NYCC 2023: Chatting About ‘Star Trek: Lower Decks’ With Showrunner Mike McMahan

One of the great highlights of New York Comic Con 2023 was the opportunity to sit down with Mike McMahan, executive producer and showrunner of Paramount+’s Star Trek: Lower Decks. Comicon.com, along with journalists from other outlets, peppered McMahon with questions for roughly twenty minutes, but the discussion was flavored in the knowledge that every participant was a real-deal Trekkie – McMahan most of all!

Lower Decks began its run focusing on four ensigns – Beckett Mariner (Tawny Newsome), Bradward Boimler (Jack Quaid), D’vana Tendi (Noël Wells), and Samanthan Rutherford (Eugene Cordero) — learning the ropes of starship life, managing personal issues, and finding lots of trouble and Trek-related jokes. Although, as McMahan pointed out, Star Trek has always had the ability to make fun of itself. It’s just with Lower Decks, the emphasis has been more on the laughs than serious drama.

But with the currently running Season 4, drama has slipped in a little bit more. The four ensigns are now junior-grade lieutenants. They’ve split into quarters instead sleeping near each other in the lower deck bunks. And just for added tension, a storyline has been building all year about a mysterious alien ship destroying vessels of recognizable species like Klingons and the Ferengi.

“It’s been really fun this season because [in] promoting them, I was worried at first. Will this change the basic DNA of the show? Will it not feel like Lower Decks anymore? Will it feel like ‘the college years’ or something that [feels too different]?” McMahan said. “In producing this season, not only did it give us a ton of very Lower Decks feeling situations that still feel lower decks, I still feel lower decks. [Overall Star Trek executive producer Alex Kurtzman] is my boss, you know what I mean? I am still getting notes from the network.”

“There’s very few times I think in life that you don’t feel lower decks,” he added.

He also noted that the Star Trek format tends to send characters toward the captain’s chair. The promotions, to an extent, lead in that command direction, but McMahan said there are still plenty of stories to tell before any of the lead Lower Deckers get anywhere near the center seat. And the situations he and his writing staff found for the characters “really showed me that I don’t have to worry about that.”

Of course, the Lower Deckers aren’t rudderless, either. “I have a long-term plan for Mariner,” he revealed. “The last two episodes of this season are, I can say, pretty Mariner-focused and we’ve been leading up to them across the season and across the series.”

He credits Newsome with “unlocking” Mariner. The actor is also a huge Star Trek fan, which allowed Mariner the bandwidth to care about obscure Trek minutia and build out some of the show’s most deep-pull humor. “It’s having fun with Star Trek,” he explained. “It’s the fun you have with your friends who love something as much as you do, so you have a shorthand that you can make fun of it together.”

In terms of Mariner’s overall story, though, McMahan found it actually accelerated in the telling. The secret regarding her relationship to Captain Freeman (Dawnn Lewis) was something he expected to hold onto for much longer. “I found that that was a bad idea and then when I revealed the secret in the finale of first season, I was like, ‘oh my God, I can breathe again.’”

McMahan knows exactly why Mariner — “the opposite of Riker, who’s turning down promotions” – gets kicked off of starships and “what she’s working on.” He also added he understands “the ways that it’s expressed has changed and grown and gotten better,” but stopped short of suggesting whether or not the last two Season 5 episodes will directly address it.

Although he has a plan for the character, he is still willing to alter elements of it. “I don’t think anybody ever sits down to watch a TV show to be like, ‘Alright, how figured out is this motherfucker? You know what I mean?’” Instead, he relies on a more advanced understanding of all the characters, achieved via producing the show, to guide some aspects of the program.

“[You’re] letting yourself have that and then having some plan to stick to, so there is some structure to it,” he added. “But the structure shouldn’t beat these wonderful things you find while you’re making it.”

One such discovery: the humor inherent in Boimler. Again, he credits the actor with finding that quality. “I write Boilmer as a straight man who’s being stymied by the comedy around him, but then Jack Quaid is so funny that he ‘ruins’ that and makes him funny. [That] then makes you want to know more about him.” He teased Season 5 will prove Boimler is “always going to be better than what he was before he ended up in Starfleet.”

He also suggested the next season will more accurately place the show’s crossover with Star Trek: Strange New Worlds in the Lower Decks timeline and “there’s a lot of interesting Boimler stuff in season five; the DNA of that is directly tracked to that crossover episode.”

Being a huge Trek fan, McMahan admitted the recent episode set on Ferenginar, “Parth Ferengi’s Heart Place,” came into existence because he wanted to work with Star Trek: Deep Space Nine’s Chase Masterson. “I had met her at different comic cons when I was an assistant a decade ago. She was super nice to me back when I was writing [the] TNG Season Eight [Twitter account]. She showed me such kindness when there was absolutely no benefit to her out of it that I literally never forgot it,” he explained.

“Then, at a Star Trek day after Lower Decks started, I went running up to her as a fan and was like, ‘please let me write an episode where you and Rom [Max Grodénchik] can be in it,” he said. The result is a funny episode full of sight gags and a rare look at Ferengi television.

“Lower Decks is existing to take all of this stuff we know and have seen and have read about and have thought about and fill in the frog DNA of the Alpha Quadrant a little bit more,” he continued. “That’s why I like bringing in the Pakleds and that’s why I like Exocomps and that’s why I like going to Orion.”

McMahan also covered some other topics – like Rutherford’s original function as a romantic lead who goes on lots of dates, and idea he dropped because he didn’t want to do a “Star Trek dating show,” and the way T’Lyn (Gabrielle Ruiz) recreates some of Kirk (William Shatner) and Spock’s (Leonard Nimoy) humorous rapport from the original Star Trek — but as our time with him ended, he admitted that making a Star Trek show changes the relationship a fan has to Star Trek.

“All you’re seeing is the production. You don’t lose yourself in it anymore,” he said. “Don’t pour one out for McMahan, though. It’s comforting to watch one that I haven’t seen a million times, and that’s [the Original Series] for me. I’m thinking of re-watching Enterprise as well.”

So, maybe, it is possible for someone who makes the show to get lost in Star Trek after all.

Star Trek: Lower Decks streams Thursdays on Paramount+.