Lower Decks’ Cast Promise an Explosive Final Season (Exclusi…

The crew of the U.S.S. Cerritos is shipping out for one last set of wild galactic adventures.

The fifth and final season of Star Trek: Lower Decks, premiering Thursday, Oct. 24, will see Mariner (Tawny Newsome), Boimer (Jack Quaid), Tendi (Noël Wells) and Rutherford (Eugene Cordero) embark on new missions as newly-minted lieutenants.

The Paramount+ show not only promises to show the quartet in a somewhat new light but also throws them into a new set of missions promising “more explosions” than ever.

“It’s a blow up and a glow up,” Wells, 37, tells PEOPLE exclusively.

“We all have more responsibilities in season 5. We all grow as humans, and characters, and people, and we find out more of what they’re like when they have more responsibility,” says Cordero, 46, adding, “They don’t feel as ‘Lower Deck-y‘ in season 5, but then there are moments where they do.”

Lower Decks’ season 5 trailer hints at the issues and obstacles the crew will face, including skirmishes with aliens, a decontamination scene that’s a nod to the prequel show Star Trek: Enterprise and an episode overstuffed with different versions of Star Trek: Voyager’s Harry Kim (Garrett Wang) hailing from parallel universes. (It appears as though one version of Harry finally got the promotion he deserved.)

“Garrett Wang, he has so much personality and energy, and he is such a vibe as Harry Kim, that we couldn’t have just one,” Newsome, 41, teases. “So we had to find a way to have multiple Garretts, multiple Harrys, because the fans — and we’ve been waiting for so long to see Harry — everybody’s been waiting for Harry to come back, so we had to do it big.”

With Lower Decks entering its final season, Cordero says the sentiment among the cast is less “bittersweet” and more “celebratory.”

“It’s never really over in this franchise,” he says. “So we’re just happy that we get to do another season. We’re real deep into the canon of these characters, and we’ve learned so much about them, and there’s so much more to learn in season 5.”

While Wells will miss how Star Trek fans “genuinely love” her and her character Tendi — “Social media can be kind of a harsh place, but all of the Trek fan interactions have been really positive,” she explains — Cordero admits he’ll remember Lower Decks’ boundless optimism.

“I’m going to miss the positivity, and the ownership of something that you love,” he continues, adding that he’ll miss character, in particular. “You rarely get to have that much passion and energy towards the thing that you actually are good at.”

“When you record a cartoon, usually, it’s somebody that does a dopey this or that, and I think that positivity is there, but really, what we’re seeing in this show, which I will miss, is the friendships. I think I will miss this, the Tendi/Rutherford relationship, the Mariner/Rutherford, all of them, the Rutherford with Boimler, all of that. All of those moments, I’m just going to miss those interactions.”

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Season 5 of Star Trek: Lower Decks premieres Thursday, Oct. 24 on Paramount+.