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