The idea of a starship captain looms large in the sci-fi zeitgeist. Most famously embodied by William Shatner as Kirk in Star Trek, and later, Patrick Stewart as Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation, the heroic steadfast, nerves-of-steel brand of starship leader has been burned into Trekkie brains for decades and also made a big impact on how we think of leaders in adventure fiction in general. But, since 2020, one starship captain has been doing things a little bit differently.
“All the Star Trek captains are very hands-on,” Dawnn Lewis tells Inverse. “But Captain Freeman is hands-on like your mama. “She not only makes sure your hair is combed, but she puts spit on her fingers to make sure it stays combed and smooths it down.”
Since the debut of Star Trek: Lower Decks, Lewis has played Captain Carol Freeman with a mixture of heroism and exasperation in equal measure. In other words, Freeman might be the most realistic of the canonical Trek captains to date. But she’s also quietly the most historic. As Lower Decks warps toward the end of its final season, we caught up with Lewis to get her sense of why she loves Trek, and what she thinks could be in the future for Captain Freeman.
Before 2020, there had never been a Black woman in a recurring role as a starship captain in Star Trek. This sounds strange, but it’s true. Although Sonequa Martin-Green led Discovery in 2017, Michael Burnham wasn’t promoted to captain until the end of Season 3 in 2021. Meanwhile, Michelle Yeoh’s Captain Georgiou, a woman of color, wasn’t really a regular character in Discovery, at least not as the Prime Universe heroic Starfleet captain. The point is, before 2020, there had only been two Black women starship captains, and they were both played by the same person, Madge Sinclair. This means that the most historic Black female Starfleet captain is Dawnn Lewis’s Captain Carol Freeman of the USS Cerritos. For Dawnn Lewis, the idealistic and equitable future of Trek has always been part of her personal DNA.
“I always loved that Star Trek idealism when I was younger,” Lewis says. “I love Chekov, but I loved Sulu so much, too. But, I have to say, it’s the fans that have helped me realize how beautiful this all is. Even with all the other TV I’ve done, I never got to really meet fans. And if I was going to have an introduction to fans, I’m glad it was these fans. They are some really beautiful people.”
Even if you’ve never met Dawnn Lewis at a Star Trek convention, she is very much like her animated counterpart on Lower Decks. And she thinks that within the Trek canon, Freeman not only has made history because of representation, but because of the kind of person Freeman is. She’s not as calm and collected as Picard, and that’s OK.
“What I've learned is that Captain Freeman really needs to smoke a joint,” Lewis jokes. “She’s like at a 14 out of 10 most of the time. She’s really anxious. Sometimes I’m getting voice direction and they’re saying, ‘OK make her really upset,’ and I’m like, ‘Are you kidding me? She’s the most tightly wound person on that ship!’”
Lower Decks has gotten a lot of mileage out of pushing back against the 1990s Star Trek rule against depicting interpersonal conflict among Starfleet officers. In the Season 5 debut of Lower Decks, the crew encounters an alternate Cerritos in which nobody is allowed to argue, and one in which Captain Freeman has been sent to the dreaded Starbase 80, a place for the rejects of Starfleet. In Episode 5 of this season, titled “Starbase 80,” Freeman worries that she’s on the same path of self-sabotage as her alternate universe counterpart. We’ve seen starship captains in Trek canon be vulnerable before, but Freeman’s complete freak-out in “Starbase 80” is not just hilarious. It’s highly relatable. And this, Lewis thinks, is what makes her unique among the rest of her Starfleet captain counterparts.
“Yes, she'll give you the order, but she's going to make sure your pants are pulled up, and your shoes are tied,” Lewis says. “All of those little things that most captains don't necessarily pay attention to. She does that for each and every crew member.”
As Lower Decks comes to a close with Season 5, Lewis isn’t entirely ready to let go of this character that she’s put so much of her heart and soul into. She even reveals that when she auditioned for the role, she didn’t know it was a Star Trek series, and her character at that point was code-named Captain McDuck.
“Had I not gotten the role, and had Lower Decks come on I would have had no idea that that's the job I didn't get,” Lewis says. “But because I’m just such a huge Trek fan, period, I would have been trying to figure out who was running the show and beg for an opportunity to be on it.”
So, in this universe, at least, Dawnn Lewis wasn’t sent to the purgatory of Starbase 80. She’s Captain Freeman now, and will be, forever. And, when Lower Decks ends, she’s very aware that like Tawny Newsome and Jack Quaid did in Strange New Worlds, she could easily play her character in live-action form, in a future Star Trek project.
“I think all of us are kind of envious of Tawny and Jack doing that,” Lewis says of the live-action Lower Decks/Strange New Worlds crossover of 2023. “Maybe we can do some kind of special episode or live-action movie where we go through some kind of black hole or time warp and we all become real-live versions of ourselves. That would be pretty hot!”
