Full spoilers follow for this episode.
Star Trek: Lower Decks, the latest series from CBS All Access in the modern Trek TV pantheon that follows on the heels of Star Trek: Discovery and Star Trek: Picard, is clearly a unique, um, enterprise, as not only the first ongoing Star Trek comedy series but also an animated production at that.
What’s that you say? Star Trek shouldn’t be animated, and it’s certainly not a comedy? If Samuel T. Cogley, attorney at law, were here, he’d remind the reader that Star Trek first did animation starting way back in 1973 for two seasons of The Animated Series, which was created under the guiding hand of franchise mastermind Gene Roddenberry himself. And comedy has been a recurring aspect of every Trek series, with specifically comedic episodes dating back to The Original Series’ “The Trouble with Tribbles” in 1967. So yeah, comedy and animation aren’t really new to Star Trek.
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But combining the two to be the guiding approach to an entire show? That is new. And so far it works really well in Lower Decks.
Created by Mike McMahan (Rick and Morty, Solar Opposites), Lower Decks is a distinctly Next Generation-era series; it looks like TNG in terms of ships, costumes (mostly), computer interfaces, props, and so on, but it also feels like that beloved show in that its A/B (and sometimes C) storylines could essentially be retrofitted onto the Enterprise-D and wouldn’t seem that out of place. Next Gen fans will love Lower Decks for its faithfulness to that particular era of Star Trek.
And yet, this very much isn’t Captain Picard’s ship. Featuring the crew of the U.S.S. Cerritos, Lower Decks’ focus is on the less important missions of Starfleet and the Federation. While Picard handles “first contact” with alien races, the Cerritos team comes in after the exciting stuff is over to deal with “second contact” — basically when all the paperwork has to be taken care of. And not just that, but the focus of the show is mainly on the less glamorous jobs on the ship, and those who undertake them. Specifically, the main characters are a group of ensigns: the underachieving but quite capable Beckett Mariner (Tawny Newsome), the by-the-book but tries-way-too-hard Brad Boimler (Jack Quaid), ship newcomer and eternal optimist D’Vana Tendi (Noël Wells), and recently cyborg-ed gearhead Sam Rutherford (Eugene Cordero).
It’s through D’Vana that this first episode, which was written by McMahan, introduces us to the goings-on of the Cerritos, including the ensign quarters (basically beds in a hallway), their location on the ship (the very, very bottom, of course), and Mariner’s favorite holodeck program (“all nude Olympic training facility”), among other things.
But even though Lower Decks episodes are only 24 minutes long, “Second Contact” manages to introduce the ship and the crew while also providing an adventure for Mariner and Boimler during that titular away mission on the planet below, a quasi-zombie plague onboard ship, and a fledgling romance for Rutherford. And it all seamlessly fits together, is often exciting, and is pretty funny too. Sure, some of the jokes in this first episode don’t always work, but when the best ones land, they really land.
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The show looks terrific, with the animation by studio Titmouse seamlessly translating the Trek world into 2D drawings. It’s all very smooth and stylish, conveying a modern feel that still manages to reach back nostalgically to the TNG era… while also telling stories technically set after that show.
The premiere episode also proves why Star Trek makes so much sense for animation, as the budgetary constraints of live-action television just aren’t here. If the show needs a Benzite officer, the team can draw one. If it needs rampaging zombie crewmembers spitting black alien-bile, no problem. Giant spider-creature attack? They got you covered.
The senior officers of the ship are the supporting characters in this show, but so far Jerry O’Connell as the Riker-esque blowhard Commander Jack Ransom takes the cake out of this group. A close second is Gillian Vigman’s grouchy T’Ana, chief medical officer (and also a cat lady). Meanwhile, Dawnn Lewis’s Captain Carol Freeman, as we learn by the end of this episode, is also Mariner’s mother, which is obviously setting up a season arc story between the strict mom and rebellious daughter.
I’ve seen the first four episodes of Lower Decks so far, and while I can’t talk specifics about what’s to come yet, I will say that as the setting and format kick into gear (for the show’s creators as well as the viewer), things get tighter and click even better than they do here. One of Star Trek executive producer/head honcho Alex Kurtzman’s mandates has been to find different approaches for each new Trek show in the CBS All Access era, and with Lower Decks they’ve done that in spades.
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Questions and Notes from the Q Continuum:
- This series is so TNG that even its first act cast and crew credits are in the same blue font as that show.
- Gotta love the opening titles, which sum up the show perfectly: Boldly going but kinda screwing things up a bit along the way.
- “Did I eat flesh…?”
- T’Ana is of course a Caitian, which is a callback to M’Ress from The Animated Series.
- So. Many. References. Mariner in particular is a treasure trove of namedrops, but this show is bursting at the seams in terms of Trek continuity and Easter eggs.
Source: IGN.com Star Trek: Lower Decks Series Premiere Review