[COLUMN] Lower Decks Is the Best Star Trek of This Generation | by Darren Mooney

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.