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Lower Decks Boss Mike McMahan Takes Our Kind of Weird Star Trek Quiz
Season 5 of Star Trek: Lower Decks is here, so we quizzed showrunner Mike McMahan about some of the more obscure aspects of Trekdom.
It’s hard to believe that Star Trek: Lower Decks’ final season has arrived, but after five years and 50 episodes, the animated Trek created by Mike McMahan is in fact coming to an end. In the Season 5 premiere, "Dos Cerritos," the crew of the USS Cerritos encounter versions of themselves from another reality… versions that get them thinking about the paths their own lives have taken.
When I spoke to McMahan recently, he explained that his goal for this final season was to wrap up the “Lower Decks era” of Mariner, Boimler, Rutherford, and Tendi’s lives, but not their overall stories. “You'll see in the finale that it does feel like a resolution of the concept of the show, but also introduces opportunities for other shows with these characters as they're moving forward,” he explains, before laughingly adding, “The gross way to say it is there's a bunch of fun backdoor pilots at the very end of it, but it feels final for the stories we've been telling.”
Whether or not the Lower Deckers pop up elsewhere in the Star Trek universe remains to be seen (Mariner and Boimler did already make the jump to live-action for a Strange New Worlds episode last year). But McMahan promises that a bunch of legacy Trek characters will appear in Season 5 of Lower Decks, courtesy of the quantum reality introduced in the season premiere. “The alternate visions of [the Cerritos crew] that you see in the premiere is also a mechanism to get unexpected legacy people later on,” promises the showrunner. “Without messing with the timeline and without resorting to time travel or holodeck stuff.”
So stay tuned on that front! In the meantime, I’ve interviewed McMahan several times since the debut of Lower Decks, and I’ve quizzed him on his Trek knowledge on more than one occasion. Dude knows his stuff! So with the final season of the show now here, I figured we’d try some more obscure quiz questions this time around…
Oddest Captain Picard Moment
Captain Jean-Luc Picard is usually a pretty straight-laced, tea-drinking, by-the-book Starfleet officer. Usually…
McMahan: “Probably when you can see his balls in ‘Captain's Holiday.’ We could have had slightly, slightly longer shorts, ladies and gentlemen. And it took me 40 years of living to find out that so many of those original TNG episodes were the same costume designer as TOS. When you're watching people on that planet where they're romping around, the one where Wesley falls into the bush and they want to execute him, and in HD... Man, if I was a kid and HD had existed then. You learn a lot about anatomy from HD transfers of TNG that I didn't know. I mean a lot. There should be a nipple warning at the front of these episodes now.”
Favorite Trek Captain Who Wasn’t a Series Regular
We all have a favorite Star Trek captain, but then there are the captains who only get a guest episode or one-shot appearance…
McMahan: “It's so funny. Pike is now removed from that docket [because he’s on Strange New Worlds]. … I loved when Sulu was captain just so briefly, but just getting hit by the Praxis effect… I freaking loved that movie. I just took my son to that and then had the weird experience of being recognized by other Trek fans there where I was like, ‘No, I'm an animation showrunner. I know that I have a very distinct lack of hair, but you should be recognizing Tawny [Newsome] and Jack [Quaid], not me.’ But just seeing Sulu at the helm, you can't watch that and not be like, ‘Give me more of that.’
“And then it's hard to pick [a guest captain] in TNG and in Deep Space Nine, because so many of them have dark turns at the ends of episodes. If you're not the lead of the show, usually you're a dick bag by the end of the episode, and you've been taken away by Starfleet. But yeah, I'll go with Sulu. I would've loved to have seen more.”
Favorite Tellarite
The least glamorous of the founding member races of the United Federation of Planets, the Tellarites have nonetheless been around since The Original Series. Sure, they look like pig-men, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have a favorite.
McMahan: “Well, I wrote a Short Trek that had a nefarious Tellarite in it, who is fighting with Harry Mudd, that I got to spend a week filming with. So he's my favorite Tellarite. Personally, the Tellarite I've met and worked with.
