The Big Picture
Star Trek: Lower Decks is currently airing its hilarious and heartfelt fourth season on Paramount+. The adult-oriented animated series follows a handful of low-ranking Starfleet officers on the California class starship the USS Cerritos which often tasked with missions like “second contact.” Ahead of Season 4’s sixth episode “Parth Ferengi’s Heart Place,” I sat down with series creator Mike McMahan to unpack the latest episodes and the upcoming season finale. During our conversation, McMahan also spoke about working with the Strange New Worlds team for “Those Old Scientists,” the crossover episode that saw Jack Quaid and Tawny Newsome bringing their 2D characters to live action.
Naturally, the two teams got on quite well. As McMahan said, “It was like looking in a mirror and being like, ‘Weird. You guys are big Star Trek nerds as much as I am and in the exact same way.'” The showrunner had high praise for the team behind the prequel series, saying:
“I love the Stranger Worlds guys. Henry had me do a little bit of punch-up on the first season whenever they had a bit of a silly episode, and that was so fun that then when they were talking about doing a crossover, they really pulled me in and involved me, not only in getting to do passes on the scripts and with the character voices. Getting to write Spock and Uhura lines was so cool. It was just really, really fun, and they didn’t have to involve us as much as they did. They let Tawny and Jack improvise on set, and they had a blast, and their cast was doing it, too, and it wasn’t usually like the vibe. We went from making important Star Trek to making fun Star Trek, and sometimes you can do both, you know what I mean? And I love that they can switch hats like that. It’s very TNG/TOS. Star Trek is great at doing that.”
Though the episode resides in Strange New Worlds it sounds like the crossover was exactly that with extensive collaboration between the two creative teams, McMahan said “they [even] let me be in the edit bay.” Though he couldn’t be on set due to COVID restrictions being in place during filming, McMahan said “Tawny was texting me photos from set the entire freaking time…I just couldn’t be on set, and I’m getting texts of her hugging [Jonathan] Frakes at dinner, and I’m like, “Ahh!” So it was really just a party.” He went on to explain the extent of the collaboration between the two teams, saying: “We were all so happy to be involved in it, and we’re all such fans. They were fans of our show, and obviously, we were fans of Strange New Worlds, so whether everybody else liked the episode, that was one for us. We just had a blast, and Kathryn Lyn, who was a writer on Lower Decks and wrote “wej Duj,” was one of the writers on this episode. The whole thing was so comfy. I think you can feel, when you see the episode at the end, that it wasn’t like trying to force something to happen.”
‘Strange New Worlds’ Took on the Spirit of ‘Lower Decks’ For the Crossover Episode
The episode naturally leaned into the lighthearted style of Lower Decks and while McMahan considered intensifying the stakes to make it fit more of Strange New Worlds’ standard style, however, “everybody with Strange New Worlds was like, ‘No, no, no. This is feeling good. We don’t need more. We’re having a blast. The stakes are that they are on the ship, it’s not the Orion stuff.” And they were right.” He went on to call the episode a real merging of the two series as they blended more seamlessly than previous Star Trek crossovers.
“The episode came out really charming, and everybody says it’s a love letter to Trek. You hear that thrown around all the time, but it really was a synergy between two different Trek shows loving Trek at the same time. So, it wasn’t like the Deep Space Nine episode, which I love, where they go back to “The Trouble With Tribbles,” “Trials and Tribble-ations.” That was Deep Space Nine loving TOS, but doing it on their own. I don’t know if there’s ever been a Trek where it’s like two shows are merging for one moment, almost like a freeway merge, and then we split apart again, and that was really special.”
“Those Old Scientists,” and the rest of Strange New Worlds Season 2, is now available to stream on Paramount+, and new episodes of Lower Decks Season 4 hit the platform every Thursday. Stay tuned at Collider for our full conversation with McMahan.
