Episode 131 Transcript

Podcast: Our Opinions Are Correct

Episode: 131: The State of Star Trek, with Mike McMahan

Transcription by Keffy

Charlie Jane: [00:00:00] Annalee, when did you first become a Star Trek fan? 

Annalee: [00:00:04] Well, it happened to me when I was a graduate student because I grew up without a TV. My parents were both English teachers and I think they just felt like television was kind of a distraction, and so, I'd really never been exposed to Star Trek as a TV show. And then I had a friend in grad school who was like, come over to my house and watch Star Trek and get stoned, and it was the third season of Next Generation and it was like, where has this been all my life? This is an amazing show. I love the characters. I love watching them puzzle out ethical problems while also having weird sexual encounters with aliens and robots.

[00:00:45] And yeah, so I was, I was hooked and it actually inspired me to buy my very first television set back in the ‘90s. So, Star Trek had a pretty big impact on my consumer electronics consumption. 

Charlie Jane: [00:00:59] I feel like I also bought my first television set in part so that I could catch up on TNG when it was like they were showing it in reruns. I don't know. 

[00:01:08] For me I definitely watched the original series, but it was in syndication. It was on all the time when I was a little kid. And I remember I got the action figures and I had a little utility belt with a phaser and a tricorder and a communicator and stuff.

Annalee: [00:01:22] Really? Aw, that’s so cute.

Charlie Jane: [00:01:23] Yeah, I feel like there's photos around somewhere of me wearing a Starfleet uniform as like a little, little kid. My heart belonged to Doctor Who, but I definitely had a deep love of Star Trek, as well. 

[00:01:37] And I feel like the thing I liked when I was a little kid was, original Star Trek is so dramatic. It’s a show that just bombards you with drama and I feel like as a little kid there was a lot of drama that I couldn't kind of process in my own life. And so the fact that there was the thundering music and everybody scowling at each other and being like, “Jim, you have to do something. Jim!” And the pro wrestling fight scenes.

Annalee: [00:02:06] Yeah. Like literally the—

Charlie Jane: [00:02:07] The fight scenes that literally look like pro wrestling, yeah. 

Annalee: [00:02:11] Yeah. And I was gonna say, this is the show that introduced us to the classic dun dun, dun kind of fight scene music.

Charlie Jane: [00:02:17] Yeah, no, it's like, I could still hum that fight scene music from beginning to end. It’s pretty iconic.

[00:02:26] And then, you and I both loved Star Trek: The Motion Picture from 1979, right? 

Annalee: [00:02:28] Yeah, so that was my first exposure to Star Trek was when I was a really little kid and I watched Star Trek: The Motion Picture. So you have to imagine this little kid who doesn't know anything about the Star Trek universe, and this is the first thing that I experience, and it's all about a giant spaceship that's sentient. And again, spoilers, for a really old movie. It was just, it blew my mind, I think, because it was the first time I had seen science fiction that was just really weird. It wasn't just pew, pew, pew… I of course had loved Star Wars, but that's a whole different vibe. There's no moment in Star Wars where they're like, “What is the nature of consciousness?” And so I was just totally sold and it did take me a minute to figure out that Star Trek was also a TV show. I was like, it's a movie thing. And so that is how I experienced it, yeah. 

Charlie Jane: [00:02:28] Yeah, I mean, I just remember the grandeur of that motion picture. I mean, and like how, how imposing it was and then I saw it with like a group of like older teenagers who like, every time Spock says the word orifice, they would like snort and giggle and I'd be like, what's so funny about the word orifice? And Spock says that word like a hundred times in that movie. 

Annalee: [00:03:44] Totally. 

Charlie Jane: [00:03:45] But you know, original Star Trek, I mean, it felt like a cop show or a war drama or a parable about the Cold War. It didn't, especially watching it as a little kid, it didn't feel like an optimistic show or a show that was about a better future because it was just like, every episode we're running into more problems and like there's always Star Fleet captains who are doing terrible things. But there are these moments in the original series too, where they discuss the nature of consciousness and ethics and like what it means to be civilized. And Kirk often says things like:

Kirk from OST: [00:04:15] We can admit that we're killers, but we're not going to kill today. That's all it takes, knowing that we're not going to kill today.

Charlie Jane: [00:04:23] And I feel like after the original series went off the air, then Gene Roddenberry spends a lot of the ‘70s and ‘80s going to Star Trek conventions and talking to fans about his ideas for a kinder future. And it becomes like the mythology of Gene's vision of the future. It kind of develops throughout the ‘70s and ‘80s, and then you finally see that vision come more fully to the screen in The Next Generation where empathy and thoughtfulness are kind of a big deal. 

[00:04:49] You're listening to Our Opinions are Correct, a show about the meaning of science fiction and futurism and science. I'm Charlie Jane Anders.

Annalee: [00:04:56] And I’m Annalee Newitz. Our very first episode of this podcast was about Star Trek, partly because we're just so fascinated with all of the many faces of the show, and now it's five years later and it's time to take stock of where Star Trek is now. After we've had three live action shows and two animated shows.

Charlie Jane: [00:05:20] We could not have possibly imagined where we would be now. And to help us imagine the future of Star Trek from where we sit now, I talked to Mike McMahan, the creator of Star Trek: Lower Decks, and we should warn you now, there are going to be vague spoilers for all of the Star Trek that has appeared so far, all of it.

Annalee: [00:05:38] Also on our mini episode next week we'll be talking about Star Trek characters who deserve their own spinoff shows because, you know what, Jean Luke Picard is not the only fruit. I mean, he's not the only character who should be headlining a TV show.

Charlie Jane: [00:05:53] And by the way, did you know that this podcast is entirely independent and it's funded by you, our listeners, through Patreon? That's right. And if you become a patron, you're helping to keep this podcast going. You're giving us resources and encouragement and love and support, and you get mini episodes after every single episode.

[00:06:13] Plus you get access to our Discord channel where we just hang out all the time. Think about it. All of that could be yours for just a few bucks a month. And anything you give us goes right back into making our opinions even more correct. Find us at patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect. Okay, let's beam on up.

[00:06:33] [OOAC theme plays. Science fictiony synth noises over an energetic, jazzy drum line.]

Annalee: [00:07:06] Charlie Jane, you have watched all three seasons of Star Trek: Picard, which means you have boldly gone where I did not even dare to go because I peaced out after the middle of season two. So, what do you make of it? 

Charlie Jane: [00:07:20] You know, I have a real soft spot for Star Trek: Picard. It's definitely a show that went to a lot of different places, and Star Trek had never done a show focusing on a single individual and instead of picking someone who was an outsider or a rebel, someone whose individual personal perspective could stand in opposition to the Federation and Star Fleet, they chose arguably the biggest authority figure in the entire franchise. And in fact, Picard was always an ensemble show throughout its entire run. 

