Mike McMahan doesn’t want you to be sad. Although his beloved animated comedy series Star Trek: Lower Decks has taken its final bow with the Season 5 finale, “The New Next Generation,” McMahan can’t view the ending of the show as a funeral. “It’s not like the end of Enterprise,” McMahan says. “It’s not like there’s going to be zero Star Trek on TV from now on. There’s still a lot happening.”
Still, there’s a bittersweet aspect to the ending of Star Trek: Lower Decks. Because McMahan was best known at the time as a writer for Rick and Morty, there was a perception, four years ago, that Lower Decks would become the raunchy Rick and Morty of the Trek franchise.
Instead, the series proved itself to be a nonstop love letter to the ‘90s era of Star Trek, and one of the sweeter and more down-to-earth iterations of the franchise’s modern era. As it all comes to an end, Inverse caught up with McMahan to get a sense of how the ending of Lower Decks was crafted, how he’d feel about his characters appearing in other contexts, and whether he’ll return to Star Trek.
The underdog Star Trek show
When Mike McMahan first pitched Star Trek: Lower Decks to Alex Kurtzman back in 2018, he never really believed his idea would get off the ground. In 2023, he told Inverse, “I said to [producers] Aaron Baiers on the phone, ‘I’ll pitch a Star Trek show to Kurtzman, but you're not going to like what I have to say.’” The idea was fairly out-there and like nothing else the Trek franchise had done before, save for one episode of The Next Generation, the famous “Lower Decks” from which the McMahan’s show derived its name.
The basic notion of Lower Decks then, was always an experiment: What if there was a Star Trek show focused specifically on the officers who would be background characters in other shows? And, on top of that, what if the ship they served on was also perceived as less-than-cool within the rest of Starfleet?
“We really got away with something,” McMahan says wistfully. “We got to make a Star Trek and make it funny. We even had some Mugatos get it on in the middle. Who knew we could do it?”
Crafting the final season
Somewhat infamously, there was no real plan to end Lower Decks after just five seasons. Throughout the show’s run, the cast and crew were hopeful that the show could continue for a very long time. After all, unlike other Trek shows, there were no costumes and sets to worry about. That said, when the powers-that-be decided that Season 5 would be the end of the show, McMahan says he was given plenty of notice, at least enough to make the last season feel like a proper send-off.
“They told me it was going to be the last one before the seasons started. It was really before we started writing,” McMahan reveals. “So, I was like, ‘What do I want to do in a final season?’ How do I cut a fifth of Lower Decks episodes out and just do a big final season? So, I split the difference. That’s why the front half of the season feels like a classic Lower Decks season. And the back half feels like I accelerated some stuff.”
McMahan also never wanted to make Lower Decks too reliant on cameos from legacy characters, but for this season, McMahan decided to go all out. We got various Harry Kims (Garret Wang). We got Brent Spiner as (purple) Data. We got Garak (Andrew Robinson), Dr. Bashir (Alexander Siddig), T’Pol (Jolene Blalock), and Lily Sloane (Alfre Woodard).
“Usually I don’t care about that stuff,” McMahan says in reference to cameos. “But this time, I’m like, no, we’re just going to have a party. The fans deserve this. They’re going to love it.”
A future for the Lower Decks era?
Essentially, McMahan views the five seasons of Lower Decks as a triumph, rather than tragedy. What began as a thought experiment turned into its own world, full of characters so beloved, that they even crossed over into live-action in Strange New Worlds. In a sense, if Lower Decks characters were to appear in future versions of the Trek franchises, those would be legacy characters.
“I hadn’t thought of that,” McMahan says. “To me, right now at this one moment, like comics or books or games or whatever, that stuff is fine for the [Lower Decks] characters to appear in. If there was a movie or a TV show, it'd be hard for me at this one moment to hand them over just because I still have so many stories I want to tell, and I know them so deeply.”
Essentially, Mike McMahan already is missing his beloved Lower Deckers, calling them his “babies.” Although he did some uncredited script punch-ups on a few Strange New Worlds stories (including “Spock Amok”), McMahan doesn’t think it’s likely that he’ll continue writing in the Trek franchise now that Lower Decks has ended.
“I’m not sure there’s any plans to involve me in future Trek stuff,” he says. “I would love to have a serious conversation about movies and live-action shows, especially in the Lower Decks era. But for now, with all the new Trek coming out, I’m happy to be a fan.”
