Losing Lower Decks

A spoiler-filled assessment of the final season of streaming Trek's unexpected gem

It should be obvious by now to readers of this Substack that I am a true Star Trek dead-ender and will watch whatever they put out—even if they put it behind a paywall, even if they package it as a series of increasingly ill-conceived serialized plots, even if they spend a whole season driving around present-day Los Angeles. And while I have a lot of critiques of the recent streaming-era (which you can find in my forthcoming book, available for preorder directly from the press, from Bookshop.org, or from the Evil Empire), I have found that most of it is good enough to scratch that Star Trek itch, albeit sometimes barely.

Yet there are two streaming-era installments that I truly love. The first is Discovery season 1, which boldly reinvented Star Trek for the streaming era and gave us truly prestige-level writing and production values for the first (and arguably only) time in the franchise’s history. I’ve compared it favorably to the award-winning HBO Watchmen series and even based an academic course around it. I know that many fans disagree with my assessment, and those fans are wrong. I will argue with them till my dying day.

Given my reasons for embracing Discovery season 1, my other true love from streaming Trek may perhaps be unexpected—namely, Lower Decks. Ironically, it was the first new Trek production that I didn’t watch immediately. Seeing previews and learning that the creator, Mike McMahan, was a co-creator of Rick and Morty, I was a little scared and even preemptively offended at the existence of the show. They had just established that Star Trek could be sophisticated again, worthy of sustained academic analysis, and they were going to turn around and make a Rick and Morty knock-off with a Star Trek skin? When my impulse toward completism finally wore down my resistence, I was almost immediately won over. Though the pacing for the first episode in particular was a little manic and the tone a bit harsh, it was easy to tell that the jokes came from a place of genuine affection. The key thing for me is that they realized that they weren’t making fun of Star Trek, but rather picking up on absurdities that had always been a part of it. If Discovery season 1 (and only season 1!) reminded us that Star Trek could be sophisticated drama for adults, Lower Decks reminded us that it could also be about the crazy antics of guys who look like black-and-white cookies or the scourge of hyper-procreative fuzzballs.

The very premise of the show is a kind of joke. We follow the crew of the USS Cerritos, which is tasked with the unglamorous duty of making Second Contact with civilizations visited by the more prestigious ships. Simply by pointing out the fact that the Enterprise gets to introduce momentous changes into entire planetary civilizations and then just… fly away, they already inject a note of absurdity into even the most serious and thought-provoking episodes. At the same time, though, the premise fills the very plot hole it points out, while creating an in-text reason for the crew’s adventures to be very referential to previous episodes.

Of course, none of this would work at all if they didn’t capture the heart of Star Trek, which is to be a kind of utopian workplace drama centered on a supportive “chosen family.” The core friend group of “Lower Deckers” are all charmingly naive, enthusiastic, and loyal, and the main character, Beckett Mariner, is one of the franchise’s greatest creations. Her charisma, thirst for adventure, and strange mix of competence and recklessness all compare favorably to Captain Kirk—yet she contrives to remain a low-ranked peon, preferring front-line action to responsibility and paperwork. Her sidekick and mentee is Brad Boimler, a neurotic by-the-book careerist who gradually learns to loosen up. Rounding out the friend group is Rutherford (a gifted engineer with neural implants) and Tendi (an Orion eager to shed the baggage of her species’ criminal reputation—and, as it turns out, her own family’s criminal history). In later seasons, they add T’Lyn, a Vulcan who most often serves as comic relief due to her flat delivery.

Perhaps just as importantly, the Lower Deckers’ adventures are much more episodic than the often overwrought serialized seasons of Discovery or Picard. They do build in an overarching plotline for each season and some kind of arc for each character, but those threads usually only come together in season finales. And at least in the early seasons, they felt earned. They weren’t just high stakes for the sake of high stakes, but emerged organically from the characters’ experiences and hopes. In later seasons, though, they began to feel more and more contrived. Each episode of season 4, for instance, included a seemingly unmotivated scene of a different alien ship being destroyed by a mysterious vessel. Ultimately, we learn that the ships were not being destroyed, but recruited—by Nick Locarno! You know, the charismatic fellow student who convinces Wesley to go along with a dangerous maneuver that gets their friend killed, that one time? That season also sees our ensigns promoted to lieutenants (junior grade), setting up an arc where we learn that Mariner’s love of the lower ranks is based in that hoariest of contemporary TV clichés: trauma. It turns out that she is still suffering from PTSD from serving in the Dominion War (previously a source of fun “she knows everyone!”-style scenes) and shuns command because she doesn’t want to send her comrades to their death. Bummer!

