Star Trek: Lower Decks Creator Teases Star Trek-iest Season Yet, Legacy Cameos and ‘Bonkers’ Series Finale
Our time aboard the U.S.S. Cerritos is about to come to an end — but not before Paramount+’s Star Trek: Lower Decks beams up a bevy of last laughs (and maybe some tears).
As announced in the spring, Star Trek: Lower Decks is ending with Season 5, which premieres this Thursday, Oct. 24, with the first two episodes (followed by weekly drops through Dec. 19).
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Star Trek: Lower Decks follows the support crew of the aforementioned Cerritos, “one of Starfleet’s least important ships.” The animated series boasts a voice cast that includes Tawny Newsome, Jack Quaid, Noël Wells, Eugene Cordero, Dawnn Lewis, Jerry O’Connell, Fred Tatasciore and Gillian Vigman.
The series’ farewell mission finds the crew tasked with closing “space potholes” — subspace rifts that are causing chaos in the Alpha Quadrant. Along the way, Jr. Officers Mariner, Boimler, Tendi and Rutherford also must deal with “an Orion war, furious Klingons, diplomatic catastrophes, murder mysteries and scariest of all: their own career aspirations.”
“Some people on the crew, who are big fans [of the franchise], are like, ‘This is the most Star Trek we’ve ever Star Trekked,'” Lower Decks creator Mike McMahan shared ahead of the Star Trek Universe New York Comic Con panel this weekend.
“I don’t know if that’s exactly right, because Lower Decks has always Star Trekked more than anybody’s Star Trekked,” the EP noted. But since “we knew it was going to be the final season pretty early on in the writing process, I made a decision to move forward some stuff that I had planned.”
The result is a farewell run that is “still hilarious” and features “standalone episodes with just a bit of a through line,” McMahan avows. “It’s everything you love about Lower Decks, and it’s everything you love about Star Trek — we’ve just gotten really good at it.”
The season opens Thursday with an homage of sorts to the original Star Trek’s iconic “Mirror, Mirror” episode.
In “Dos Cerritos,” the crew members “do see alternate versions of themselves that have made different choices,” McMahan previews. But, he makes clear, “this isn’t the mirror universe. This is, like, a two-percent different [reality]” that sets up “an aspirational, or a cautionary, tale.”
On the casting front, “We finally got Harry Kim, with [Star Trek: Voyager‘s] Garrett Wang on the show, and that guy was made for animation. He comes in with so much exuberance,” McMahan shared. “[TNG‘s Jonathan] Frakes is like that, too — they’re able to switch from their live-action tone to still being the character, but a comedy version of it.”
Beyond Wang’s Kim, “We did get some dream legacy cast in this season,” McMahan teased, “but you’re going to 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 specific time period of the show,” he explained. “I was actually really surprised that we could get who we got.”
What sort of series finale does McMahan on tap for Dec. 19? After all, the Cerritos‘ underdog crew is dangerously close to being promoted out of the lower decks and into new Starfleet roles.
“I know this is going to sound ridiculous…,” McMahan told TVLine, “but the finale will make a lot of people tear up” — the EP’s own wife-turned-Trekker included. “But at the same time, the finale is bonkers.
“We end with them in a different place, but there are no betrayals, nobody’s going to feel like we pulled the rug out from under them,” he added. “You’re going to be really happy, I think, at the end of it.”
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