“I do like the TOS Tellarites. They’re so fucking freaky looking. They look like those hollow-eyed pig people. But yeah, despite Tellarites being founding members of the Federation, I do feel like they've gotten short shrift, because they're weren’t as big in TNG. They kind of got sidelined with the Andorians and Orions. You know what I mean? Klingons kind of took over. But yeah, I think you got to love the Tellarite you're on set with.
“Lower Decks was in development, but we hadn't sold it, and Aaron Baiers, who works with [Trek boss] Alex [Kurtzman], came and asked me if I liked Harry Mudd and if I wanted to take a crack at it. I was like, ‘Yeah, obviously.’ I wrote ‘The Escape Artist,’ and Rainn Wilson starred and directed it. When we were making that is when I was on set, and [Jonathan] Frakes was directing a Season 2 Discovery episode. And I ran into him at a bar or a hotel restaurant and showed him the pitch artwork that we were about to take out for Lower Decks, and asked him if we sold it, would he be in it? And that's why he's in the finale of the first season.”
Least Favorite Vulcan
Everyone loves Spock, but we’ve seen a bunch of Vulcans over the years and, really, a lot of them have kind of been jerks?
McMahan: “That's pretty easy. Most of them are complete assholes. So I’ve got two answers to this. I feel like any non-T'Pol Vulcan from Enterprise was such a dick bag that I really feel like they blurred the lines between Romulans and Vulcans with those guys. Vulcans were spiritual before, and they kind of became institutional in Enterprise, so I didn't love those Vulcans. I love T'Pol though, because she was the Lower Deck Vulcan.
“The structurally – as a writer – Vulcan I like the least is Spock's brother, because the idea of having a Vulcan that has emotion removes the fun of a Vulcan. I love [the movie he’s in, Star Trek V]. I used to not love that movie. I used to like the first half hour of it, and then a couple of seasons ago we did a parody version of it where Boimler basically is like, ‘Well, Mariner got to have a movie, and I have contractual parity to her, so I should get to do a holodeck movie.’ And he's kind of the Shatner of the episode. And I watched Star Trek V three or four times while we were working on that episode, and by the end of it I was like, ‘Man, I fucking love this movie.’
“There's this one line that my wife told me I wasn't allowed to repeat anymore … ‘You can't make your problems go away with the wave of a magic wand!’ … She's just like, ‘Please do not reference the magic wand.’”
Favorite or Weirdest Tool Geordi Ever Used
TNG’s Geordi La Forge wasn’t just the chief engineer of the USS Enterprise, but he was also the keeper of some of the strangest and occasionally cheesiest tools seen in the entire Alpha Quadrant.
McMahan: “Oh, man. For me, I like whenever he would lift the flap of Data's head and just zibbity-zibbity-zibbity, because they're best friends. And sometimes I'll be talking to my best friend, and I'm like, ‘Man, this guy's being a fucking idiot. I wish I could lift a flap on him and zibbity-zibbity him.’
“Also, every time we're introducing a new sci-fi tool in Lower Decks, I try to go and find prop reuse across the different series so that we can then use that prop, so that in the Memory Alpha [wiki] where it [says it] was used for this, this, that, they have to add another line – literally draw it into the show. They were just going into the cabinet and pulling out sci-fi stuff and redressing it. You'll see exocomps upside down and painted silver being used as engine pieces and stuff.
“Actually, there's lines of dialogue buried in Lower Decks [where Commander] Billups will be like … I'll look up what the tools were used for, and he'll be like, ‘Grab me the thing that looks like the thing. … Grab me the ion decelerator that looks like the plasma router.’ And if you go into Memory Alpha, it's an ion decelerator [that] they reused the prop as a plasma router. There's insane deep cuts that are production jokes in Lower Decks that archeologists wouldn't be able to dig up. … I also love what we call the Tucker tubes, which is that prop that you see in so many sci-fi things, which are the pieces of metal that have the neon tube between them. I love me a big tube, an engineering tube I love.”
What’s your pick for the oddest Captain Picard moment? Let’s discuss in the comments, and check out Star Trek: Lower Decks Season 5 on Paramount+ now.
Talk to Scott Collura on Twitter at @ScottCollura, or listen to his Star Trek podcast, Transporter Room 3. Or do both!
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