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[COLUMN] Lower Decks Is the Best Star Trek of This Generation | by Darren Mooney
🕑 Added 2024-12-20 15:00:19 +0000 UTC
Note: This piece contains general spoilers for the series finale of Lower Decks.
Star Trek: Lower Decks concluded its final season with “The New Next Generation”, a bumper size finale that includes “a whole extra act, an entire additional eight minutes” to wrap up the show’s five-year mission.
While Paramount did not officially announce Lower Decks would be ending after its fifth season until April 2024, showrunner Mike McMahan conceded as early as October 2023 that “Lower Decks could very well be [a] five-season show.” In pre-premiere interviews, McMahan acknowledged, “So we knew it was gonna be the final season pretty early on in the writing process, and I kind of made a decision to move some stuff that I had planned forward.” The fifth season feels like a final season.
While Lower Decks is, broadly speaking, an episodic half-hour sitcom, the show does consistently thread plots and themes across its seasons. It often sets up ideas, characters and plot elements early in the year, before paying them off in the finale. McMahan admits as much. “There is a running theme across the season of these space potholes that the U.S.S Cerritos is closing that are these rifts in space,” he explained in pre-release publicity for the final season. Much of the season’s drama derives from these interdimensional fissures.
There is something appealingly low stakes in how Lower Decks frames these tears in the fabric of reality. True to the utopian idealism of Star Trek, these openings provide an opportunity for the exchange of knowledge and ideas. When the USS Cerritos encounters a mirror image of itself in the season premiere, “Dos Cerritos”, the other ship is not populated by evil doppelgängers or murderous replacements. Instead, it’s staffed by a crew who simply made slightly different life choices.
This warm humanism is typical of Lower Decks, and speaks to it as the most consistently satisfying of the streaming Star Trek spin-offs. When William Boimler (Jack Quaid) discovers the cause of these tears in the season’s penultimate episode, “Fissure Quest”, it is not some monstrous alien invader – “a Reverse Picard or Borgified Kirk.” It is simply an accidental byproduct of an exploration mission headed by an alternate version Lily Sloane (Alfre Woodard).
This emphasis on parallel universes feels like a fitting central theme for the final season of a Star Trek show, and not just because of how transparently it is indebted to “Parallels”, one of the stronger episodes of the admittedly uneven final season of The Next Generation. Indeed, it is also of a piece with “All Good Things…”, the final episode of The Next Generation, which presented Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) with a vision of one possible future.
That said, Lower Decks has always owed a lot to the seventh season of The Next Generation. It derives its title from another of the season’s standout episodes and McMahan cut his teeth running a satirical twitter feed of episodes from the show’s never-made eighth season. Indeed, the show’s nature as a sitcom and its willingness to embrace the more absurd aspects of Star Trek canon likely contributed to decisions to draw from late Next Generation episodes like “Masks” or “Genesis.”
However, even beyond cementing those ties, this emphasis on parallel universes and alternate possibilities serves as a clever way to reinforce the fact that the core cast of Lower Decks have reached a point of personal equilibrium. It allows the characters to consider different choices that they could have made, and in doing so confront the place in which they have found themselves. It is a fitting theme for a closing set of episodes, a grace note on the series as a whole.
Sometimes these alternative possibilities are literal. In the season premiere, Mariner (Tawny Newsome) meets an alternate version of herself (also Newsome) who has fast-tracked her way to a captaincy. Inevitably, Mariner learns that this other version of herself is unhappy and unfulfilled, that her own life is richer. Sometimes these other parallels are more abstract. In “Of Gods and Angles”, Mariner meets Ensign Olly (Sada Homayoon), another nepo baby who has issues with authority. Contrasting Mariner and Olly illustrates how Mariner has grown over the show’s five seasons.
In “The Best Exotic Nanite Hotel”, Brad Boimler (Quaid) is frustrated when Commander Jack Ransom (Jerry O’Connell) drafts him as the lowest-ranked member of an away team with Chief Andy Billups (Paul Scheer), recognizing that he has been recruited to serve as the token “red shirt.” In a nod to Apocalypse Now¸ the mission is to track down the rogue Admiral Milius (Toby Huss). Milius is frustrated with how his career has gone, and comes to serve as a cautionary tale for Boimler.
