And now, below are some highlights of the audio commentary for “A Mathematically Perfect Redemption,” which was done by Kether Donohue (not "Dnohue"), Mike McMahan, and frequent Lower Decks episode director Barry J. Kelly. He didn’t direct “Mathematically” (Jason Zurek did), but he loves it. (I like this divisive episode about Donohue’s Peanut Hamper character a bit more than most LD fans do because it’s a biting takedown of Avatar and white savior movies.)
McMahan: “Writer Ann Kim once told us that she thought that big hunky bird men in video games were really hot, so we intentionally set this episode on a planet of hunky bird men because she wrote this one.”
McMahan: “[The episode] really split the fandom. I, like, woke up the next day, and I had all these tweets where half the people were like, ‘Burn Lower Decks at the stakes for making us watch the bird people!’ And then the other half were like, ‘This is the funniest thing I’ve ever seen in my life,’ which I guess means we’re doing our job right.”
Kelly: “I love that they were polarized.”
McMahan: “You’re not seeing a lot of exposed oblique muscles in Star Trek. We need to push that agenda more often… Rawda [the love interest voiced by Harry Shum Jr.] has not a lot of obliques. I think that would have been a muscle too far if we had added that… CBS doesn’t allow pelvic obliques. That’s not a CBS thing.”
Donohue: “My favorite parts of voiceover is when I picture it being live action instead of animation… You could picture this a live-action movie. When I watch this, I feel like I’m watching a $100 million, like, studio movie, live action.”
McMahan: “You can blow ships up, you can kill people, there can be, like, planets that are dying, but if you show a robot, implied off-screen, fellating a bird alien, oh, does that set [Star Trek fans] off.”
McMahan: “When I pitched the name Peanut Hamper, everybody told me I was an idiot. They were like, ‘Do not call this character Peanut Hamper.’ And I was like, ‘I wanna name a robot that will think it’s cool [but] isn’t cool,’ and then everybody begged me not to do it... In Donnie Darko, there was something where they were like, ‘Cellar door’s the most beautiful English phrase,’ and I was like, ‘That’s stupid. How about ‘Peanut Hamper’? I was just trying to think of a thing that wasn’t a beautiful phrase. Now I like it. Now I like that Rawda calls her Peanut.”
McMahan on Peanut Hamper’s betrayal of Rawda, a moment half the audience hated, while the other half found it to be hilarious: “We’ve seen Dances with Wolves. We’ve seen these kinds of stories before. We’ve never seen a double double-cross in one of them, which made me laugh.”
