Monday, October 19, 2020

Star Trek: Lower Decks Showrunner Claims Every Starfleet Officer Is "Baseline Bisexual"

McMahan did a recent interview with Variety, where he discussed quite a bit of his plans for the second season of the animated show while also confirming that they're planning to explore Ensign Mariner's sexuality more prominently.

During the interview, McMahan revealed that Mariner was romantically involved with Captain Amina Ramsey when the two were at the Academy.

The showrunner stated, "The thing about privilege is that some people have it, some people don't. But everybody has their own story as well."

He continued, "There's an episode in the first season where you meet Mariner's close friend, confidant, and probably lover from the Academy days, who literally says, 'You used to be the best of us, you were going to be a captain, what happened to you?'"

That character is Captain Amina Ramsey. And McMahan would be asked a follow-up on that revelation confirming if she is indeed her lover.

He responded, "We weren't explicit about it, because most of the relationships in this show are familial or friendship love. It's not physical love. That character showing up, the story we're telling about them has nothing to do with any previous relationships they've had."

He then went on to reveal that all the Starfleet officers on the show are "baseline bisexual."

He stated, "For me and for the writers as we were making this, we didn't intentionally mean for anybody to be strictly heteronormative or straight or cis. Every Starfleet officer is probably at the baseline bisexual, in a way. That being said, I am not the most amazing person at writing those kind of stories. I think we get a little bit better about it in the second season."

McMahan would also discuss the show's inclusiveness. He stated, "It's something I think we need to be better about. If there's anything I can say about inclusiveness — whether it's about sex or gender or race or anything — is that I know that I can always learn more and be better about it, and I'm always trying to do that."

He then specifically stated they should have made it clearer that Mariner had a female lover, "This is one of those cases where we could have done a better job of explicitly stating the things that the writers always knew about Mariner. It seeps in there in little ways, which even irritates me even more, like you start off the season with Mariner saying, "Whoa, she's like the hottest girl on the ship, are you nervous?" —  that's one of her first lines."

McMahan continued, "That doesn't put a stake in the ground, which I wish we had done a little bit more explicitly. It's always a learning experience. We're going to be trying to be better about it. And we are more explicit about it in the second season."

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