Even the Cerritos itself is repeatedly mirrored across the season. “Dos Cerritos” obviously features a literal alternate version of the ship, and “The New Next Generation” includes an action beat where the ship splits into two possible versions of itself in what feels like a nod to the three Enterprises present at the climax of “All Good Things…” However, “Starbase 80?!” confronts the crew with the eponymous installation, another dysfunctional organ of Starfleet that works in its own unique way.
As such, there is a charming thematic cohesion to the final season of Lower Decks. It is not the best or most consistent season of the show. It is never quite as smart or as distinctly itself as the show’s third season. However, it is also not the show’s weakest season, and represents a considerable improvement from the rather messy and unambitious fourth season. It captures the appealing low-stakes vibe of Lower Decks, cementing Lower Decks as the most consistent streaming Star Trek show.
Since the end of the first season of Star Trek: Discovery in 2017, the Star Trek franchise has existed in something of a perpetual existential and nostalgic crisis. For almost seven years at this point, through a variety of shows and spin-offs, the Star Trek franchise has desperately tried to turn back time and recapture the halcyon days of the Berman era of the 1990s. For a franchise about the unlimited potential that lies ahead, Star Trek seemed to be boldly going in reverse.
The second of this wave of Star Trek shows was Picard, which turned into a fully-fledged museum to The Next Generation in its final season. The third live action Star Trek streaming show, Strange New Worlds, was built around the characters from the original 1964 Star Trek pilot that never made it to air, and which built its first season arc around the necessity of Christopher Pike (Anson Mount) ending up in his cool wheelchair from a November 1966 episode of Star Trek to preserve canon.
There is a broader debate to be had about the sustainability of this approach in the long term, of the viability of producing franchise content designed primarily to appeal to the nostalgia of ageing fans instead of attracting a younger and newer audience, of whether one can go home again or step in the same river twice, but Paramount made their opinion on that matter crystal clear when they cancelled Star Trek: Prodigy – the only wave of these shows since the first season of Discovery to be aimed a wider audience – after only two seasons.
If one is to take this era of Star Trek on its own terms, and to judge it in accordance with its own priorities, Lower Decks is very obviously the best of this generation of Star Trek spin-offs. It is nostalgic. It is designed to appeal to existing audiences. It is full of references to things that the viewer already knows, and it occasionally falls victim to the same impulses of later Discovery, Picard and Strange New Worlds in assuming that acknowledging a thing is equivalent to doing a thing.
However, it is also the only one of these shows that seems to understand the material that it is trying to emulate. So much of later Discovery, Picard and Strange New Worlds can feel like a Star Trek cargo cult, a collection of familiar tropes and iconography arranged in a recognizable pattern with the expectation that iterating over such material will produce comparable results, without understanding why The Next Generation worked and how times have changed in the decades since.
Lower Decks has two clear advantages over its contemporaries. While it is doing many of the same things, it operates in a different genre and a different format as a half-hour animated sitcom. Indeed, this has always been the show’s secret weapon. Even structurally, the utopian idealism of The Next Generation is no longer the purview of hour-long dramas, but instead the remit of half-hour workplace sitcoms like Abbott Elementary or the shows of Michael Schur.
Even the simple act of reconfiguring classic Star Trek plots by adding jokes and cutting the runtime by half added an energy to Lower Decks sorely missing from the hollow tribute band repetition of Strange New Worlds. Telling those stories from the perspective of characters outside the senior staff similarly added a little dash of freshness to the mix. It also helped that characters like Mariner and Boimler felt like genuinely new additions to the Star Trek canon rather than reheated archetypes.
Lower Decks could occasionally devolve into a variation of the “Leo pointing” meme. However, somehow that felt more forgivable in a low-stakes science-fiction sitcom that was trying to be a good hang than in an earnest argument that the Baby Boomers were the best generation there will ever be and they’ll prove it by vanquishing already-defeated foes or a self-serious knock-off of the work of Ursula Le Guin that serves as a morality play about how important it was that Captain Pike needs to go in the pain chair now.
