Paramount has been cranking out new Star Trek shows like crazy over the past several years, including Discovery, Strange New Worlds, Prodigy and Picard. Just last week, Paramount+ started airing new episodes of Star Trek: Lower Decks, an animated comedy set during The Next Generation era. This is the show's fifth and final season, and according to showrunner Mike McMahan, it's the best one yet.
"Watching any Star Trek, you get a couple seasons in and you’re like, oh, it just clicked," McMahan told StarTrek.com. "They grew the beard. You know what I mean? This is the season where we grow the beard a little bit, and it feels like a nice culmination of everything we’ve been doing so far."
McMahan is very confident, going so far as to promise that the series finale "WILL make a lot of people tear up."
"[T]he finale is bonkers...[I]t’s a series ender and it’s a season ender, and it’s a love letter, and it’s a thank you to Star Trek and a thank you to fans and a thank you to Tawny and Jack and Noël and Eugene and everybody but it’s also...not the end, right?...The show is an era for these characters, and we got to experience an era from beginning to end.
...the way the show ends, while it does feel final, it also blooms into all these other opportunities that we could either make shows, or we could do comics or write books, or fans could just very fully imagine that these characters are still doing awesome Star Trek stuff, and it’s different. We end with them in a different place, but there’s no betrayals. Nobody’s gonna feel like we pulled the rug out from under them. You’re gonna be really happy, I think, at the end of it."
McMahan doesn't sound like he's done with these characters and this world, and the cast members seem right there with him. "We'll do this show until we're dust in the ground," Eugene Cordero (Sam Rutherford) told RadioTimes.com. And Tawny Newsome (Mariner) sounds like she has lots of gas left in the tank:
"Mike [McMahan] has re-written 5:10 [ the finale episode] so many times, and I feel like it gets longer and longer, and it’s great but you will feel the hanging on that he and we are all doing, like, 'We could keep making this! Let's keep making this.'"
As I mentioned up top, Paramount has put a lot of time and resources into developing Star Trek shows, so you'd figure if they really wanted it to continue, it would. But five seasons is a long time for any TV show to be around, especially these days, so we can't say that Lower Decks is being cut short. Better it go out at the top of its game than hang around until it gets stale.
LeVar Burton is still holding out hope for Star Trek: Legacy
As for the actual season ahead, McMahan promises some appearances by talent from Star Trek's long history. "We did get some dream legacy cast in this season, but you’re gonna have to wait and see," he said. "There’s a bit of a season-long thread that allowed us to, without time travel, have people that are harder to get into this this specific time period of the show. So we got to work with some really cool people. I was actually really surprised that we could get who we got."
For all we know, that legacy talent could include LeVar Burton, who played Geordi La Forge on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Burton returned to that role for the third and final season of Star Trek: Picard, as did several cast members from The Next Generation. Speaking to TV Line, Burton sounds like he has more in the tank as well. In particular, he wants the legacy cast members to reunite for a long-theorized show called Star Trek: Legacy:
"[T]he audience, two years on, seem to be just as interested in the idea of Legacy as when Picard was just airing. I’m not close to the brain trust over there, but I see that they are all in on Starfleet Academy. And in this age of cutting back and retrenching in the entertainment space, I imagine they’re going to focus on that until they feel like they might be able to focus on something else. And I would think that given the opportunity and the resources, that they would want to do this. It makes so much sense… It makes so much sense."
Starfleet Academy is yet another new Star Trek show, this one coming out sometime over the next couple of years. With how much Paramount seems to love making Star Trek series, I wouldn't be surprised if we saw both Legacy and some kind of offshoot of Lower Decks sometime over the next few years. In the meantime, new episodes of Star Trek: Lower Decks drop Thursdays on Paramount+.
To stay up to date on everything fantasy, science fiction, and WiC, follow our all-encompassing Facebook page and Twitter account, sign up for our exclusive newsletter and check out our YouTube channel.