate all the times that we've been back to Earth in Star Trek. We wanted to play with the idea of Earth as a place through the lens of Star Trek and kind of revisit fan-favorite places for ourselves.
On the subject of Deep Space Nine, I loved how the Pakleds' plan to frame Captain Freeman was weirdly similar to Sisko and Garak's plan to trick the Romulans into Dominion War. They use a data forger and everything. Was that all intended?
Mike McMahan: No, I think that where Sisko was coming from, they had to figure out something against an unstoppable force coming through the Gamma Quadrant. The Pakleds were just like, "This has worked for us on a smaller scale. Let's just do it on a massive scale!" And they ended up basically giving themselves a black eye on a planetary level. So I think Sisko's plan was smart. I think the Pakleds bit off more than they can chew.
I also really liked how, as Captain Freeman mentioned, it was a classic Pakled Samaritan's Snare that eventually caught them. But her acquittal reaffirmed Starfleet as the good guys. Mariner kept being told to trust Starfleet, they'll do the right thing. And she didn't believe them. But they did. Starfleet was reaffirmed. They know what they're doing.
Mike McMahan: Yeah, you know, 99% of the time Starfleet is amazing. Like, every once in a while on the Enterprise, you have a bad Admiral show up. But all in all, Starfleet is where the Prime Directive came from. The Federation is a good thing.
And you gotta remember that Mariner is Lower Decks. Her mom is the captain. She was acting emotionally. She was acting in a way that Data wanted to act. But sometimes, acting emotionally causes you to act on your worst impulses and try to take things in your own hands, which maybe she shouldn't have tried to do.
We wanted to give a feeling of when you see the latter half of the episode, the reveal is that there was this whole amazing episode happening. That Mariner didn't see because she's Lower Decks. Occasionally, there are bigger things at work that you don't know about. You have to sometimes trust that the people who created the system that you love might like it as much as you do.
That's one of the cool things Lower Decks does. The focus is on the Lower Deckers, but you've touched on this in other episodes, the senior staff has their own show going on, that occasionally intersects with them.
Mike McMahan: Yes, sometimes we see some of the senior staff, sometimes we get a little bit of their backstory. Sometimes like, in the original "Lower Decks" [on TNG], the Lower Deckers are pulled into the main story. Sometimes the whole ship is pulled into the main story so the Lower Deckers are involved in that. But I do like the feeling of how, back when I was an assistant, you didn't always know what your bosses are working on until you read about it in the news.
Looking ahead to the rest of season 3, one of the big things is we're going to find out the backstory of Rutherford's implant, right?
Mike McMahan: Yeah, there's some more information on why Rutherford has the implant and what he was wrong about regarding the implant.
It's also already been teased that we're seeing that we're going to see Bold Boimler and Tendi training as a Science Officer. What can you tease about that coming up?
Mike McMahan: We love kind of slowly moving characters forward in ways we've seen in other Star Treks. With Rutherford, it's a bit of a Julian Bashir from Deep Space Nine revealing the kind of genetic background stuff. Except with Rutherford, it's like memory and who was he before, and who is he now.
With Tendi, she came on to the Cerritos as a brand-new Ensign in Medical. What she's learning about herself is that maybe she's something more than Medical. Maybe she's just a Senior Science Officer in waiting. That if she trained, she could cover it all kind of like Spock does. Seeing the very beginning very, very first steps of that starting is really exciting for me as a writer, but also for Tendi as a character.
Mariner gets stuck with Ransom this season. Her mom kind of washes her hands of dealing with Mariner's bulls***. So Mariner has got a whole different situation this season that she has to navigate.
And Boimler being bold, he's decided that hey, for the first 20 episodes, I've slowly learned to be less careful and believe in myself more. So he kind of throws himself into more dangerous situations, which is not exactly going to be the safest thing for our guy.
You can track Boimler's evolution from the first episode, and he's starting to turn into a great Starfleet officer. He really has been leveling up, and it's very visible and cool to watch.
