"Star Trek: Lower Decks" has become one of the brightest lights in the franchise's constellation over the past five years and its final 10-episode season launches today, Oct. 24, on Paramount+ with a double-episode debut.
Goodbyes are always difficult, especially when a beloved TV series' surging popularity is on such a meteoric rise, but we've got a fun chat with the vocal cast to share to help dry those tears.
Rounded up prior to their appearance for the "Star Trek" Universe panel at New York Comic Con last weekend, "Lower Decks'" main voice stars Tawny Newsome (Ensign Beckett Mariner), Jack Quaid (Ensign Brad Boimler), Noël Wells (Ensign Tendi), and Eugene Cordero (Ensign Rutherford) spoke with Space.com for a reflective interaction to hear what they'll miss most about their five-year "Lower Decks" journey and portraying these four colorful characters.
"I will miss the positivity that Rutherford has in every moment," Cordero shared. "I think that ownership of the things you love and the things that you've worked really hard to get and kind of being a fanboy of his own work is something that I would like to keep taking forward after this is done.
"But I don't see this ending. I think it's open-ended for all of these characters and hopefully this is just a moment that we get to take a second to look at what's been awesome over the last five seasons and what we can bring moving forward."
Quaid admits that he's a very anxious person and Boimler reflects that inner anxiety.
"What I love about the character is that he's learned to manage that over the seasons and gain more confidence," he notes. "I'm gonna miss that. He holds a really special place in my heart. Like Eugene says, we're trying to think of this as more of a pause and less of a goodbye, because we just love playing these characters. We'll do it until we're dead, and that's a promise."
Newsome went one step further to swear that she'd do it even after she was dead!
"I will miss the way the show can surprise me and make me laugh out loud," she adds. "Even when I've read the script, I know the joke, maybe I even recorded the joke, but then when I see the animatic or I see the episode, something will still surprise me to the point where I'm bursting out laughing. I've done a lot of comedies in my life, and that does not always happen. You have to be surprised in order to laugh and this show consistently does it."
For Wells, she is extremely grateful that she got to explore Tendi on multiple levels.
"She starts out really sweet and chirpy but through the course of the show she has to take on ever more badass leadership capabilities," Wells recalls. "I liked finding all of those levels and being able to turn the knob really high and then really low. In terms of taking that into the world, just learning how to control my loudness and quietness. But also for a character and finding all those nuances and having those different facets is something I'm going to try and bring into anything I do, including any future 'Lower Decks' that may happen.
Need a quick "Lower Decks" refresher course? Warp on over to last April's "Star Trek: Lower Decks" Season 4 Blu-ray release or our complete "Star Trek" streaming guide.
Created by Mike McMahan and animated by the Emmy Award-winning Titmouse team, "Lower Decks" streams exclusively on Paramount+. It's produced by CBS' Eye Animation Productions, Secret Hideout, and Roddenberry Entertainment. Executive producers assigned to this final season are Alex Kurtzman, Mike McMahan, Aaron Baiers, Rod Roddenberry, and Trevor Roth.
