‘Star Trek: Lower Decks’ Boss Mike McMahan Teases What to Expect in Season 2

Are you ready to boldly go where Star Trek has gone before, again? We certainly hope so, because today marks the premiere of the second season of Paramount+’s animated comedy Star Trek: Lower Decks. And after figuring out the balance of tones in Season 1 — sometimes a comedy show, sometimes an earnest Star Trek series — Lower Decks Season 2 is off to the races. Part of that, for show creator Mike McMahan, comes with the flexibility.

“You can have all of these plans, but when you find something that’s making you laugh, that’s unexpected,” McMahan told Decider, “that’s worth more than any plan you could be making.”

Picking up from the Season 1 finale, in the season premiere, titled “Strange Energies,” the Lower Decks crew is dealing with the hasty exit of Ensign Boimler (Jack Quaid), who is working with Riker (Jonathan Frakes) on the Titan, having left his friends abruptly behind. Dealing with it worse than anyone, of course, is the hot-headed Mariner (Tawny Newsome), though fellow Ensigns Tendi (Noël Wells) and Rutherford (Eugene Cordero) are also grappling in their own ways.

To find out more about what to expect from Season 2 of the series, as well as some teases for the already greenlit Season 3, read on.

Decider: It really feels like Season 2 has hit its rhythm. Is that something you felt in the writers room, as well?

Mike McMahan: It was something we felt when we started seeing the color cuts come in. Because when you’re writing it, you’re not hearing all the voice acting coming together, you’re not seeing the new art, the new look of the ship. You know, you go back and watch The Simpsons, each season the art really makes this progressive leap forward in confidence, but also execution and understanding of what you’re doing. And to do it in 10 episodes, to the next 10… It feels like our cast really gets their characters, that we’re really writing up to them. Especially when the episodes get edited, and our editor, Andy, does such an amazing job, before they’re edited, you’re like, “is it going to work?” And then everything is fixed and it’s all exactly right and you’re like, “Oh yeah, it does. This is great. I’m really liking it.”

Well one of the things that helps at least from a viewer’s perspective, I think, and this is kind of a natural thing with comedy, is you very slowly build up the background characters and the people that are just popping up for one-off jokes. Does that help as well, in terms of fleshing out the world?

Oh, absolutely. You can have all of these plans, but when you find something that’s making you laugh, that’s unexpected, that’s worth more than any plan you could be making. There was this moment in the first season where Tawny [Newsome] was supposed to have Mariner running through a hallway saying, “Get out of my way! Get out of my way!” And she just improvised this line of “Get out of my way, Jennifer!” The way she said it was so funny. And then the artists put in this character who had been a background character in the bar, it’s this Andorian, and suddenly she became Jennifer the Andorian. It just made me be like, okay, I want to know more about Jennifer the Andorian, and I want to know why Mariner hates her. So you’ll see second season, we do delve into that a bit more, and that never would have happened if we weren’t geeking out over our own show.

Let’s check in on the status of the main characters as we enter Season 2, starting with Boimler, who is over on the Titan. What was it like plotting those adventures out in particular, because they’re so different from what’s going on in the Cerritos?

It’s partially everybody’s greatest fear that they achieve their dreams, and then realize they’re immediately in over their head. Right? And Boimler was a heel at the end of Season 1. Coming into Season 2, we didn’t want to make him this person who is being rewarded for how he treated the other characters on our show. You also didn’t want to punish him. It had to be this kind of in-between, this “be careful what you wish for.” So you’re seeing The Titan, that’s doing everything you would want The Titan to do. It’s doing these big, amazing battles and it’s doing these big missions. The Titan is not this Titan-esque gigantic vehicle, it’s this tactical, awesome, exploratory vessel. And that, for me, meant everything is higher stakes and everything is happening faster. Those types of Star Treks, I always think of them as the movie Star Treks, that’s not what Boimler represents usually in the show.

He’s used to playing his little plastic fiddle in the bar during talent night, doing episodic, TNG era kind of stuff. So you’re coming in, you’re seeing him in these giant, high stakes cinematic situations. It’s almost like he got dropped into a level three class and he missed levels one and two in a way. Where he’s constantly feeling like he’s playing catch up, He’s constantly trying to keep it together, and he is surrounded by officers that are all attitudinally different from him and all seem a little bit more keyed in, and are physically all a little bit more of a presence. You’re almost seeing him try to keep his head above water when we come back.

Moving over to Mariner, she had a detente with her mom by the end of Season 1. Particularly for her, how do you progress a character who refuses to grow and change?

The way we’ve been trying to do it is you see them behaving in a way that ultimately doesn’t make them happier. And eventually, you get to these moments, these kind of rock bottom moments where you have to be the one who’s going to decide to let change come into your life. We saw that a couple of times in Season 1, both of Mariner and her mom, and you’re going to see more of that Season 2. Mariner is used to people being mad at her, and abandoning her, and what kind of character does that create? You know, it doesn’t make her worse at Starfleet stuff, but it does maybe make her not as happy, and a friend. You’re going to see her delving into that because it’s not exploring strange new worlds, it’s second contact. It’s going back to a strange known world. Right. But a lot of the storytelling, and emotional storytelling, is about investigating the strange new ways that you can find happiness, or calmness, or a path in your life that you like.

This is maybe as a similar sort of question, but Rutherford got his memory partially wiped at the end of Season 1, which actually rebooted him somewhat. Are we going to see him grow back to the same point he was at the end of Season 1, or perhaps head somewhere different emotionally?

Rutherford has got a longer arc than Season 1 and Season 2. What we’re going to be seeing is how this affected his and Tendi’s relationship. Also, I don’t want to give away too much about the first half of the season, but you’ll see that a lot of these characters internalize stuff because they’re Starfleet. They’re not supposed to feel down about stuff, right? They’re supposed to be living up to this ideal and that will boil over sometimes. Even Rutherford, who is the chillest, most okey-dokey, friendly guy that, when Eugene [Cordero] is performing him, has just got this inherent gentle, aspirational, technological field to him. You’ll see that even halfway through this season, things will come out that Rutherford is grappling with that he hasn’t expressed to anybody; because he’s great at diagnosing stuff with the Warp Core, but he’s not really great at expressing when stuff is bugging him.

Moving over to Tendi then, she’s so wonderfully unhinged at times over the course of the first season, what potentially can we expect from her? Creating more dogs?

Originally I was so excited to have an Orion on the show because I think the monoculture of Orion is something that is worth building out and examining. I would love to take it a step further and do an entire Star Trek show on a monocultural planet, like Andoria or on Orion, and actually really get to play out and see what different alien creatures are on this planet. We take something that used to be a monoculture, and you expand it and we find out that was a small view of this huge population. For Tendi, you’re going to see that a little bit across the season, but it’s really going to start coming in Season 3: how does Tendi define herself? How does Tendi grapple with the understanding of Orions? And who does she want to be? Who does she want to portray? And how much of her heritage does she have to dispose of to be able to get that? And is that something that she actually likes? You’ll start seeing more of that this season.

Before I let you go, I know I asked you this the last time we talked, but any movement on the live action version of Lower Decks? I’m just going to keep pushing for it as long as I can.

You know, it’s weird. I keep telling CBS to give me more Trek shows and they keep pointing out I have a Trek show. But hey, I’m down for it too. Let’s do eight seasons of Lower Decks. Let’s do a couple of movies. Let’s do a live action spin-off. Let’s do a Ransom spin-off. I’m down there for it. I’m on your side. Give me more Star Trek shows!

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

New episodes of Star Trek: Lower Decks premiere on Paramount+ on Thursdays.

Where to watch Star Trek: Lower Decks