JANUARY 31, 2023 - Since we first heard a few months ago of the big cross-over event between Star Trek: Strange New Worlds and Star Trek: Lower Decks, we’ve been more than mildly curious, to say the least, about how a live-action and an animated series would pull it off.  

We’ll let the director of that episode tell us.  You may know him as Commander William T Riker, and Thomas Riker, where he’s appeared on ST: TNG, ST: DS9, ST: VOY, ST: ENT, ST: PIC, and ST: LOW.  He’s directed multiple episodes across the franchise as well as two motion pictures.  So, he’s definitely gotten some credentials behind his name.

We’re speaking about the upcoming second season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds where we’ll have a crossover with Lower Decks that will bring Tawny Newsome as Mariner and Jack Quaid as Boimler onto Pike’s USS Enterprise in live-action. 

Frakes said he was picked to direct the crossover because he had previously appeared as Riker in Lower Decks.  It pushed his character into the realm of full-on comedy, and so that same comedy will be brought to SNW.

Jonathan Frakes will be featured in an interview in the February issue of SFX Magazine, and while he’s obviously speaking about his return in front of the camera as Captain Riker in the third season of Picard, he’s also sharing his experience directing the Strange New Worlds/Lower Decks crossover episode:

The following excerpt is from the interview:

Oh god, it’s so good. I have Jack Quaid and Tawny Newsome, who are both amazing. It was such a treat for me because it is a flat-out comedy. Full on. And they’re fearless over there, they take some really big swings on Strange New Worlds. They’re animated at the beginning and at the end. It’s a clever and simple product. It’s not really Roger Rabbit because what happens is these guys come over and they’re humans and you accept them as soon as they’re on the Enterprise. God, the two of them have got great energy, and it freed up the acting company on Strange New Worlds to play more broadly. Anson’s a wonderful comedian, very dry, but so’s Rebecca. It encouraged Ethan and everyone, there were just a lot of positives that came out of them having the guts to do a full-on comedy, let alone a crossover with an animated show.

His obvious excitement for the upcoming episode fills us with an even greater desire to “get on with it already Paramount+ and let us watch it!” While we’ve not heard when season two of SNW will come back on screen, we do have this little thing known as ST: PIC season three coming in just another couple of weeks.