Warning! The following contains spoilers for the Star Trek: Lower Decks finale, "The New Next Generation." Stream it with a Paramount+ subscription and read at your own risk!
We've officially said goodbye to another Star Trek series exiting the 2024 TV schedule, but there are still fans hoping we'll see Lower Decks pop back up on the upcoming Trek slate in the future. I count myself as one of those, especially after the animated series added such a game-changing element to the franchise, opening up the floodgates for many cool adventures down the road. Starfleet now has a stable portal to the multiverse, and I had to ask creator Mike McMahan how hard that was to clear.
While Trek has delivered some WTF moments in TNG and other shows, it surprisingly hasn't spent much time exploring the prospect of the multiverse. There's the Mirror Universe, the parallel universe and, of course, te alternative timelines that make for the Kelvin universe. All that said, Lower Decks exploded the concept of the multiverse and confirmed a seemingly endless amount of realities for Starfleet to explore with the new portal.
With such a radical change added to the Prime universe's canon, I asked Mike McMahan if it was a struggle getting it cleared, he confirmed as much, saying:
It was a little bit... Star Trek has two types of multidimensionality, right? You've got the episode parallels from TNG, and then you've got the Mirror Universe stuff. I've always thought the Mirror Universe stuff isn't really my cup of tea, but it's so Star Trek. I love the idea. That's where the Harry Kim line came from where he's like, ‘There's more than two universes?!’ So I think that's very funny...I worked for four seasons on Rick and Morty talking about the multiverse. I put a lot of thought into what about the multiverse can become as interesting as warp travel, right? And what is Star Trek really about? And, and Star Trek isn't about meeting, talking goo or whatever. I mean, it is, but it's also about learning about the possibilities of life itself, right? So it's not that big of a leap to think of like alternate dimension, Lily Sloane traveling the multiverse, learning about the possibilities of humanity and having a map of the multiverse quadrant is really exciting to me.
As someone who considers Star Trek: First Contact one of the best Trek movies ever made, I absolutely loved that Lily Sloane reference. I also adore that Mike McMahan mentioned his time as head writer of Rick and Morty, which tackles multiversal storytelling as well as any franchise out there. If Alex Kurtzman and crew are looking for someone to head up a series diving into Trek's multiverse mishaps, he's the guy to do it. Assuming they aren't still mad about his cheeky joke Discovery's Klingons, I think he'd nail that job.
McMahan continued to talk about pitching the idea of a multiversal threat in Star Trek and what finally sold the idea to the decision-makers above him. In doing so, he dropped another big name in shouting out Lower Decks voice actor Jerry O'Connell, who memorably had another multiverse sci-fi fave years before he joined Trek. As the showrunner put it:
You're not trying to get home like Jerry [O’Connell] did in Sliders, you're trying to learn about humanity and and grow from it. Once I realized that was the way I could do it and that I could mislead that there was a bad guy ripping open the multiverse all season, and then you find out, no, it's just another version of Starfleet that meant well. That felt so Star Trek to me that I really didn't get any pushback once the powers that be read that stuff.
While it's still a bummer that Star Trek: Lower Decks won't return anywhere on the 2025 TV schedule, there is an upside in that the portal for exploring the multiverse now exists in the Prime timeline. This would mean that assuming a series takes place after Lower Decks is set, it's fair game for this portal to be used by other Star Trek shows. I hope it is utilized by future creatives and not just something the franchise leaves drifting in space like the good Borgs from Picard Season 2.
Right now, the odds of Star Trek: Lower Decks returning to television feels very slim. That said, this fanbase is used to improbable comebacks of their beloved shows, and after Netflix saved Prodigy, I'd say the series may find a home yet again. We'll just have to cross our fingers and maybe write some letters to Paramount to see it happen, but I'm down for the cause if it means adventures in the multiverse.
Anyone who missed the finale or any of Star Trek: Lower Decks can check it out on Paramount+ right now. There are plenty of great episodes to watch or revisit if you've seen the series before, so don't delay in streaming it today.