[00:07:51] The thing that I keep thinking about after watching season three is that. Jean Picard's life is kind of a tragedy. Like the arc of his life is tragic. He becomes a Star Fleet captain right at the moment where the Federation is at its most liberal and enlightened, the start of the TNG era. And it's like we've finally started to live up to the values that we've been professing all along.

[00:08:10] And then he lives through all the mistakes and atrocities and disasters of the Dominion War, which kind of tarnish the legacy of Star Fleet a little bit. And then as an old man, he gets to see the Federation kind of fully compromised, first by anti-android bigotry and the abandonment of the Romulans, and then by changeling infiltration.

[00:08:30] And so when you look at it as a whole, Jean Luc Picard’s life is a tragedy. 

Picard Clip: [00:08:35] Why did you really quit Star Fleet? 

Because it was no longer Star Fleet. 

I'm sorry?

Because it was no longer Star Fleet!

Annalee: [00:08:46] Yeah, that is. So interesting because generally Star Trek has characters that are obsessed with tragedies like say King Lear or Hamlet or Moby Dick.

[00:09:00] But they don't usually act out that tragic arc. And I think Discovery has some of that same vibe. You know, it started off telling a story about Star Fleet being compromised, much like we see in Picard, in that first season where people who we think are trustworthy turn out to be fully dark side. 

[00:09:21] And this comes after Deep Space Nine. And many of the movies hinted at this dark side as well, where we kind of see the colonial underbelly of the Federation's mission, which is supposed to be just reaching out to other life forms and kind of discovering things. But, in fact, there's also this whole bureaucratic infrastructure that's about how to occupy a place and how to help one regime change hands to another regime which is what we see in Deep Space Nine.

[00:09:49] And I feel like at this point, it feels like we're constantly just having our faces rubbed in this dark underbelly part of the Federation. And you know what? I mean that's kind of a mixed metaphor, but that is how it smells. Okay. I'm being rubbed in a dark underbelly and it's just getting a little stinky.

[00:10:08] And now they're making a TV movie about Section 31, which is basically space CIA. It's the amoral black ops division of Star Fleet. And it's exciting because Michelle Yeoh will be in it. But it's also just gonna feel like even more of this kind of face rubbing in the tarnished part of the Federation.

Charlie Jane: [00:10:29] Yeah, and it's interesting. To some extent, the Federation always felt like a stand in for the United States, like in the original series, like I mentioned before, it's a Cold War allegory with the Federation being the United States—

Annalee: [00:10:41] Hundred percent.

Charlie Jane: [00:10:41] And like the Klingons are the Soviet Union. In TNG it definitely feels like the Clinton-era United States. And so, you know, it makes sense that different eras of US politics see the Federation differently. But it's also interesting to think about how now we have televised Star Trek that [spans?] from the 22nd century, in the show Enterprise, all the way up to the 32nd century in Discovery, which means there's now over a thousand years of Federation history.

[00:11:10] And you know, when you think about it as that long of a time scale, like no Earth government, no governing entity on Earth has lasted a thousand years. It kind of feels like, okay, there's been some bad patches here and there, but it's actually kind of miraculous that anything like Star Fleet or the Federation still exists for that length of time.

[00:11:26] And that's one reason why I actually really love Discovery. It starts out showing us a ruthless, kind of amoral, destructive, version of Star Fleet in its first season, and then eventually it jumps forward in time and shows us a future where Star Fleet has been through some really bad times, but it's now rebuilding. It's staying extremely true to its principles, even when it actually costs something. 

Annalee: [00:11:47] Yeah, it's also something that I love about Discovery. It's definitely one of my favorite Star Trek shows, even though it's also really uneven. There's been moments in that show where I was like, eh, I don't know about this.

[00:11:59] But, I love that arc. I love the idea that we don't just see the building up of the Federation, which has been kind of an obsession with some of the other shows and some of the movies. And we actually get to see how do you deal with an organization that has lost a lot of its power and flexibility and is now rejuvenating.

[00:12:27] I love stories of rejuvenation and so that's a really interesting direction that we've gotten to go as we've gone a thousand years into the future of this franchise. 

[00:12:37] And I will remind you, yeah, it's a long time, but like, Ancient Egyptian empire lasted for more than a thousand years, you know, so it's not improbable. Humans have done it before, and if we teamed up with aliens, we might do it even better, you know?

Charlie Jane: [00:12:52] Yeah. I guess. I feel like there have been, I mean, obviously China's history goes back 5,000 years. 

Annalee: [00:12:58] Yeah. 

Charlie Jane: [00:12:58] But there are different dynasties. 

Annalee: [00:12:59] Sure. 

Charlie Jane: [00:13:00] There's different political eras, and the idea that there's an unbroken, like, one political entity remains kind of static for a thousand years. I always kind of bump up against that.

Annalee: [00:13:11] Yeah, well, I think that's what's cool about Discovery is that it's admitting, actually it doesn't stay static. It gets attenuated and then it reconsolidates and it has a lot of transformations.

Charlie Jane: [00:13:22] For sure.

Annalee: [00:13:23] Okay, so I have just like a fundamental important question to ask you, which is, what do you think is the best thing about all of the new Star Trek that we've been getting? 

Charlie Jane: [00:13:34] Yeah, I think that the absolute best thing is that Star Trek is now extremely gay. 

Annalee: [00:13:38] Yes! 

Charlie Jane: [00:13:39] Discovery has like a whole queer family with Stamets and Culber as these gay dads and Adira and Gray as their trans kids. And then you have Jett Reno who is like the queer engineer and you have Michelle Yeoh playing a bisexual evil emperor from another universe and so on and so forth. And Lower Decks has given us a pretty sweet Romance between Beckett Mariner and Jennifer Sh’reyan, which I'm excited to see where that goes.

Annalee: [00:14:05] Yeah.

Charlie Jane: [00:14:06] Picard gave Seven of Nine and Raffi a pretty great romance. Strange New Worlds, meanwhile has a trans villain who's supposedly coming back in season two. Nurse Chapel is suddenly bisexual. And there's a persistent rumor, which I really hope is true, that Strange New Worlds will reveal that James Kirk is also bisexual.

Annalee: [00:14:24] Absolutely. That makes total sense to me. I have always gotten a bisexual vibe from Captain Kirk. He's obviously, you know, hooking up with Spock.

Charlie Jane: [00:14:34] Hundred percent. 

Annalee: [00:14:34] You know, I think he's like, I think, honestly, I think he's pansexual. I think he's into Green enbies. I think he's like, you know, I think he’s just, all things. Gender doesn't matter to him. Species doesn't matter to him. You know, it's like, do you have 12 tentacles? Captain Kirk is there to suck ‘em. You know what I mean? He's just like, he's got a big enough mouth for all 12 of your tentacles. It's totally fine.