Lower Decks was perhaps underappreciated and overlooked in discussions of modern Star Trek because it was animated and because it was a sitcom, two modes of television that have historically been dismissed when compared to the praise lavished on prestige live action drama. This is perhaps appropriate, given that the entire premise of Lower Decks was that the show focused on undervalued crew members on an undervalued ship.
However, if one takes modern Star Trek at face value and accepts its ambitions on their own terms, Lower Decks ultimately proved itself top of the line.
Comments
William Alexander
I suppose we should be grateful that the wealth of content is still there (and is readable with Adblock). Peak 2010 era internet isn’t coming back.
JR
Oh yes... I now have a method including two browsers and an incognito mode... But hey, fortunately some of the old articles are still worth it. :)
Darren Mooney
Ah, that’s a shame.
William Alexander
Hoo boy, dipping back into the Escapist without an ad blocker is a nightmare. Even with one it’s pretty bad. Glad to have SW around in its current iteration—it’s a gift.
JR
I get that. I think, I just came a bit late to the classics - for some media as a consequence of my age and for other as a consequence of the delay caused by watching the shows/movies translated and on TV, not in English and the cinema. So for Star Trek in particular, it was never the contemporary context which made it interesting to me, but rather its universal ideas. Sure, at a certain age I would get a cold war metaphor. But in my most formative years, the Cold War itself was a metaphor and a historic event. This is not to take away from your point. It's just to illustrate where my viewpoint is coming from. If I'm being honest, I personally might have trouble even re-reading books I strongly anchor in the contemporary context in which they were written and in which I read them - let alone appreciate a later-made adaptation which doesn't add enough.
Darren Mooney
Oh, yeah. But the flipside is that it is now as easy to watch "Balance of Terror" or "Yesterday's Enterprise" as it is to watch "A Quality of Mercy." They're on the same app. They've both been remastered. It takes as many clicks to get to to them as it does to "A Quality of Mercy." But I think there is a diminished artistic value. I have no problem with revisiting or remaking existing works. (Indeed, I'd argue that it would probably be more honest just to straight-up remake "Star Trek" than to do this half-measure.) I love both versions of "Dune." I really liked "Nosferatu", which is opening next weekend. I have a morbid fascination with Gus Van Sant's "Psycho", although I contend that is best viewed through the prism of Soderbergh's "Psychos", which is free to watch online. My issue with "Strange New Worlds" is that none of these references and homages have anything to say, beyond referencing things that it assumes the audience already recognises. They aren't about anything but "Star Trek." So, like, "Balance of Terror" is about the idea that in this modern cold war, soldiers on both sides are not so different from one another, both serving their patriotic ideals, and that preserving the peace might mean having to kill a good person. While also conceding that for all America presents itself as "the good guys" who fought racism during the Second World War, racism was still a real problem. "Yesterday's Enterprise" is about the idea that the current moment - "the unipolar moment" or "the end of history" - is really the exception rather than the rule, and is not a natural or default state, but something much more precarious. Whereas "A Quality of Mercy" is solely about - as I describe it in the article - "Cap'n Pike's gotta go in the pain chair, because we all remember The Menagerie, right?" It's not about anything but itself. It doesn't have anything to say about the world in which we live. It's grand thesis statement is, "You like this thing from the sixties, right? You like the way it looked and the way it was plotted?" And - to me, admittedly - that was never what I liked about "Star Trek." I liked that it had things to say about the world in which it existed, using the science-fiction trappings as allegory.
