Star Trek: Lower Decks may be a lot of things, but normally it doesn’t go for raunchy sex jokes. Even in a previous Season 2 episode set in a co-ed shower, the humor was more based on Mariner (Tawny Newsome) trying to one-up a fellow crew-member, rather than the fact that they were all nude.
…And then there’s this weeks episode, which featured an alien creature called a Mugato seemingly masturbating its horn while it watched two other Mugatos have sex. And it turns out that even Lower Decks showrunner Mike McMahan wasn’t 100% sure about including the shocking (though also laugh-out-loud funny) moment.
“There was some hesitancy from me,” McMahan told Decider. “There continues to be hesitancy for me.”
In the episode, Boimler (Jack Quaid) and Rutherford (Eugene Cordero) are on the run from some rampaging Mugatos, and decide to hide inside of a tree trunk. Two of the beasts approach the log, and start to sniff it — seemingly in order to find the two Starfleet Ensigns. Instead, the Mugatos smile, and proceed to, uh, make love on the log.
That’s when a third Mugato enters, and starts yelling at the other two Mugatos.
“This could get violent if he likes to assert dominance,” says a panicked Boimler, when suddenly, the formerly enraged third Mugato sits down, and in a split second shot begins to aggressively rub his own horn.
“Is he asserting?” asks Rutherford.
“No, I think he likes to watch,” answers Boimler.
“It’s just so fucking funny, I wouldn’t even call it masturbating his horn, maybe fondling his horn?” McMahan continued. “The Mugatos are so funny and we got to do them in such a new way. I think that even grosser than the horn movement is, if you go back and look at what the Mugato’s eyes are doing, they’re going a little walleyed.”
As mentioned above, the masturbating Mugato (or fondling Mugato, if you prefer) moment is barely a second long, and the show doesn’t return for an extended after-credits ‘bating session or anything. For the Lower Decks crew finding the right balance, even for this blip of a moment, was just as important as anything else.
“We want to be making people laugh,” McMahan said. “We want to be making people enjoying this world. So occasionally you have to find that line, and I’ll tell you there was a real long edit session where we got that moment down to the exact amount of frames that was between ‘tasteful’ and ‘this is ridiculous.’”
Calling out a Season 1 character named Badgey, a murderous, Clippy style character who went nuts on the Holodeck last season and looks to return this season, McMahan noted that, “it lives in the same Badgey zone where we were like, ‘is Badgey going a little too far or just far enough?’ I think that is what the Mugato moment does.”
You can watch today’s episode of Star Trek: Lower Decks on Paramount+ and judge for yourself. New episodes stream every Thursday.
Where to watch Star Trek: Lower Decks