Charlie Jane: [00:15:00] I. That's a mental images that I'm really glad I have now. And it's weird that Star Trek actually resisted being gay for so long. Like Gene Roddenberry famously shot down some of David Gerrold’s attempts to insert gay storylines [crosstalk].

Annalee: [00:15:14] I know. And that's why we got that really ridiculous storyline in Next Generation about like the people who were intolerant of heterosexuality. It was originally not, it was supposed to be originally like intolerant of homosexuality Anyway.

Charlie Jane: [00:15:28] It's weird, but you know, it's weird because so much of Star Trek is about acceptance and sensitivity and like homoeroticism has always been a core Star Trek principle, but it's always been just kind of, we're not allowed to talk about it. The other great thing about all the Star Trek we've gotten recently is just how positive and joyful most of it seems to be, and yeah, okay. Like we said earlier, Federation and Star Fleet are constantly being tarnished and shown to be corrupted and imperfect. But the characters that we care about, the characters that we're actually invested in, are consistently upbeat and clever and competent, and they're usually kind to each other across all of the Star Trek shows.

[00:16:08] I mean, I personally peaced out of Ted Lasso at some point during season two, but I get my fix of kindness and gentleness from Star Trek and Lower Decks, which we'll talk about more in the second half feels like a really beautiful celebration of what we love about Star Trek in general, including an unabashed love of nerdiness and chosen family.

Annalee: [00:16:27] Yeah, I totally agree, and I think that when I went back and did a rewatch of Deep Space Nine, it really reminded me how much the shows from the turn of the century really did have this emphasis on how every episode kind of had to end with reconciliation or with people figuring out ways to work together. And it was just interesting because I had been watching Discovery where a lot of it is about how things are falling apart and like people are not trustworthy. And that's just so not the vibe in the Star Trek that I love. And pretty soon, one of the really gentle, you know, psychologically healthy Star Trek shows, Strange New World is gonna be the only live action Trek show. There's, I guess there's a Star Fleet Academy show in the pipeline. I'm not sure what's happening with that.

Charlie Jane: [00:17:17] Mm-hmm. It's been delayed by the writer’s strike, yeah.

Annalee: [00:17:19] Okay. But that's, I mean, so we may get that. And it really sucks that we're only getting one more season of Discovery, which keeps showing us this really distant future where Star Fleet is rebuilding. It's changing, but it's sticking to some of its early principles where scientific curiosity is centered. It's a positive thing, the idea that you would just go out and learn things instead of acquire things or colonize things. 

[00:17:50] The most recent season where they've learned to communicate with aliens outside the galaxy, whose language involves hydrocarbons and light patterns, that is Star Trek at its best. Like, that takes me back to being a kid, learning about V’Ger, the sentient Starship. It’s completely mind blowing. It's redefining life itself, and in order for us to have a more expansive vision of what our galactic community could be. 

[00:18:16] So, I'm really glad that we're getting a little bit more uplifting stuff. I'm sad to see Discovery going now that it's grown into being, I think probably the most forward-looking, uplifting live action Trek show right now

Charlie Jane: [00:18:31] Yeah. And you know, I love Strange New Worlds dearly, like I have to emphasize that. I really love that show. 

Annalee: [00:18:36] Me, too.

Charlie Jane: [00:18:36] But a lot of why it feels, why Strange New Worlds in particular, feels happy and uplifting is kind of just vibes. Like the show has really friendly vibes. Anson Mount is wonderful as Captain Pike and he is, in many ways, the ideal of a Star Fleet captain. He's a nurturing leader who lifts people up and the crew are pretty much all lovable. But meanwhile, the actual show is kind of conservative and kind of dark.

[00:19:03] And you know, like in season one, the big bad that we keep coming back to are the Gorn. Who are these scary lizard people who showed up in one episode of the original series, “Arena.” And in the original series, the point of the Gorn was that we should try to understand them and that killing them was the wrong choice. As Captain Kirk explains:

OST Clip: [00:19:22] No. No, I won't kill you. Maybe you thought you were protecting yourself.

Charlie Jane: [00:19:34] But then you get to Strange New Worlds and the Gorn have been kind of reinvented as these terrifying predators who cannot be reasoned with or coped with. They simply have to be slaughtered. 

SNW Clip: [00:19:44] Some things in this universe are just plain evil. The truth is plenty of people have seen the Gorn, they just don't live long enough to talk about it. 

Charlie Jane: [00:19:52] And then the season finale of Strange New Worlds is this retelling of the story “Balance of Terror” from the original series, except now we're in an alternate timeline and Pike is captain instead of Kirk. And it's all about how like Pike does a worse job than Kirk in this stand off with the Romulans because Pike tries to make peace and Kirk just goes for the jugular. Like Pike is like, let's have a two-hour ceasefire and try to work this out, and that ends up being the wrong choice and you should just kill them.

[00:20:19] I feel like the tone of Strange New Worlds is kind, but the actual message is frequently like shoot first and ask questions later. 

Annalee: [00:20:26] Yeah. You're kind of reminding me of one of the things that really threw me out of Strange New Worlds, which is the fact that it has this kind of conservative way of looking back to earlier Star Trek shows and specific episodes.

[00:20:42] Like I had not watched all of the original series. My Star Trek is Next Generation. And so, everyone kept talking about like, oh, this is a retelling of “Balance of Terror.” And I'm like, I don't know. I didn't watch that. I don't think I should have had to have watched and memorized that in order to get that this show is making a comment about how even this conservative previous version of Star Trek was too liberal and now we've gotta go even further toward militarization.

Charlie Jane: [00:21:10] Or that that was the right version. 

Annalee: [00:21:11] Yeah, I guess you're right. But my point is that that is a kind of conservative move, to be looking back to the past and then of course, reanimating this story that had this conservative message.

[00:21:24] And it kind of reminded me of a non-genre show that I'm watching right now called The Diplomat, which is kind of like The West Wing, where it's like a liberal fantasy about a government that could exist if we had more liberal values in the United States. But the weird thing is that the premise of the show is that, the main character, the diplomat, who's gonna be installed as the vice president, isn't elected, she's gonna be appointed because there's been this scandal around the vice president and they keep talking about how isn't it great that you didn't have to be elected? You don't have to go through the whole thing of like going on the campaign trail because you are somebody who just really knows about government. And what we need is someone competent who knows about government and like your head would explode if you had to campaign because that's not your bailiwick.

[00:22:18] And I was like, okay, on one hand, yay, like liberalism and yay, like, people who are competent but also this is very anti-democratic. We shouldn't be cheering for a show that's about like, let's do an end-run around a democratic voting system. And I feel that we really need to kinda stop it. I feel like Star Trek needs to have kind of that same message.

