Why Star Trek: Lower Decks Wants Its Animated Sets To Look Just A Little Bit Cheap (Sometimes) [Exclusive]

I was recently invited to visit the sacred halls of Titmouse, Inc. to see what the coolest animation studio in the game has in store, and had the chance to talk with "Star Trek: Lower Decks" producer Megan Treviño and director Barry Kelly. One of the first things we talked about was how they're able to translate the iconography of the live-action shows and movies into animation, but there was another itch in my brain that needed scratching.

"Star Trek" is famous for its humble origins, and the way the creative team was able to transport audiences into notoriously cheap set designs and make them believe they'd stepped into a spaceship or onto other planets. So much so that "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" even poked fun at the low-budget history. For a show like "Lower Decks," the only true limitation is imagination. At least, that's what I assumed, but Treviño and Kelly explained just how the "Lower Decks" team decides what parameters to work within to keep the series in line with the rest of the "Star Trek" properties.

"We have a budget too," jokes Treviño, "but I think we do have a wild imagination as everything is just a blank surface." To ensure that nothing goes off the rails, the team made a conscious decision to stagger out the bigger adventures with bottle episodes where the crew never leaves the ship. "The typical episode is half on the ship, half on a planet, and we try to limit how much we're showing," says Kelly. "It's kind of like the old shows honestly — one set, okay, let's try to reuse that set as much as possible and move pieces around so that it doesn't feel like it's the same reused section." And although they can draw the sets however they want, they still try to capture the spirit of early "Trek."

Season 4, episode 8 of "Star Trek: Lower Decks" is called "Caves" and exists as one of the best meta-joke episodes of the entire series. It's also one of Treviño's all-time favorites. "If you are 'Star Trek' fans, you know the cave, and we're like, 'Yeah, we'll just have the same cave,'" she says. "But obviously [...] we have to draw that cave and all the different iterations, where if it was a live-action set, the cave is already there, so we just redress it a little bit." Kelly adds to the point, acknowledging that it wasn't easy to re-capture the cave because it can't just be a cave, it has to specifically be "a s***ty cave that was made on a set."

Kelly tells me that if you watch the episode multiple times, you'll start to notice all of the small details that went into making the set of the cave look like the one used in live-action. "The second time you're like, 'Yeah, there's nothing on the floor. It's completely flat. It doesn't match the color,' and it's supposed to look like a bad set." Fortunately, picking out those elements is part of the fun. "We're trying to make some of the good parts and the cheesy bad parts of 'Star Trek,' like weird lights coming from nowhere on the original ship," he says. "It helps with the freedom we have and the animation that we can do that."

"Star Trek: Lower Decks" will return for its fifth and final season later this fall.