JR
I mean, the classic answer to "Why would I ever watch B and not just rewatch A?" was "Because B is running right now while A isn't.", isn't it? And I think that's still true to a degree. Before my mother will go through the hassle to make an old movie/series episode/... available for herself, she'll watch what's running on TV or what's on the front pages of a streaming service. And seeking out the good old stuff always needs a little more knowledge than just "Man, there was this cool Trek episode about X years ago." So, for the average viewer, there's always an interaction cost barrier that makes stuff the connoisseur deems regurgitated momentarily more attractive. I know, that as an answer to your rhetorical question this is somewhat beside your point. I just don't think a "remake" of a kind isn't necessarily disrespectful to the viewer, despite its diminished artistic value.
Precious Roy
The hamfisted commentary was certainly bad, I was personally more offended by how badly it misrepresented the science of astronomy. In order to resolve an object the size of a starship in a different solar system, you'd need a telescope as wide as, say, the distance between the Earth and the moon. ST:Voyager obviously paid tribute to Hubble by having it's most iconic images at the time prominently displayed in astrometrics. But the SNW writers seem to have seen modern extrasolar imaging and thought "hey what if we saw an alien spaceship with this??" COMPLETELY IGNORING the fact that we can only just barely view things the size of a PLANET nevermind somehow reverse engineering f'ing Warp Drive from a series of still images taken in the vicinity of a "black hole." ffffffffffff
Darren Mooney
Oh, if it's your first TOS episode... I'd maybe start with "Journey to Babel" or "Amok Time." They're ones that are much closer to later "Star Trek." (But yeah, "Balance of Terror" rocks. So does "Errand of Mercy", "The Devil in the Dark", "Mirror, Mirror" and so many more.)
Jeroen Delcour
I agree it makes sense to branch out if the goal is to continue the brand indefinitely, which fits Hollywood's current cultural fracking strategy, as you have described more eloquently in your columns than I could. I guess I'm just sick of that. Heck, the best shows of the recent past feel like original stories dressed up as spin-offs to get the green light: The Mandalorian, Andor, Agatha All Along... (I don't know if that's actually what happened, of course). In that framework, I see your point now. I just wish the framework were different. Thanks for taking the time to reply. I love your columns exactly because you help me see a new perspective. And I'll be sure to watch "Balance of Terror" as my first TOS episode :)
Darren Mooney
But the whole point of the brand is that, if it's going to continue to generate narrative, it needs to expand and grow. The Venn diagram doesn't get smaller, because all those previous shows still exist and can be watched at anytime. It gets larger. It grows and expands, because now "what Star Trek is" is bigger than it was before you did the thing. As opposed to sitting and stewing in water so stale it's turning septic. ("Balance of Terror" rocks, by the way. One of the best episodes in the history of the franchise.)
Jeroen Delcour
I have seen those episodes (except "Balance of Terror"), and disagree that the SNW ones are just poor photocopies. I see the parallels, but hadn't even noticed, let alone be bothered by them, until you pointed them out. But I haven't seen anywhere near the full 800 episodes, maybe that's why it feels less stale to me. I see your point how it's always the same setting (Federation space ship with a mostly human crew), but I'd argue a stationary setting or full alien cast would be more limiting. A ship crew can travel to a colony or station and have full episodes down there (and often do). And while the alien races are interesting as caricatures of familiar human traits, they'd feel shallow and unrelatable when not anchored by a mostly human cast. For me, the established tone with its semi-serious mix of ethical dilemmas and exciting action is precisely why I watch Star Trek. I have no interest in the lore or world building. Yes, you could write a Romeo & Juliet story between a Vulcan and a Klingon and make it a romcom starring Jack Black. Or a coming-of-age sitcom of an awkward teenage Spock growing up as a half-human on Vulcan who ultimately finds a loveable group of misfits to call his friends. Or Ferengi space Indiana Jones swashbuckling his way through the Beta Quadrant. But would the Star Trek lore really add anything? You'd only shrink the Venn diagram that is your potential audience. I'm all for new stories, but if they're too new, they're better served without the baggage of an existing brand.