[00:22:42] It's like, yeah, I love having the good vibes, I love having characters who support each other, but I also like having a show that suggests peaceful democratic alternatives to difficult situations. You know, I don't want us to do an end run around democracy. I don't want us to shoot first. I want us to like think about the kind of things that Picard used to think about in Next Generation where it's like wrestling with the ethics of a situation and trying to find a third way as opposed to, you know, fight or flight. 

Charlie Jane: [00:23:15] Yeah, and I do want to kind of defend that Star Trek episode, “Balance of Terror” a little bit because the underlying message of it is very progressive for the time when it was made, which is that the kind of arc of the show is that they figure out that the Romulans look just like Spock. And so they're like, is Spock an enemy agent? And it's about like, no, we have to trust Spock, he's our friend, even though he looks like these other guys who are trying to kill us. But at the same time, it is a very shoot… It’s very kill or be killed is the way it's set up. And that's what Spock tells him. He's like, I think that if these Romulans are this offshoot of Vulcans, we have to kill them. 

[00:23:48] And I feel like I have a lot of faith that Strange New Worlds will grow the way every previous Star Trek show has. Like, you never wanna judge a Star Trek show by its first season. That's never a great idea. 

Annalee: [00:23:57] Sure. Yeah. Totally agree. 

Charlie Jane: [00:23:59] But I think that one thing I wanna celebrate is that we're so much better off with Star Trek as a TV franchise rather than as a movie franchise, which it was not too long ago. I actually think Chris Pine, who played Captain Kirk in the three most recent Star Trek movies, made a really good, good point recently when he was interviewed about like Dungeons & Dragons and he just said as an aside, I really wish that they would stop trying to make Star Trek movies that will be as big as Marvel movies or Star Wars movies because, you know, if we just made them to be a bit smaller and not have to try to make a billion dollars. We could do something that was a lower budget, but that actually had the things that people love about Star Trek and I was like, “Right on Chris Pine.”

[00:24:39] I feel like those movies should not be trying to make a billion dollars. They should be trying to make like John Wick money. 

Annalee: [00:24:48] Yeah. I mean, I don't want a John Wick / Star Trek crossover because we've just been talking about how we wanna eject all the darkness from Star Trek.

Charlie Jane: [00:24:57] Yeah…

Annalee: [00:24:57] But I would like to see them being used as kind of comp titles, like you said. There should be some kind of idea of a mid-list for films. 

Charlie Jane: [00:25:07] Mm-hmm. Or mid-budget movie. 

Annalee: [00:25:08] Mid-budget movie, exactly.

Charlie Jane: [00:25:11] I mean, okay. There's a Star Trek movie where they bring back John's Wick's dog, like in the future. They clone John Wick's dog.

Annalee: [00:25:17] Uh-huh, and then they clone—

Charlie Jane: [00:25:19] And the dog just runs around having a nice time.

Annalee: [00:25:19] No, and then they clone John Wick and they give him lots of therapy with his dog. And then they team up with the guy from Discovery with his cat and it’s like a whole, like, hot guys and their pets thing like, I don't know.

Charlie Jane: [00:25:36] Oh my God, yes. I want like a Star Trek pets show. 

Annalee: [00:25:38] Yes. 

Charlie Jane: [00:25:39] Where it's just like there's a veterinary ship in the Federation. Like Starfleet has one veterinary starship that just flies around taking care of people's pets. 

Annalee: [00:25:48] But also the—

Charlie Jane: [00:25:48] That is a show I would watch.

Annalee: [00:25:49] And they’re also working on deciphering the language of non-human animals, and so like they're sort of starting to talk to the dog and the cat. And the dog and the cat are like going on in adventures and stuff and the cat will be like, alert, alert, you know, like meow! And like pushing all the buttons. 

Charlie Jane: [00:26:06] Oh. Ooh, and like there are actually cat people in Star Trek. 

Annalee: [00:26:09] Yeah. 

Charlie Jane: [00:26:11] Like, you know, T’Ana, in Lower Decks is a cat person, so it can be like cat people with cats. And it's like—

Annalee: [00:26:18] No, no—

Charlie Jane: [00:26:20] This is a show we need to watch.

Annalee: [00:26:20] Cat people would have spider monkeys. Like little, you know what I mean? Like they'd have like little hominids. 

Charlie Jane: [00:26:27] Oh, I love that.

Annalee: [00:26:29] And they would kind bat them around sometimes. 

Charlie Jane: [00:26:33] That seems like a great place to take a quick break. And when we come back, we're gonna talk to Mike McMahan, all about Lower Decks and all things Star Trek.

[00:26:39] OOAC session break music, a quick little synth bwoop bwoo.

Charlie Jane: [00:26:45] And now we're so incredibly lucky to be joined by Mike McMahan, the creator and showrunner of Star Trek: Lower Decks. So, lovely to talk to you. I'm a huge fan. So…

Mike McMahan: [00:26:54] Thank you. 

Charlie Jane: [00:26:54] Yeah. I've been rewatching Lower Decks in preparation for the next season, and every rewatch it gets better. So, you know, there have been a lot of Star Trek spoofs over the years. Like, there's the highly underrated Pigs in Space which I rewatched some of recently. I don't know. There's been a bunch of Star Trek spoofs. What's the difference between like spoofing Star Trek and making a comedy show that's set in the Star Trek universe?

Mike McMahan: [00:27:20] I think one of the primary things is the difference between making fun of and having fun with, in a way. 

Charlie Jane: [00:27:27] Right. 

Mike McMahan: [00:27:28] That's what I try to navigate is I think that there's a lot of like, look, I like spoofs. I think you have to be in the mood for a spoof, in a way, and that when you're watching a spoof, most times there really aren't any stakes for the characters. There aren't any internal stakes. Like, you're just there to be silly, you know? Which is fine. You know what I mean? It’s like Mad Magazine. It's like stuff I grew up, with liking that kind of, you know, that's one way to handle the comedy of it. And I think that, the way that I like to do it more, and it's where Lower Decks comes from, is I like to have our comedy but also be the thing that we are having fun within at the same time.

[00:28:07] We're a bit of a turducken of real stakes that really matter for the characters that follow the rules of the world up to a point, and then bend those rules and have fun with the format and have it be a thing that that a fan might watch and say, wow, that felt like a holodeck version of a real thing that could have happened in the Star Trek that I'm used to. 

Like, those kind of permission structures of like, oh, that was so close to being Star Trek, but it was fast and short and funny and animated that I have to figure out how to make it fit into the Star Trek overall.

Charlie Jane: [00:28:49] Right? 

Mike McMahan: [00:28:49] Which is what we do for the movies. It's what we're doing with, you know, different series. It's what we do with the uniforms and why the alien designs change as we get better at it or as they kind of shift back and forth. But yeah, I guess there's a little spoofitude in what I'm doing, as well. But, with equal balance to trying to tell emotionally-driven stories that also feel like they fit into the format of what used to be a franchise, but is almost a genre in and of itself now. 

