Did you all know season five was the end before you started recording?
JACK: It could go other places, so we’re trying not to think of this as “the end.” We’re trying to think of it as, hopefully, a pause. But we didn’t really know; it was a tough thing to hear, to have that news broken to us, because we just loved doing this show so much. And I know I’m speaking for all of us when I say we’d play these characters till we’re dead.
NOËL: They had to do rewrites. Once we found out, they had to make changes and we had to come back in to re-record. But I think [the farewell] is handled in a nice way.
EUGENE: Yeah, I think it’s leaving this season in a place where, like all Trek, you never know what’s going to happen next.
Tawny and Jack, you got to bring Mariner and Boimler to live-action on a crossover with fellow Trek series Strange New Worlds last season. Did that affect your sense of these cartoon characters?
TAWNY: It was great. I wanted to do it forever. That’s always the type of role that I want to play, and I don’t often in live-action get to play roles like her. As soon as we finished it, I was like, “This is going in the front of my goddamned [acting] reel so that I can actually get cast as this type of role.” Because she kind of just feels like me. I don’t want to play judges and DAs and stuff. I want to do more Mariners . . .
JACK: You want to stir the chaos . . .
TAWNY: I want to crash a truck into a JOANN Fabrics. I don’t want to fold my arms and be like, “Oh, court was hard today, honey.” So, any casting directors out there listening: Stop calling me in for the things you’re calling me in for. I want to be a nightmare, thank you!
JACK: I’m pretty sure I do a lot more mannerisms in the voiceover booth now [after the Strange New Worlds episode].
TAWNY: I see you do Boimler moves in real life, and it’s like, what imitated what? Was the art first or the man?
JACK: I don’t know anymore . . . I was just at “Halloween Horror Nights” at Universal Studios and there were so many Boimler screams; it just came out of me.
Other than comedy, what did Lower Decks add to the Star Trek world that wasn’t there in any of the other shows?
EUGENE: I think what it brought that is different is, “It’s OK to be starting out.” There’s a beginning for everybody. It’s not always the people at the top of their game that you should be watching. Watch the people that are working their way up to make something of themselves. You want that from the franchises that you love, so that you feel like you can be part of it . . . It’s OK to be young and stupid.
TAWNY: And it’s focused on the things that other Trek shows wouldn’t waste real estate on — smaller-stakes stories, little B-plots about character-driven moments. “Twin Twains” — two people trying to sort out an argument about a bonsai tree by dressing up as Mark Twain — is not something, verbatim, that would’ve been in TNG.
As I meet fans, so many of them are like me — in that we think about this world as though it’s real. I know dates from Trek history better than I know actual American history; I cannot tell you when World War Two started, but I know exactly when the Eugenics War was. So, what this has done is given those people who do think of it like a whole, real world little windows into other parts of it, to see the underbelly and the more casual, downbeaty side . . . Show us what the bathrooms look like on the Enterprise. Please! I just want to see the weird stuff.
Star Trek: Lower Decks airs Thursday, December 19, on CTV Sci-Fi; streaming on Paramount+
MEMORABLE ROLES:
Each of the core four voice actors on this cartoon also have flourishing live-action careers. Tawny Newsome was a series regular on Steve Carell vehicle Space Force; Eugene Cordero is an accomplished sketch comic trained by Upright Citizens Brigade who has appeared in The Good Place and now co-stars in Ted Danson’s A Man On the Inside; Noël Wells had a brief stint on SNL before landing in Netflix Emmy-magnet Master of None; and Jack Quaid is no doubt best known as Hughie on Prime’s hit superhero satire The Boys.
CURRENT GIG:
The Star Trek universe’s first-ever animated comedy reaches the end of its five-year mission this Thursday, as misfit Starfleet officers Mariner (Newsome), Rutherford (Cordero), Tendi (Wells) and Boimler (Quaid) bumble their way through one last intergalactic calamity.