Star Trek: Lower Decks


Star Trek: Lower Decks is an American adult animated science fiction television series created by Mike McMahan for the streaming service CBS All Access. It is the ninth Star Trek series and debuted in 2020 as part of executive producer Alex Kurtzman's expanded Star Trek Universe. The franchise's first animated series since Star Trek: The Animated Series concluded in 1974, and also its first comedy, Lower Decks follows the low-ranking support crew of the starship Cerritos in the 24th century.
Tawny Newsome, Jack Quaid, Noël Wells, and Eugene Cordero voice the lower decks crew members of the Cerritos, with Dawnn Lewis, Jerry O'Connell, Fred Tatasciore, and Gillian Vigman providing voices for the ship's senior officers. Work on an animated Star Trek series began in June 2018. McMahan joined as creator and showrunner by that October, when Lower Decks was ordered for two seasons by All Access. The series is produced by CBS Eye Animation Productions in association with Secret Hideout, Important Science, Roddenberry Entertainment, and animation studio Titmouse. The latter began work by February 2019, and the main cast was announced that July. Production on the first two seasons shifted to taking place remotely in March 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The series features many connections and references to past Star Trek series.
Star Trek: Lower Decks premiered on CBS All Access on August 6, 2020, and its 10-episode first season was released weekly through October 2020. The second season was released on Paramount+ from August to October 2021, a third season was released from August to October 2022, a fourth season was released from September to November 2023, and a fifth and final season was released from October to December 2024. The series has received positive reviews and several accolades, including three Primetime Creative Arts Emmy Award nominations and a Hugo Award.

Premise

Star Trek: Lower Decks is set in the late 24th century in the Star Trek universe, where Earth is part of the multi-species United Federation of Planets. The Federation's military and exploration division, Starfleet, operates a fleet of starships that travel the galaxy establishing contact with alien races; Lower Decks focuses on one of Starfleet's least important starships, the USS Cerritos. Unlike previous Star Trek series, whose principal characters are typically starship captains and other senior officers, Lower Decks focuses on the missions and adventures of the "lower deckers", low-ranking officers with menial jobs, while the captain and other senior staff appear as supporting characters.

Episodes

Season 1 (2020)

Season 2 (2021)

Season 3 (2022)

Season 4 (2023)

Season 5 (2024)

Cast and characters

  • Tawny Newsome as Beckett Mariner:
    A human ensign aboard the USS Cerritos and the daughter of Captain Freeman. Newsome described Mariner as an irreverent rule-breaker who has been demoted several times, though she is actually "very good at all things Starfleet". She is promoted to lieutenant in the fourth season. The character is named after showrunner Mike McMahan's sister, Beckett Mariner McMahan.
  • Jack Quaid as Brad Boimler:
    A human ensign aboard the Cerritos, Boimler is a stickler for the rules and will need to learn how to improvise if he is to become a captain one day. He is promoted to lieutenant in the fourth season. Quaid said the character would "nail the written portion of the driving test with flying colors but once it actually got to him being in the car, it would be a complete and total disaster."
  • Noël Wells as D'Vana Tendi:
    An Orion ensign in the medical bay aboard the Cerritos, Tendi is a big fan of Starfleet, and is thrilled to be on a starship. She is new to the Cerritos at the start of the series, and helps introduce the audience to the setting and characters. McMahan said he would act like Tendi if he ever got to work on a starship. She is promoted to lieutenant in the fourth season.
  • Eugene Cordero as Sam Rutherford:
    A human ensign aboard the Cerritos, Rutherford is adjusting to a new cyborg implant. McMahan compared Rutherford to the Star Trek: The Next Generation character Geordi La Forge, saying they are both "amazing at engineering stuff" but Rutherford does not always solve the problem like Geordi because he is still learning. He is promoted to lieutenant in the fourth season.
  • Dawnn Lewis as Carol Freeman:
    The human captain of the Cerritos and Mariner's mother. McMahan described her as a capable Starfleet captain whose starship is not very important. Freeman initially does not want Mariner to be on the Cerritos and is looking for a reason to have her transferred to another ship, but over the course of the series the pair grow closer as they discover things that they have in common.
  • Jerry O'Connell as Jack Ransom:
    The human first officer of the Cerritos whom McMahan compared to Next Generations William Riker, if he was on speed and had less shame.
  • Fred Tatasciore as Shaxs:
    A Bajoran tactical officer aboard the Cerritos. Shaxs dies sacrificing himself for Rutherford at the end of the first season, but he returns to life in the second season in a storyline that plays on the numerous times and ways that characters have been resurrected in previous Star Trek series.
  • Gillian Vigman as T'Ana:
    A Caitian doctor and head of medical aboard the Cerritos. McMahan described her as a "good doctor, but she's an unpleasant cat". Including a Caitian in the series is a reference to Star Trek: The Animated Series which also features a member of that species, M'Ress.

