Star Trek: 10 Things You Didn't Know About Rom

2. The Lobes For Lower Decks

After 24 years of absence in the real world, Rom and Leeta returned to our screens in animated form in the Star Trek: Lower Decks episode Parth Ferengi's Heart Place. In universe, only six years had passed. Rom was still Nagus. Leeta was First Clerk. Both had the lobes, and the baseballs, for a bit of business with the Federation.

On The 7th Rule podcast in February 2024, his heart forever in the right place, Max Grodénchik called reprising the role "a dream come true". Co-star Chase Masterson agreed. It was, in fact, Masterson who was largely responsible for the episode's existence in the first place, and the one to let Grodénchik know the good news.

In a 2023 interview, Lower Decks creator and showrunner Mike McMahan told Collider that in around 2011, when he was still an assistant, Masterson (and Wil Wheaton) had vouched for him at a Comic-Con party, preventing him from being thrown out, and that despite the fact that Masterson had only just met him. Years later, McMahan got to return the kindness. "I literally wrote this Ferenginar episode to have her be in [it]," he added to Collider.

Masterson is equally the champion of kind in her charity work, proving, as Rom would say, that "equality and hospitality are more profitable in the long run".