Charlie Jane: [00:29:17] Yeah. So, is that canonical? That this is the holodeck version? This is like the final episode of Enterprise where we're actually on the holodeck watching a reconstruction of stuff that happened.

Mike McMahan: [00:29:26] That's not canon. I would say Lower Decks is canon and everything else is the holodeck. 

Charlie Jane: [00:29:31] That makes total sense. 

Mike McMahan: [00:29:34] I think whatever your favorite Star Trek show is canon, and then everything else is probably the holodeck recreations that they're watching around it. And then you can have a favorite Enterprise episode. You can have a favorite TOS episode and Discovery and then those all work, you know? 

Charlie Jane: [00:29:50] Yeah. So, speaking of having your favorite Star Trek show, I'm a huge fan of Discovery as well as Lower Decks. And I sometimes get into, Arguments with people who are like, you know, Discovery sucks, Strange New Worlds is great, Lower Decks is great.

[00:30:03] And I'm like, right now we're at this moment where we have so many different Star Trek shows, which is the first time that's happened in 20 years that there's been multiple versions of Star Trek at the same time. Do you feel like having different visions of Star Trek at the same time allows us to kind of better understand what Star Trek is?

Mike McMahan: [00:30:15] Absolutely. When I was a kid watching Star Trek, it was like, oh, here's a thing for me amid this landscape of lots of things that aren't for me. And then you would find people who loved sci-fi, and loved the kind of aspirational, calm, sweet, supportive stories that Star Trek is so good at telling. Now… well, sorry. Not to get ahead of myself.

[00:30:44] At the same time, you know, back when we did have Deep Space Nine and Voyager and TNG and various movies, you still had “Oh, TOS is better than TNG, or TNG is better than Deep Space Nine. We were all in-fighting back then, anyway.

[00:31:04] I don’t know what it is about Star Trek fans that make us want to, even if we all agree, we start ranking. We start being like, well, this is the best episode and this is the second best episode and this is the best season. There’s something about being a Star Trek fan that like, makes us want to talk about it, right?

[00:31:24] My wife and I, when we were watching Deep Space Nine, I remember once we missed an exit on the highway that we were driving on because we were so into talking about one episode of Deep Space Nine we had just watched. 

[00:31:39] There's something inherently water cooler about Star Trek and you go in, you wanna like find water coolers everywhere. It's not just at the office anymore. You're not just going into the office and talking about the new episode. That's not enough for Star Trek fans. Like, Star Trek basically invented fan fiction. It basically invented shipping. It basically invented conventions because we all love this world that was created and the expression of which, which are all the different shows and the movies and the comics and the books and everything that we all have to pit it against itself and against Star Wars and against all the stuff that's out there, you know.

[00:32:19] And so, right now, yeah. I can't believe we have all this Star Trek. And by the way, we have all the Star Trek we grew up watching, too, like... 

Charlie Jane: [00:32:27] Right.

Mike McMahan: [00:32:27] For a long time, and I think this gets left out of the conversation. It was hard to watch the Star Trek we had. Like, Star Trek wasn't available on streaming. It was like, I remember when Star Trek came out on DVD and I was like, oh, thank God I can actually. Like, I hadn’t reseen the Pakled episode, “Samaritan Snare” for like a decade because I just didn't have access to it until it came out on DVD. 

Charlie Jane: [00:32:48] Wow. 

Mike McMahan: [00:32:48] And I was like, oh, right. I thought this episode was a dream I had. Like, it's crazy, you know? And like everybody has these different relationships with it. So, now we're at the, I would argue that like not only do we have more Star Trek than ever before, not only because we have all this amazing new Star Trek and all the Star Trek that's coming on the horizon, we have all of the Kelvin Verse movies. We have all of the TNG stuff. We have all the TOS stuff, but we've also got all the comics, all the books, all of it mixed together. And we have The Orville and we have The Expanse, and we have all this Star Trek adjacent stuff, you know? Like, we have Galaxy Quest, but it's all available on streaming. You don't have to know somebody who happens to have the right VHS anymore. I'm dating myself.

Charlie Jane: [00:33:32] Right. Oh my God. 

Mike McMahan: [00:33:33] But yeah, I mean it's, it is this huge immersive, almost a thousand episode property that changes and shifts and is generational and is almost a document about the people that made it and the times they made it in and all this stuff.

[00:33:49] So I do like that… you know, I don't love the tone of ownership when people argue about it. Like, oh, this isn't right. 

Charlie Jane: [00:33:55] Yeah. 

Mike McMahan: [00:33:57] This isn't my Star Trek. And it's like, get fucked.

Charlie Jane: [00:34:00] Yeah, I didn't mean to get us off on that tangent, but—

Mike McMahan: [00:34:02] But I do like talking about Star Trek, so it's good to argue about it.

Charlie Jane: [00:34:06] Yeah. And I, I love the notion that Star Trek invented fandom and invented kind of like conventions and shipping and fanfic, because that's really true.

[00:34:16] And so, like, pivoting slightly, like what made you choose to set Lower Decks during the, the TNG era, specifically? 

Mike McMahan: [00:34:23] So that was interesting. When I first pitched it, I was like, oh, this is gonna have to be disco. Like this is gonna have to be. I didn't even pitch Lower Decks. I sat with Alex Kurtzman and Aaron Baiers and, and Heather Kadin. And they were like, well, if you could do a Star Trek animated show, what would it be? And I was like, well, you guys aren't gonna like this. And I just described Lower Decks, you know. I was like, here's my favorite episode of TNG and here's what it inspires and here's what I think, the stories you could tell and you know, here's the type of ship I'd want it to be on. And I was like, the only thing is I don't know as much about the era of Discovery as you guys are telling, because I've only seen as much of it as aired. You know what I mean? You're creating it as you're going and I don't know all those rules. I know the TNG, Deep Space Nine, Voyager rules real well, you know? 

[00:35:10] And they were like, just set it in that era. Then I was like, oh my God, I'm allowed to, I can do that? And they were like, yeah, dude.

[00:35:19] And that was the first it. I think everybody who makes Star Trek right now, is a combination of how did I get here? How am I being allowed to do this?

Charlie Jane: [00:35:28] Oh, sure, yeah. 

Mike McMahan: [00:35:28] Supermarket Sweep. How much of the, the stuff that I've always wanted to do can I do in this show, you know?

And so, TNG's the most comfortable for me, like that era of movies and shows. That's what I grew up with. When I think of my enterprise crew, you know, it's Picard's crew, and so, because I was doing a comedy, you wanna feel like you are the most familiar with what you are playing with. Nobody’s gonna laugh at jokes that seem like you don't know what the fuck you're talking about. You know what I mean? So, it was a lot easier and more comfortable for me to tell stories in that era.