    Production

Development

In June 2018, after becoming sole showrunner of the series Star Trek: Discovery, Alex Kurtzman signed a five-year overall deal with CBS Television Studios to expand the Star Trek franchise beyond Discovery to several new series, miniseries, and animated series. Aaron Baiers of Kurtzman's production company Secret Hideout brought Mike McMahan—the head writer of popular animated comedy Rick and Morty—to a general meeting about animation in Star Trek. Baiers and McMahan had been television assistants together when McMahan was running the Twitter fan account @TNG_S8, suggesting stories for a theoretical eighth season of Star Trek: The Next Generation. McMahan was asked what his dream Star Trek series would be, and pitched a series following "the people who put the yellow cartridge in the food replicator so a banana can come out the other end".
File:Mike McMahan, Heather Kadin & Alex Kurtzman.jpg|thumb|right| Creator and showrunner Mike McMahan promoting Lower Decks at the 2019 San Diego Comic-Con with executive producers Heather Kadin and Alex Kurtzman
After McMahan won over executives with his initial pitch, Secret Hideout moved forward with the series. It was marketed to different platforms and networks before being picked up by CBS All Access, the streaming service that was releasing Discovery, who officially ordered two seasons on October 25, 2018. Titled Star Trek: Lower Decks, it was the service's first original animated series and the first animated Star Trek series since the 1973–74 series Star Trek: The Animated Series. McMahan was set to create, write, and executive produce alongside Kurtzman, Secret Hideout's Heather Kadin, Rod Roddenberry and Trevor Roth of Roddenberry Entertainment, and veteran animation executive-turned-producer Katie Krentz of the newly formed CBS Eye Animation Productions. In January 2019, Kurtzman said the series would not be "Rick and Morty in the world of Star Trek" and would have its own tone, but would "skew slightly more adult". In July, McMahan said the first season consisted of 10 episodes and would be released in 2020.
By late March 2020, work on the series was taking place remotely due to the COVID-19 pandemic forcing staff to work from home. In May, McMahan said animation was "uniquely suited for this moment" since the series' animators could continue work on the series from home. In July, All Access scheduled the series to premiere in August 2020. The streaming service was rebranded Paramount+ in 2021. A third season was ordered in April ahead of the second-season premiere that August. The third season was confirmed for a late-2022 release when a fourth season was ordered in January 2022, and the fourth season was confirmed for a mid-2023 release when a fifth season was ordered in March 2023. That October, McMahan said he wanted to keep making the series but further seasons beyond the fifth were not guaranteed, particularly after Paramount+ cancelled fellow animated series Star Trek: Prodigy and confirmed the final seasons of Discovery and Star Trek: Picard. He was open to continuing the series in other media, including films, comics, books, and video games. In April 2024, Paramount confirmed that the fifth season would be the last for the series. McMahan and Kurtzman expressed their hope that the characters' stories would continue beyond the end of the series.

Writing

The series begins in 2380, one year after the events of the film Star Trek: Nemesis, and focuses on the support crew of a starship rather than the main bridge crew like previous Star Trek series did. McMahan set the series shortly after Nemesis, which was the last Star Trek film in the era of The Next Generation, due to his love of The Next Generation. The series is named after the Next Generation episode "Lower Decks", which also focuses on the lives of lower-ranking starship personnel and which McMahan said was his favorite episode of any Star Trek series; the episode was the first thing McMahan showed the Lower Decks writers' room when they started work on the series. McMahan was inspired by the social side-stories in episodes of The Next Generation, and Kurtzman explained that the "A story" of a typical Star Trek episode would be taking place in the background of each Lower Decks episode, so "huge, crazy, crazy shit is going on in the background and that's super peripheral to the story that you're actually focusing on". Kurtzman felt this made the series a unique addition to the franchise. Starting in late 2019, astrophysicist Erin Macdonald joined the Star Trek franchise as a science advisor. Macdonald said each series was on a "spectrum of science to fiction" and the Lower Decks writers approached science from the perspective of being able to "get away with a lot more" than the live-action series, so her role was mostly to fix dialogue to ensure the correct terms were used rather than strive for complete scientific accuracy.
The main setting of the series is the starship USS Cerritos, a "California-class" ship. This ship class, created for Lower Decks, is a class of support starships that work with larger starships like those seen previously in the franchise, but are not "important enough" to have appeared on screen before. McMahan described the mission of the Cerritos as "Second Contact": after Starfleet has made first contact with a new alien civilization and invited it to join the Federation, the crew of support ships like the Cerritos arrive to find "all the good places to eat the communications stuff". McMahan wanted California-class ships to be named after Californian cities, and chose the city of Cerritos because he otherwise only knew it for local Cerritos Auto Square car dealership advertisements. He wanted to give the city "one more thing other than just being the home of the Auto Square".
McMahan did not want the humor to be "punching down on Trek" and focused on telling Star Trek stories where the characters happen to be funny. Writers from different comedic backgrounds and with different levels of Star Trek interest were hired. Kurtzman described Lower Decks as a love letter to Star Trek, and it is filled with many references to other Star Trek series. McMahan said these were there to "create a rich, vibrant, fun expression of the world of Star Trek in that era" rather than just be Easter eggs for fans to pick through. It was important to the team that these not distract from the emotional storytelling and also fit within established canon, with Star Trek author David Mack consulting on the series to ensure that it fit into the franchise. McMahan hoped that references to The Animated Series specifically would honor it as the franchise's first animated series. The characters often use the real-world titles of past Star Trek episodes when referencing those events, with McMahan explaining that the personal logs of famous characters are given similar in-universe titles to the episodes they are from. The franchise established that "Star Trek characters watch Star Trek" in the series finale of Star Trek: Enterprise, where the events of an earlier mission are recreated with a hologram, and McMahan felt many events from past series would be common knowledge within Starfleet. Acknowledging this allowed the main characters to be "geeks for Star Trek", which let Lower Decks be a "Rosetta Stone" connecting all previous Star Trek projects.