"Rarely going where no one has gone before"

A promising start for the new run of Lower Decks comics

I feel like we are amid a bit of a Star Trek desert, at least compared to recent years. One of the two remaining ongoing shows recently ended, there is no set release date for the next season of Strange New Worlds, and the last canonical production to air was, to put it charitably, unwatchable garbage that should be decanonized and deleted (and the earth should be salted wherever it was filmed). Novels have slowed to a trickle since the demise of the novelverse, with most devoted to filling in backstory for Picard. (There are still regular one-off Original Series novels, but if I’m going to read an Original Series novel it’s going to be from their Golden Age in the early 80s.) Comics are the one area of booming activity, with two monthly ongoing titles (one self-titled and one with the subtitle Defiant) chronicling events between Nemesis and Picard. But—though I will inevitably catch up some day—I can’t bring myself to follow them, simply because the stories sound too absurd. (For example, apparently in the current arc Data’s evil brother Lore has somehow caused the universe to blink out of existence.)

My one thin reed of hope is the ongoing Lower Decks comic. The series was positively crying out for a comic adaptation from day one, and not only because of its animated format. The show’s humor felt, with its reliance on sly Easter eggs, like a perfect fit for a comic book aesthetic. And as I wrote earlier, after a somewhat rocky start with a limited series bizarrely focused on a holodeck Dracula, the creative team—headed by veteran comic writer Ryan North—delivered a genuine masterpiece in the form of a Choose Your Own Adventure-formatted graphic novel. I was always going to follow the ongoing series no matter what, but that graphic novel gave me real optimism.

Looking back at the first four issues, which encompass two short story arcs, I am still optimistic, but not yet satisfied. The series is still finding its feet, and in keeping with Lower Decks’s self-referential ethos, the growing pains are explicitly lampshaded. The first mission we witness is chock full of canon references, to the point that the characters themselves marvel at the coincidence that everything they are doing somehow refers back to other ships’ missions, while the second is an attempt at an all-original story.

I enjoyed the first more than the second, particularly the very first issue, which was dense with Animated Series references. But I was impressed by the ambition of the second. Building on real scientific concepts (a Ryan North trademark), it sees our heroes confronted with a new universe that is rapidly expanding to overtake their own and has already destroyed an inhabited star system. More significant, though, is the ending: after much conflict and struggle to find some way to save the new universe (which rapidly evolved a radically different form of sentient life) without destroying the old universe, they discover that they are in a no-win scenario and the only answer is to let the new universe die. One of the strengths of the original show at its best was that it could still explore real emotions in a way that was somehow made more meaningful by the humorous framing. I’m not sure North really sticks the landing on this more serious ending, but the fact that he’s even attempting it shows that he understands that Lower Decks isn’t only about comedy.

Perhaps the most promising thing so far is that the series is so purely episodic—or at least as close as you can get nowadays. The norms of contemporary comics make it very difficult to fit a meaningful story in one issue, so two-parters are the most self-contained option available. What’s more, it’s not set after the end of the series (which set up a new scenario about which I have Very Serious Questions) but at some indeterminate point during its run, such that these adventures presumably come “in between” the existing episodes. That may simply reflect the timing of the series’ release, which partly overlapped with the final episodes of the TV show and hence couldn’t reveal spoilers, but I hope they stick with it. I don’t want to “continue the story” of Lower Decks, I just want more episodes.

And much as I still hate hate hate the “extra” jokes he puts in the margins (reportedly another trademark), it does make me want to check out some of Ryan North’s other work. I’ve placed a library hold on the first volume of his well-received Adventure Time continuation, and I may even dare to betray my DC roots by dipping into his current Fantastic Four run, which apparently has a very Star Trek-like format.

But before I go, I should probably explain the image above, which comes from issue #4 of DC’s 1984 run of Star Trek comics. (Comment below if you would be interested in a post on that comic run, which I recently read in its entirety.) The first major arc of that series bizarrely revives the Excalbians, the rocky telepathic aliens who set up a competition between Abraham Lincoln and Khaless in a particularly ill-judged season 3 episode of The Original Series. The first arc of Lower Decks leans on the same obscure species. Coincidence? Maybe—or maybe this was an intentional tribute to a beloved Star Trek comic series as well as an Easter egg that literally only I would get.