Charlie Jane: [00:36:03] Yeah. And one thing I love about TNG is that it really gets to this thing that I think is at the heart of Star Trek, which is, on the one hand it's, in the utopia of the Federation every individual gets to develop to their fullest potential. Every individual gets to kind of blossom like a beautiful flower. But at the same time, it's all about cooperation. It's all about working together. It's all about, you know, sacrifice and we live in a world right now where individualism and working towards the common good are harshly in conflict and people are constantly having that debate in the real world.

[00:36:41] And so do you think that that's a contradiction at the heart of Star Trek or do you think that Star Trek shows us a way that those two things are not a contradiction? 

Mike McMahan: [00:36:46] I think Star Trek shows us what we could have at the same time as showing us that it's always a challenge. That, even in the things that they've accomplished, they wanna take Data apart. People are prejudging Worf for stuff. Troi isn't even in a uniform for a long time. Wesley is getting into problems at Star Fleet Academy because he's falling in love with the wrong leader. You know what I mean? Like, that human problems, that emotional issues that things that we have to stand up for, all these things that make us human, but that are also things that people wanna kind of like homogenize and like sort of tamp down into this one ideal. That if you do that, you're not human anymore. That the good thing about us is gone. 

[00:37:34] Like, I think that Star Trek shows us both at once. It shows us that you can be respectful of everybody, even though everybody's different. That we might all be in the same uniform, but we all have these different backgrounds and we all are out here for scientific purposes. But like you always have…

[00:37:50] Like, what I love about Lower Decks is that we took the exploring the galaxy part and put that in the background and took the exploring yourself part and put that in the foreground, which some episodes of TNG do. But we made that the banner, the headline for Lower Decks. 

[00:38:05] And so, you know, when you watch Star Trek, there is the idea of Star Fleet and the Federation, and we're all like, those are good things. You know what I mean? Like, sometimes they can falter, but that's what we want, you know, we want to have a post-scarcity future where we're flying around the galaxy with potted plants and, and wall to wall carpeting, and we have the Prime Directive and we all support each other and we don't have like racism or bigotry holding us back. Like we've fulfilled the most supportive, kind of ideal, version of ourselves. But then there's always a bad admiral who shows up who's like, well, let's do it my way.

[00:38:46] Because you still have, I know Roddenberry didn't wanna have conflict between these characters. But, I think at the end of the day, especially right now with what we're seeing, which mirrors Star Trek in many ways, that like, even when we think we're making progress, you can't… you have to always be vigilant, right? You have to always be watching out for people that are marginalized in whatever way that they are. And Star Trek always showed that, that that will always be a persistent thing, that unless you're vigilant against it, the powers that that capitalize on that are always gonna be trying to utilize it. 

Charlie Jane: [00:39:23] Right. And Beckett Mariner seems like she's kind of engineered to kind of get to the heart of that because she's always acting as though she doesn't give a shit and then she finally gets kind of pushed to the limit of that, where she's sent to that horrible assignment on the garbage station.

Mike McMahan: [00:39:38] [Crosstalk]

Charlie Jane: [00:39:39] Yeah, and she has to confront whether she actually is gonna live up to that or whether she's gonna admit that she does give a shit. Right? Like I feel like that's kind of the story.

Mike McMahan: [00:39:49] Well, it's interesting, like, I think. She does give a shit. It's just if you give a shit, do you have to give a shit about the whole system or can you give a shit and break the system that you care about? You know what I mean? And like—

Charlie Jane: [00:40:02] Right.

Mike McMahan: [00:40:02] And I always think about people that… I read an article back when I was a young man, I guess about people working at Google and they would run into this problem where Google was the place that was supposed to be the best place to work in the world. I think this happens at Pixar, too, where it's like that's the best place to work, and then you get there and if you don't fit in there, you have this existential crisis because this is supposed to be the place that you're happiest. This is supposed to be the place where everything is right and it works, and everybody loves it here. And if you see problems with it, you are the problem. You know?

[00:40:40] And if you, at the same time, don't love this thing, you're supposed to love and you want it to be better and you are suddenly a problem within it, that's a really hard thing to navigate. And I think that is what Mariner is navigating and we actually, season four is coming out later this summer and there's some really interesting stuff that you learn about what put Mariner in that head space that I think is very, Star Trek. Is very like this era of Star Trek and is another way of saying, yes, you can love the Federation, but you can also always want stuff to be better. You can always be… but you can honor something by improving it. Like things don't have to be… Your favorite things in the world aren't things that haven't changed your whole life. It's things that improve and get even better, you know?

Charlie Jane: [00:41:32] Hundred percent. And yeah, I mean, how is it different compared to like, Rick and Morty or Solar Opposites telling funny stories, doing comedy in a show where there is this thread of idealism and people aren't maybe selfish monsters in the way they might be in other shows. How is that? Is it harder to be funny if people have to actually kind of have that idealistic side?

Mike McMahan: [00:41:54] Yeah, you're definitely wearing a different hat. There's a lot more rules. Because on Solar Opposites, it’s, what’s gonna be really funny, what really feels like the show, but there's no like also, does this fit into 800 previous episodes that set and define a world and the structures within it.

[00:42:17] Because we want to be Star Trek so that you feel like you're in that world, but then you also want to tell jokes. You wanna tell jokes that are fun and funny, but that don't mess up what is great about Star Trek. I think at the core of what your question is to me is can you be funny and optimistic at the same time? And I think like, yes, absolutely. 

[00:42:40] We’ve seen a whole era of comedy and being cynical and nihilistic and there's a lot of really funny stuff that is inherently uncomfortable or mean or reveling in the things that make us feel bad. And sometimes it's really fun to shine a light on that stuff.

[00:43:01] But with Lower Decks, what's really fun is that the person with the lowest level job on a Star Fleet ship is still probably a genius, you know what I mean? Like, they are still the top of their game. They are still an idealized future version of a person. And so where do you get jokes if you don't have somebody who's tripping over furniture or somebody who's an idiot? You know what I mean? And it just makes you play with a different set of comedy where it's like you're finding irony in people that that have… I find a lot of the times our best jokes are where people want the same things but have completely different sets of tools and skills to get there and that's what brings conflict between them. It’s how hard it is to like get in other people's heads all the time. Everybody can mean well and I think most of the time everybody does mean really well, but we all come from such different places and we have all of our own different baggage and our own ways of dealing with things that that's where a lot of the comedy comes from in Lower Decks.

[00:44:12] Lower Decks is also so interesting because like there's no other show I think where you can have a character like Rutherford who's like deeply in love with the starship he works in and that's where a lot of the comedy's coming from. And that sincerity of that character. He's like, I can't imagine Rutherford ever saying something at somebody else's expense or hurting somebody's feelings. He's just so clinical and so engineer-y that getting to tell jokes in a world where that's… a quarter of the characters are like that is really freeing in a way because the world we're in lets us do that. 