Mike McMahan: All of our Ensigns are great Starfleet officers, they just kind of didn't know how to express it at first. So as you're seeing them become better, they're not actually becoming better. They're kind of unlocking their own belief and their abilities and how to utilize them. You know what I mean? WIth Starfleet, even going from Starfleet Academy and getting to [become an] Ensign is no small feat. It's really just like, how do they define themselves as officers? And they're getting better at that.
Of course, the crossover with Strange New Worlds is coming next year. I think that's the single Star Trek thing I'm most excited for. So I want to ask you a little bit about it. How did that come about? How long has that been in the works?
Mike McMahan: It's been in the works for a while. I believe we were talking about it last year. [Strange New Worlds' showrunner] Henry Alonso Myers came to me and asked if I'd be interested in sharing some of my characters because they're huge fans of Lower Decks on Strange New Worlds. They had me do a little bit of punch -ups on a couple of Strange New Worlds season 1 episodes to add a little bit of humor. Which was a blast. Getting to write lines for Spock and Uhura is surreal.
And then they actually hired one of my writers, Kathryn Lyn, who wrote "Wej Duj," who co-wrote the episode, which I was really excited by. T'Lyn is actually based on her cosplay Vulcan she used to play conventions. And then I got to do a ton of punch-ups on the Strange New Worlds episode as well. I got to add a lot of character voice for the Lower Deckers but also give them some options for jokes for the rest of the Strange New Worlds cast, who are really charming and funny in their own right. They're great.
I couldn't make it up [to Toronto] because of scheduling. But I was supposed to, and I was so jealous that I couldn't be there. And I kept getting teasing texts from Tawny, Jack, and Jonathan Frakes [who directed the crossover.] With photos they were taking of each other on set, having a blast.
Jack and Ethan [Peck] just are thick as thieves. They were just such great friends. And it's so funny seeing them hanging out at like Comic Con and stuff afterwards. They call themselves "Spoimler." And Tawny and Celia [Rose Gooding], I just know that Tawny has so much respect for Celia and vice versa. And it's just awesome to see these kinds of Star Trek friendships grow.
That's amazing. Speaking of friendships in the Star Trek family, Star Trek Day is coming up in a couple of weeks. So I want to ask you, now that season 3 is under your belt, and Lower Decks is really loved by the fans, and you guys are now established as Star Trek in your own right, how do you feel about your place in the overall franchise?
Mike McMahan: I just still feel lucky. Every episode of Lower Decks feels like I'm the luckiest guy. That we're getting to make a thing that I grew up loving, currently love, and that people are responding to the version of it that speaks to me. Like, I hoped maybe that some people would fight for us and be like, "No, it's good." And that is true.
But this kind of overwhelming fan response from the biggest Star Trek fans is like something I never dreamed that we could get -- and so quickly, if at all. And so, I'm really proud of what we did season 3. I can't wait for all of season 3 to get out in the world. Also, weirdly, my head space is we're still writing season 4. I'm writing episode 9 of season 4 right now. I just closed the document to talk to you. So I know how awesome season 4 is. I hope everybody loves season 3 as much as I do. Because season 4 is excellent in a totally different way, and in a way that is going to surprise everybody.
I love all the Star Trek shows that are on right now. Picard season 3 is gonna be a blast. Obviously, Strange New Worlds, the crossover episode, what Prodigy is doing. It's awesome to be a part of Star Trek, but especially at a time when everything is hitting on all cylinders. It's just such a great bunch of Star Trek. Everybody's bringing it, which is really cool.
Star Trek: Lower Decks Synopsis
With Captain Freeman (Dawnn Lewis) on trial following the Season 2 finale, Mariner (Tawny Newsome), Tendi (Noël Wells), Boimler (Jack Quaid), and Rutherford (Eugene Cordero) are in for a host of new adventures--including a trip to Deep Space 9.
Check out our SDCC interview with the cast and crew of Star Trek: Lower Decks as well as our previous interviews with stars Jack Quaid and Tawny Newsome.
Star Trek: Lower Decks season 3 streams Thursdays on Paramount+.