Darren Mooney
Yep, the first episode of "Strange New Worlds" was such a bleak illustration of what happens when a franchise eats its own tail. "Oh, you're doing a Cold War metaphor from 1964. Great. That's definitely relevant to the world in which we live and not just a product of you having watching 'A Taste of Armageddon' recently." And then it has the gall to invoke January 6th, as if it's making a profound comment. You weren't doing a metaphor for January 6th! You could do a metaphor for January 6th! You should do a metaphor for January 6th! But this was just a reheated Cold War metaphor from the mid-sixties that exists mainly as a reference to how "Star Trek" used to actually engage with contemporary politics.
Darren Mooney
It's not that storytelling formats can be old-fashioned, but there are really only so many variations of the same premise you can do within a narrow confine. (And, to be fair, 800 is a fairly sizable number of variations, given most shows only run to 100 episodes.) I'm of the opinion you could very easily do a host of episodic "Star Trek" that feels fresh compared to what came before. I argue that "Lower Decks" does it here, simply by changing the genre (comedy), the episode length (halving it) and the format (animation), so that hitting the same beats and plot elements feels somewhat novel. You could also do something like what "Deep Space Nine" did, which was to set a "Star Trek" show somewhere other than a starship. "Deep Space Nine" was set on a space station. It would be fun to set a show on a colony world. Or outside the Federation. There are options. But if you are setting a "Star Trek" show on a Federation ship with a Starfleet crew and it has to be relatively serious in tone and it has to adhere to the established format and it has to hit the necessary beats and there's a laundry list of things you can't do, then you are eventually just going to run out of stories you can tell within that template. When I reviewed "Strange New Worlds" for "The Escapist", the first half of every review was me exhaustedly going, "Okay, so this week we're just doing another iteration of [these four or five episodes from the 800-episode history of Star Trek]," feeling like a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy. In what universe am I ever going to get the urge to watch "Children of the Comet" and not just put on "Fight or Flight" instead? In what world is my first impulse going to be to watch "A Quality of Mercy", not "Yesterday's Enterprise" and "Balance of Terror?"
Darren Mooney
If you're looking for recommendations within the franchise, both "Next Generation" and "Deep Space Nine" are also great shows.
Darren Mooney
Yeah, it's kinda refreshing that it isn't until the finale that we get an honest-to-goodness "we saved the universe?!" plot, which felt true to the spirit of the show.
Darren Mooney
I hope you enjoy!
Precious Roy
I love Lower Decks, and watching the finale made me genuinely tear up. It's the only modern Trek show that feels like it was made by people who actually love Star Trek (Beyond is easily the best of the new movies, in part for the same reason). I really love your "cargo cult" metaphor; the pilot episode of SNW was abysmally stupid because it did feel like someone trying to assemble something that looked like Trek without comprehending any of the reasons why it worked. SNW -can- be good (I actually think The Elysian Kingdom is underrated as a fun weird scifi romp with a real heart, and Those Old Scientists is a perfect episode of Star Trek) but it mostly seems to only occasionally succeed in spite of itself. Lower Decks definitely belongs in the upper ranks with DS9 and TNG.
Jeroen Delcour
I found Lower Deck's humor too... crass, for lack of a better word. It's partially just not to my taste, but it also feels out of place for a Star Trek setting, which imho is at its best in more philosophical stories, even if they draw heavily from existing works (nothing new under the sun if you squint hard enough). Maybe the juxtaposition is supposed to be funny and I just don't get it. FWIW, I actually liked Strange New Worlds for returning to the episodic character development format, even if some episodes were better than others. It never occured to me that storytelling formats can be considered old-fashioned. What did you think of the cross-over episode?
ParaParadox
I never got into Star Trek, but Lower Decks never made me feel like I *needed* to have. It was a solid show first and foremost that happened to be Star Trek. The writing and animation supported both the serious and comedic tones when it needed to and having a seasonal overarching story made each episode that much more compelling.
Zia McVay
Best Trek since DS9 went off the air. Honestly felt like something fresh and new but also very true to the core of Star Trek in a way little else has been as the franchise spirals into actionized spinoffs with repeatedly overblown stakes.
GayBearDaddy2
I guess I need to finally watch Lower Decks. I just finished Castlevania, so having another show I can "watch" while I play through classic Final Fantasy games is good.