[00:44:50] If I had to put that character into like an episode of Friends, they would stick out and seem really weird. So, the easier thing about telling jokes and stories in the world of Star Trek is it's kind of fertile ground that hasn't been, hasn't been joke-ified before. We're getting to be the first one to tell jokes that also honor Gene Roddenberry's vision instead of Space Ball-ing it, you know what I mean? 

Charlie Jane: [00:45:18] For sure. 

Mike McMahan: [00:45:18] And so it's a challenge, but also nobody's done it before. So like we do get to find things and build on stuff that was there before. But at the same time, it's really fucking hard. I've never had a show that's harder to write and story break. It really is a labor but I’m also so proud of it. I'm so proud of the characters. Our voice actors are so lovely and amazing and funny, and all the writers, the artists are amazing too. It's really worth doing, but yeah, it’s not easy.

Charlie Jane: [00:45:50] I mean, yeah. And it's a strong contender for the best Star Trek show, for sure. And I—

Mike McMahan: [00:45:56] Oh, thank you. 

Charlie Jane: [00:45:56] I have that conversation all the time about like, how did this become like one of the best Star Trek shows? That’s not what anybody was expecting and not to like, be. We had high expectations, but, you know.

Mike McMahan: [00:46:07] Oh, I know. Well, weren't going for the best Star Trek show. Our goal, I remember the first day of the first writer's room, I said, our goal on this show is to make a show that is so Star Trek and so funny and so fun to watch. So put on in the background while you're doing the dishes, because you've seen the episodes 30 times and you just wanna be hanging with your Star Fleet friends that if we've accomplished our job, that when people are bringing up… We're back to lists, right? When people are arguing about what their favorite is or what the best is. I don't need to be number one. I don't even need to be two or three. I just want somebody to say, well, Lower Decks is on my list, because. I just wanted to be included. And I think partially it was because I had seen so many years of the original animated series get omitted and get put to the side.

Charlie Jane: [00:46:58] I know!

Mike McMahan: [00:46:59] Unfairly.

Charlie Jane: [00:47:01] Like, oh, that doesn't belong. 

Mike McMahan: [00:47:01] Right? And there's really great ideas in that animated series. Yeah, it’s of the time and the budget is rough, but like those voices are from TOS. Those writers are from TOS. 

Charlie Jane: [00:47:13] David Fucking Gerrold.

Mike McMahan: [00:47:13] Those ideas were TOS. Yeah! 

Charlie Jane: [00:47:15] D. C. Fontana worked on that. It was freaking high caliber.

Mike McMahan: [00:47:17] Of course! Isn’t that their only Emmy too? Didn't they win an Emmy for Animated Series and not for TOS? 

Charlie Jane: [00:47:24] I don't actually. I’m not sure. 

Mike McMahan: [00:47:25] Well, we're fake fans. We're fake fans. 

Charlie Jane: [00:47:27] I should check. We are fake fans. I’m a fake fan. 

Mike McMahan: [00:47:29] We just wanted to do a good enough show that it got included in the conversation. So, yeah. If we're the best Star Trek show, sorry everybody, that was an accident. 

Charlie Jane: [00:47:36] Yeah, you definitely are. You're definitely up there. I mean. It’s definitely… Discovery has a huge place in my heart. DS9, but you're definitely in the top three for me, personally. And I think—

Mike McMahan: [00:47:46] Oh, thank you. 

Charlie Jane: [00:47:47] It's reshuffled depending on which one I watched recently.

[00:47:49] So, the Star Trek universe is bonkers. It's full of like gods, giant space blobs that make no sense, evil computers, people cosplaying as 1920s gangsters, you know? 

Mike McMahan: [00:48:01] Yeah. 

Charlie Jane: [00:48:02] The holodeck is just this like nightmare. It's a fundamentally absurd universe. And like, do you feel like there's something profound about human beings trying to make their way in like a universe that just makes no sense and is absurd and ridiculous?

Mike McMahan: [00:48:17] Yeah, I don't know. I think it's a combination of… when you think about actual space exploration, right? It's like vast distances, it's a lot of stuff that's hard to wrap your head around. And exploring that is like, the amount of stuff out there to find, but how hard it is to see it and to actually like experience it is like an ultimate irony of humans wanting to expand our knowledge, but our lifetimes are so short that we truly only get like a tiny little blip of the cosmic calendar at any one moment in our experience. 

[00:49:00] And then you have Star Trek, which is going out and exploring just the galaxy.

[00:49:04] I hear people say the Star Trek universe, and I'm like uh uh uh. There's a lot to explore quadrant by quadrant in the galaxy. Most of Star Trek is in one quarter of the galaxy. You know what I mean? And then within that one quarter, what is the spectacle, right? What is the pushing of the imagination? What is the stuff you can't predict? And I think like seeing big, glowing hands in space or seeing gangsters or space Lincoln or giant tubes that are doomsday machines. Star Trek is, is this format of exploration that allows for things that tend to be, oh yeah, that actually happened, like cell phones, like iPads, you know? Like various medical device? There are things in Star Trek that we get right, you know? And there are things in Star Trek that are unproven so far, like the glowing hand. Will we find a glowing hand in space? I'd say probably not, but yeah, I would've said that about iPads, you know?

[00:50:15] So, I do like that the spectacle of the unexpected, like all of the unexpected stuff, the silly stuff. That there is a feeling of, oh, we don't know. The exploration is still there because we're coming up with weird stuff for Star Trek. You know what I mean? That it's not just we're around another rock and we're looking for microbes. You know what I mean? And I love that stuff in real life. That stuff is thrilling in real life. 

[00:50:46] But to be exploring a weird galaxy in Star Trek does feel more like what it feels like when you leave your house. You know what I mean? There's so much weird stuff on Earth. And so little weird stuff that we can see in space that it just feels like human storytelling needs us to have events, and it needs to have dragons. It needs to have the things that were off the map, the imagination. And exploring the human imagination through Star Trek is just as exciting from a storytelling perspective is exploring the galaxy is if we actually did that in Star Trek.

Charlie Jane: [00:51:19] So you're saying that the bizarre is actually the familiar and the comforting and that's what makes the kind of—

Mike McMahan: [00:51:22] [Crosstalk]

Charlie Jane: [00:51:23] Okay, that makes sense. So final question, and I'm sorry to have kept you so much, but final question. 

Mike McMahan: [00:51:29] No, of course, of course. I talk so much. Sorry, everybody listening to the podcast, I know these could have been shorter answers. 

Charlie Jane: [00:51:33] No, these answers have been amazing and I've really appreciated them. Final question. So obviously Discovery got pretty dark. Picard has had some pretty dark stuff where like, you know, I watch Lower Decks and I'm like, oh man, you guys have no idea what's coming. Like, there's gonna be like the [unclear] is gonna blow up, the androids are all gonna go bonkers, you know. Lower Decks feels like it's kind of sailing towards this cliff of darkness sometimes when I think about it. Do you think Star Trek still offers us hope and optimism? Do you think that's still kind of a core part of what Star Trek is about? 