And that brings us to season 5, which was, I’m sad to say, a disappointment on almost every level. Now to be fair, it seems the creators were not aware they were being cancelled until the very late stages of production, and in any case, it would have been difficult for them to live up to the expectations of fans who want every one of the final installments of their beloved show to be extraordinary. Even in that context, though, there are too many forgettable episodes based on what we could generously call tertiary characters. Worst of all in that regard is a B-plot focused on the ship’s counselor, who had previously served as little more than a sight gag—the most prominent example of the show’s obsession with avian species (which feature heavily in the original Animated Series but understandably much less so in live-action shows). Again, if this had been just another season amid a longer run, the drop-off in quality might not have stood out as much. But as a final season, intentional or not, it gave the impression that they had run out of ideas….

…at least until the final two episodes, when it appeared that they had come up with far too many ideas, most of them unpromising. In the context of the established characters, they arranged for a transfer of the current captain (incidentally also Mariner’s mother). This paved the way for the seemingly superficial, workout-obsessed first officer to become captain, and for him to appoint Mariner and Boimler as co-first officers. They had already made Tendi and T’Lynn co-senior science officers, so apparently they were really spoiling for friends to compete against each other for roles. Meanwhile, Rutherford removed his implants, which turn out to have been suppressing his emotions—explaining why Tendi and Rutherford had never been romantically involved. In short, many of our characters are set up to have more conflict, while a charming friendship is set to be ruined. Ruh roh!

On the conceptual level, too, the creators give the impression that they believe they are “swinging for the fences.” The overarching plot of the season focuses on “subspace fissures” that are opening up seemingly at random, creating potentially damaging openings to alternate dimensions. In the penultimate episode, we learn that the fissures are artificially created and that a transporter clone of Boimler (let’s just run with it) has been leading a mission to stop whoever is behind it—joined by a crew of alternate-universe versions of favorite characters. The highlight here is surely a version of Garak and Bashir who are married (and even kiss on screen), but they also spend a great deal of time on a weird frenemy relationship between some version of T’Pol and Curzon Dax. The denouement has our heroes struggling to close a dangerous fissure and finally concluding that they can only stabilize it—creating a permanent opening to alternate universes, which the Cerritos crew will take the lead in exploring.

We may never know how much of this was created after the cancellation notice came and how much was planned all along. But after discussing this important issue with Gerry Canavan, I can only conclude that the plan was to “pivot” into a new concept for the show—one in which they could indulge in even more gimmicks and guest stars without affecting the Prime Universe. That is, they could finally become the Rick and Morty knock-off they initially appeared to be. (The penultimate episode seems to be setting us up to accept this outcome, as the duplicate Boimler starts off complaining about how much multiverse plots suck but then we learn that it’s actually a valid and life-affirming option.)

Perhaps, therefore, it is a mercy that the show was cancelled right before it promised to grant itself greater creative freedom—at the price of rendering itself irrelevant to the rest of the franchise. It was admittedly always a bit of a stretch to incorporate Lower Decks into official franchise canon, with its very different tone and frequent fourth-wall breaking. But for me, that tension was part of the appeal, and the show was at its best when it realized it needed to earn its place in the Prime Timeline by winning a place in fans’ hearts. And they did that in part by daring to move stories forward, sometimes on a very large scale (as with the beginning of negotiations for the Ferengi to join the Federation). As much fun as it was to see some version of Garak and Bashir finally getting together, why not confirm every viewer’s suspicions even more directly by revealing that our Prime Universe Garak and Bashir finally managed to shed a lifetime of hiding and self-deception and admit their profound attraction and bond?

Surely my opinion will change and soften over time—because I am obviously going to be rewatching this show over and over again until the day I die. And that’s because, for all its irony and metacommentary, Lower Decks is the current streaming show that has most made me feel like I am simply inhabiting the world of Star Trek, which is ultimately all the long-time fan is after.