Star Trek thanks to the franchise’s secure home on streaming platform Paramount+. That universe is indeed large enough to encom a wide variety of shows stretching across different time periods and forms.
Of course there will always be a place for old-fashioned live-action Star Trek space adventure, a niche that is irably filled by Strange New Worlds. But in addition to old school episodic Trek like SNW, there’s also room for more new school space adventures, as supplied by the animated show Lower Decks. Different as Strange New Worlds and Lower Decks may be however, the two shows are about to be blended thanks to a crossover episode set as part of SNW season 2. This crossover event will see Lower Decks voice actors Jack Quaid and Tawny Newsome playing live-action versions of their animated characters Boimler and Mariner alongside Pike, Spock and Uhura on Strange New Worlds.
The idea to crossover an animated show with a live-action one may seem like a strange thing to undertake. But as it turns out, the Lower Decks/Strange New Worlds crossover came together quite naturally thanks to mutual iration and even sharing of personnel between the creative teams behind the two shows. Speaking exclusively to Screen Rant, Lower Decks showrunner Mike McMahan explained exactly how the crossover came to be:
It's been in the works for a while. I believe we were talking about it last year. [Strange New Worlds' showrunner] Henry Alonso Myers came to me and asked if I'd be interested in sharing some of my characters because they're huge fans of Lower Decks on Strange New Worlds. They had me do a little bit of punch-ups on a couple of Strange New Worlds season 1 episodes to add a little bit of humor. Which was a blast. Getting to write lines for Spock and Uhura is surreal. ... And then they actually hired one of my writers, Kathyn Lyn, who wrote "Wej Duj," who co-wrote the episode, which I was really excited by. T'Lyn is actually based on her cosplay Vulcan she used to play conventions. And then I got to do a ton of punch-ups on the Strange New Worlds episode as well. I got to add a lot of character voice for the Lower Deckers but also give them some options for jokes for the rest of the Strange New Worlds cast, who are really charming and funny in their own right. They're great.
It sounds as though the whole back-and-forth between Lower Decks and Strange New Worlds was quite enthusiastic and that the whole thing went fairly smoothly. Of course there are nevertheless reasons to be somewhat skeptical of the possibility of blending the two shows into a seamless whole, if even temporarily. The animated vs. live-action element is part of it. So too is the difference in tone between the two shows, Lower Decks being a fairly broad comedy and Strange New Worlds a relatively straight-forward and (largely) serious science-fiction adventure show. That Lower Decks takes place in 2380 and Strange New Worlds in 2259 seems like a smaller hurdle to get over given that this is Star Trek.
It will be interesting indeed to see how this unlikely crossover is pulled off. Will Star Trek: Strange New Worlds skew too wacky for fans for this one episode, or will the addition of a pair of wisecracking Star Trek: Lower Decks characters simply be absorbed by SNW's overall reverence and seriousness. The broad takeaway of course is that Star Trek indeed is a big universe that has room for a lot of different tonal approaches. And that those approaches can presumably be blended together at times to make a new and interesting mix, one that hopefully will be appealing to fans who want their Star Trek fix and don’t mind a little experimentation.