Mike McMahan: [00:52:07] Yeah, I think it does. I think that, you know, you have to strike a balance between what are stories that speak to us at this one moment? I don't think it's Star Trek's job to say, hey, ignore the world around you. Everything's gonna be great. I don't think it's ever done that. I think it's more like, hey, the world sucks, but look what it could be. You know what I mean? And like, here's a way to talk about how the world sucks in a way that we aren't gonna have television executives say that we're not allowed to put that on air.

[00:52:43] Like, oh, it's aliens, it's aliens. We're not talking about politics, it's Pakleds or whatever. 

Charlie Jane: [00:52:50] Right, for sure. 

Mike McMahan: [00:52:52] And so I think that currently, everybody writing Star Trek and everybody watching Star Trek is in a world where there's some pretty fucked up shit going on, and there's a lot of stuff to solve.

[00:53:05] Now, Lower Decks is a comedy and it's a comedy that is utilizing the most optimistic, it's almost extruding, the most optimistic sides of Star Trek, and we're kind of dodging the morality plays. We're dodging the, what are you learning about society? And we're more saying, what do you learn about yourself in your twenties? You know what I mean? What did you think you wanted to do for a living? And then what did you find out? Who were the friends you thought were gonna be your best friends and who ended up being your best friends? We're playing more with a bit of a Wonder Years sort of like sentiment where we're playing with more of a nostalgia sentiment and a self-examination sentiment than an examining the world sentiment.

[00:53:49] Now that being said, Lower Decks tries to be the most Star Trek it can be. It probably, I've described to execs before where I'm like, Lower Decks is a Rosetta Stone. That if you had all of Lower Decks, you would be able to learn a little bit about every other Star Trek from it by digging through the kind of things that we talk about in it. That means that occasionally we do have to get dark. Like, the Pakleds were a, to me, my attempt at a metaphor for the rise of fascism across the world. That, at the same time, they seem like a joke, you know? And if you keep your eye off of 'em and you're not vigilant, even a joke can become deadly and serious.

[00:54:35] And there's blips of that in Lower Decks because that is a very Star Trek thing to do, and we're a very Star Trek show. But I think that what's for sale with Lower Decks is, okay, take a break for a second. These are imperfect characters in a perfect world. We want you to love these guys.

[00:54:53] They love Star Trek as much as you do. Something about Star Trek to celebrate is the fandom. Like, yeah, we're all arguing about which show is the best, but we're also loving to talk about the show and so do Boimler and Mariner and Tendi and Rutherford. That's my love letter to not just Star Trek, but being a fan of Star Trek and having this crazy lucky moment in the streaming era where somebody like me would be given a Star Trek show, which is, I never thought that I would get to do, and it just feels really important for me to do it right and to get it right because this is my one chance to like really do something I'm proud of with it. And so, getting that darkness in the show along with Boimler, getting barfed on by an alien bug, is weirdly a very high priority for me. 

Charlie Jane: [00:55:47] Okay. That, wow, that's interesting. I mean, I hadn't thought of darkness being a thing that's a priority, but I can totally, I can see it. It's part of where the kind of the emotional undercurrent of the show comes from is that terrible things do happen.

Mike McMahan: [00:56:02] Yeah. And maybe darkness isn't quite the right term for it. It might be that there's always a way to be better, you know what I mean? That we can always find ways to make… not to fix, but it's worth questioning things to make sure that we can always be improving.

[00:56:25] If you can always be getting the warp core to be going faster, if you can always be making the shields work better, there's probably also a way to make the systems of governance and Star Fleet and everything, to make those work better too. Even if it's only by 0.1%, which they're always thrilled by with the warp core anyway. 

Charlie Jane: [00:56:44] I know.

Mike McMahan: [00:56:44] You can get the warp core 0.1% faster? People are going nuts. They love it. You can make Star Fleet slightly better at handling things that don't quite apply to the Prime Directive? Everybody's like, no, don't do it. And you're like, no, come on. We're out here fixing stuff. We're engineers, we're scientists. There's a better way.

[00:57:04] We have to self-examine the ourselves Star Fleet as much as we examine the warp core. But anyway, I'm just talking about Star Trek now. I'm sorry. Sorry.

Charlie Jane: [00:57:12] No, well it was wonderful and delightful talking to you. I've kept you for way too long. Thank you so much, and thanks for a wonderful show that I love with all my heart, and I can't wait for season four.

Mike McMahan: [00:57:21] Of course, we're working on… I'll tell you, the last thing I'll say is season four is awesome. We're seeing color cuts of it right now. We're editing, we're doing music. The music is beautiful. And then we've started writing season five. And it's really, really great. Like the first couple, we're already into the first couple episodes and I'm like, oh man, is this our best stuff?

[00:57:43] I always feel like that when we're telling new stories with these characters and we've had a little time off, but like, it's so fun. It’s just so fun. I love writing Mariner and Tendi. And now we have T’Lyn. You guys are gonna get to spend a bunch of time with T’Lyn. 

Charlie Jane: [00:57:56] Oh my God. I can't wait. Cannot wait. I love T’Lyn already. 

Mike McMahan: [00:57:59] It's a blast. I can't wait for, I do too. And I can't wait for you guys to see what we did this season and what we're doing season five. So, hoping for many more seasons, but at least you've got, you've got another 20 episodes of awesomeness coming your way. 

Charlie Jane: [00:58:14] Well, heck yeah. Thank you. Have a wonderful weekend. Okay, take care.

Mike McMahan: [00:58:17] You, too. 

Charlie Jane: [00:58:18] You have been listening to Our Opinions Are Correct. If you just stumbled on us, you can find us wherever podcasts are found. And if you like us, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you can review podcasts because it really makes a huge difference to us. It helps a lot. 

[00:58:35] And you can find us on Twitter at @OOACPod, on Mastodon at ouropinions@wandering.shop. We're on Instagram as @OurOpinions, and you know, we're just everywhere. We're in the atmosphere. And also we are on Patreon at patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect and your support makes a huge, huge, huge difference.

[00:58:57] Thanks so much to our incredible beloved audio producer, Veronica Simonetti for helping to keep this ship afloat. Thanks to Chris Palmer for our amazing new music, and thanks again to you for listening. 

[00:59:09] We'll be back in two weeks with another episode, but if you're a Patreon supporter, we'll be seeing you in Discord right now and we'll have a mini episode next week.

[00:59:19] Either way, we'll be talking to you soon.

Together: [00:59:20] Bye!

[00:59:19] [OOAC theme plays. Science fictiony synth noises over an energetic, jazzy drum line.]