NYCC 2020: Star Trek Lower Decks Panel Recap

Star Trek Lower Decks celebrated its first season finale earlier this week, and to add to that, a special episode of CBS All Access’ recap show, The Ready Room, was repackaged as a new panel for this year’s New York Comic-Con. This gave us a look at the cast reactions to the end of its first voyage, what they learned along the way, and what’s to look forward to in the already confirmed next season. More emphasis was put on how the show was originally conceived to focus on the less important members of any given Starfleet ship, but what creator Mike McMahan quickly learned upon finally making this show was that they couldn’t make a show focusing on the lower crew members without giving the bigger players their own stories as well, which helped to further flesh out the crew of the Cerritos.

Many of the cast looked back on how they were able to work with each other briefly before the lockdowns forced them to work on the series remotely, as well as how much fun they had working together. Though as this was focused mainly on the finale, special time was put into how they put together the surprise appearance of Jonathan Frakes as William Riker. This was apparently in talks from the start of series development and just waiting for the episode to finally air, but they were still all glad to get it out as well as it was. As for what lies ahead, McMahan naturally has plenty of ideas for the cast, including tapping into the new status quo laid out by the finale’s events, though he doesn’t give many details beyond that. And I doubt that second season will be the end of this show either.

Star Trek: Lower Decks is available on CBS All Access. Watch this panel here.

Here’s a special message from McMahan about the upcoming second season.