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If there’s one thing that Star Trek fans of every generation can agree on, it’s this: Star Trek: Lower Decks is one of the finest shows to ever come out of the franchise. The animated comedy focusing on the support crew of the USS Cerritos recently completed its five-season run on Paramount+, leaving fans wanting more of Boimler, Tendi, Rutherford, and Mariner, some of the best Starfleet has to offer. Of course, it wasn’t always the case that audiences were quite as accepting of the crew, as show creator Mike McMahan remembers.

“I see a lot of people get mad, like, ‘This isn’t what I wanted! It’s not what I thought it was gonna be!’ And like, three years later, they’re like, ‘Oh, I do like this,’” McMahan told Popverse’s Ashley V. Robinson in the second installment of Popversations, our monthly interview series in which Ashley chats to the biggest and brightest figures in movies, TV, and comics. (You can catch up with our first episode, starring David Dastmalchian, right here.)

Want to see McMahan talk about the merch he wished could be made from the show, how it works being a showrunner on an animated series, or what the difference is between making Lower Decks or McMahan’s other animated comedy Solar Opposites? It’s all here — as well as finding out just what background invoke made Ashley scream out loud when she saw it.

Watch Popversations: Mike McMahan now:

Popversations is a new monthly video interview series made exclusively for Popverse members first. Popverse members get first access and in many cases exclusive access to this and more, including an array of articles and comic convention panel videos. See the full list here! 

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