Star Trek: Lower Decks creator Mike McMahan has hinted at some Star Trek: Next Generation cameos on the animated show.
The next Star Trek series to debut on the CBS All-Access service will end up being the animated comedy Star Trek: Lower Decks. The animated series will feature a crew of characters set in the lower decks of a Star Fleet vessel. Obviously, it’s a series about whacky hijinks, and big, random adventures.
It will be in the vein of many modern cartoons today. Like many modern cartoons, this isn’t aimed at children. Not at all. While it won’t be the hard-hitting, R-rated, raunchy affair of something you’d see on Adult Swim, the series will be more nuanced while maintaining a PG-13 sensibility.
Series creator Mike McMahan spoke to Entertainment Weekly and talked about that very idea.
"It’s definitely not a kids show, but only because it’s a little bit more complex than a kid show would be."
When talking about what kind of show he wants Lower Decks to be, McMahan described it as the “….show about the guy who brings the yellow cartridge to the back of the food replicator so that a banana comes out the front.’
The comparisons to a series like Rick and Morty can’t be denied, and that’s something that McMahan also addresses.
"The fun of Rick and Morty is that it breaks down sci-fi tropes and is told through Rick Sanchez, who has a very specific, chaotic, nihilistic lens. Lower Decks treats mythological sci-fi things just as important as a regular Trek show, while finding new stories to tell — just from a different angle. It’s not disassembling mythological sci-fi things. It’s treating them as important for everybody on the starship as it would be in a regular star Trek show."
What else do we know about Lower Decks? We know it’ll take play during the Next Generation years, despite having radically different attire than crews did at the time. So does that mean that stars of the Next Generation series will guest star on the series? McMahan can’t say, for obvious reasons.
"There are a lot of recognizable characters in the galaxy at that point. Next Gen is my favorite era. And as a huge Trek fan, I would definitely want to try to use some of them so that I could not only build out the world, but also work with some of my heroes. But I can’t get more specific than that. You’ll have to wait and see."
As of right now, that’s all we know about the show. There’s no confirmed release date, just that it’ll be available sometime in 2020. The series stars Tawny Newsome, Jack Quaid, Noel Wells, Eugene Cordero, Dawnn Lewis, Jerry O’Connell, Fred Tatasciore, and Gillian Vigman.