‘Star Trek: Lower Decks’ Has Become a Weird Gem in the ‘Trek’ Universe

When Star Trek: Lower Decks premiered in the summer of 2020 — so long ago that its streaming home at the time was called CBS All Access, rather than Paramount+ — it seemed caught between two potentially incompatible goals. On the one hand, the animated series, run by Mike McMahan, wanted to satirize all of the most ridiculous ideas the Star Trek franchise had introduced since the mid-20th century. And on the other, it wanted to tell genuine, thrilling Star Trek stories, set a decade or so after the events of the various Nineties spinoffs.

Parody and sincerity can work hand in hand — see, for instance, Galaxy Quest, which simultaneously mocks all things Star Trek and is better and more poignant than all but a handful of official Star Trek films — but it’s hard. And the combination really wasn’t working in those early episodes. At the time, I lamented that all the Next Generation Easter Eggs and stabs at rip-roaring adventure “seem to be holding McMahan back from making Lower Decks the wildly irreverent — and, more importantly, actually funny — comedy it so clearly aspires to be.” But Next Generation and Deep Space Nine took a while to find themselves, and so did Lower Decks. As the series’ fourth season begins streaming today, it’s become a highlight of this current phase of TV Trek.

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McMahan and his collaborators haven’t made any radical changes over the years. The show now is fundamentally the same show it was from the start(*), focusing on a quartet of extremely junior officers on a third-rate Federation starship. It’s just better at integrating its serious and silly sides.

(*) This includes the one component I don’t love, and that still feels like a carryover from McMahan’s work on Rick and Morty: Lower Decks can be extremely gross, with lots of graphic imagery of disgusting, oozing aliens doing things that are unpleasant to look at. Tonally, it doesn’t fit with most of the other things the series is trying to do. 

Much of the credit is due to the work that the writers and the voice cast have done in establishing its central characters(*) as people who have heroic traits as well as idiotic ones. So, for instance, overeager Starfleet history nerd Brad Boimler (Jack Quaid, who between this, The Boys, and My Adventures with Superman is the busiest actor in genre TV at the moment) is able to do great things whenever he manages to stop overthinking every decision. Beckett Mariner (Tawny Newsome) has all the traits of being a big-deal officer akin to all of Boimler’s idols, but she’s allergic to the idea of responsibility, in part because her mother, Carol Freeman (Dawnn Lewis), is captain of their ship. D’Vana Tendi (Noël Wells) comes across as a sweet, vulnerable cinnamon roll, but she’s actually a member of a legendary family of Orion pirates, perhaps more proficient with violence than anyone else in the crew. And Samanthan Rutherford (Eugene Cordero) seems way too hung up on nerdy engineering minutiae, but he’s also a genius capable of building an artificial intelligence powerful enough to threaten both the ship and the entire galaxy.

(*) Late in the previous season, the main foursome became something of a quintet with the arrival of T’Lyn (Gabrielle Ruiz), a Vulcan science officer who finds her assignment to the Cerritos beneath her. The new season essentially gives her equal storytelling weight to anyone on the show who is not Boimler or Mariner. 

It’s an effective balance, and the more we’ve gotten to know both the main characters and the more senior staff (including Jerry O’Connell as smug first officer Jack Ransom, Gillian Vigman as the catlike ship’s doctor, Paul Scheer as the chief engineer, and Paul F. Tompkins as the utterly useless ship’s counselor), the better that Lower Decks has managed to find both the comedy and the action in all of them.

In the new season, several of the characters receive promotions, from lowly ensigns to only slightly less lowly lieutenants junior grade. It’s in some ways a mild distinction, since everyone is still doing the kind of grunt work the more senior officers want no part of. But moving even one rung up the organizational ladder leads to the terrifying reality that Boimler and some of the others are now in a position to give orders to the people who still rank below them. The show has a lot of fun with this new level of responsibility, without having to deviate too much from the basic premise.

And, as always, Lower Decks remains an obsessive Trekkie’s name-dropping best friend. The season premiere is called “Twovix,” and functions as a sequel to “Tuvix,” a Star Trek: Voyager episode infamous for how Captain Janeway resolved a Trolley Problem scenario where a transporter accident merged two crewmembers into one new being. (Lower Decks does not mince words about what it thinks of Janeway’s actions.) Later episodes include Tendi taking two of her friends to visit her family on Orion, and Boimler and the others touring the Ferengi homeworld (in an episode with cameos from two Deep Space Nine characters). And more broadly, episodic plots tend to incorporate, and comment on, familiar tropes from throughout all of Trek, like Mariner and Ransom inspecting a menagerie of various alien races, which Mariner keeps insisting is a prison.

“Twovix” isn’t actually the first time this year that we’ve seen members of the Cerritos crew. Back in the spring, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds did a crossover episode of sorts, where Boimler and Mariner accidentally traveled back in time and spent an awkward day inadvertently causing problems for Captain Pike and the rest of the Enterprise crew. It was a testament to the versatility of Quaid and Newsome that they were able to make the live-action versions of these characters feel true to how they come across in two dimensions. But it was also a mark of how far Lower Decks has come. Strange New Worlds is the platonic ideal of a straightforward Star Trek show — like Lower Decks, it’s brought back the Mission of the Week format that Discovery and Picard unwisely discarded — and while it has room for comedy, it most frequently aims for drama. The point of the episode was that Boimler and Mariner are too ridiculous and clumsy to belong on the Enterprise, but the fact that they were able to co-exist with Mr. Spock for even an hour of television was remarkable, and an honor well-earned by a show that’s really come into its own.

The first two episodes of Star Trek: Lower Decks Season Four are streaming now on Paramount+, with additional episodes releasing weekly. I’ve seen the season’s first eight episodes.

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