“It was three things concurrently working together,” McMahan told io9 over the phone, speaking about Chief O’Brien’s brief cameo at the end of “Temporal Edict,” the third episode of the season. “The first one being, you know, Miles O’ Brien is the epitome of a lower decker—going from the bottom and going all the way to kind of the top. We saw him as a background character on TNG, and then he eventually gets more storylines as they’re building him out, and Colm Meaney is such a great actor that he becomes this part of TNG. And then obviously moving on to Deep Space Nine is when he really blossoms, the stories with him were so fascinating, and he has his friendship with Bashir. Of course our show would make a gold statue of that character because he’s doing what our show thematically is doing.”
But O’Brien, in his relationship with Deep Space Nine’s stiff upper-lipped doctor, also represented the kind of Starfleet camaraderie McMahan wanted Lower Decks to celebrate as well. “I love friendships in Star Trek,” McMahan continued. “Kirk and Spock, Data and Geordi, and honestly, O’Brien and Bashir is awesome. Those guys are playing racquetball all the time, I love those guys.”
O’Brien was also the kind of hero Lower Decks wanted Boimler, Mariner, Rutherford, and Tendi to be: important characters who keep Star Trek’s universe going but would never get their own splashy CBS All Access show (until they did, that is). “We were writing that episode while we knew there was a whole show called Star Trek: Picard out there,” McMahan laughed. And it didn’t ever feel like there would be a show called, you know, Star Trek: Any Other Character. Like, Picard is such a huge character, he would get his own show.”
The expectation Picard brought helped seal the deal on the O’Brien gag for McMahan. “[We] jump ahead to the future, there’s all these futuristic, you know, like this beautiful group of different kinds of species from TNG. They’re all sitting there learning and like a beautiful outside environment. And they’re about to learn about the most important person in Starfleet,” the showrunner added. “The audience’s brains should have been like, ‘Oh, I’m about to see a statue of Kirk, of Picard, or one of these usually celebrated people.’ And it just really tickled us to be like, ‘No, let’s subvert that, it will be comedic that it won’t be one of those other guys, and instead it’s this guy that we like.’”
it’s a silly gag but it also reveals so much about lower decks and its values! this kind of attention to detail is why i love lower decks so much
