Star Trek: Lower Decks Warps Off

As I think I’ve expressed before, I’m kind of fascinated by Big Franchise storytelling. Please note that the word “fascinated” in the previous sentence is not necessarily meant to be a synonym for “enjoy” or “approve of the existence of.” “Franchise” vs “series” is kind of a know-it-when-you-see-it thing, but broadly we’re talking about long-running multi-media entities that sustain themselves past the contributions of any singular participant.

One of the things that’s interesting to me about those kinds of Franchises is the way that some of them get into a groove and just keep going. Look at Law & Order, which has had at least one show on the air every year for 34 years and going, with no sign of stopping. Something like a thousand hours to date. Every year, 20-40 new hours of Law & Order, forever. Or, The Simpsons, CSI, most soap operas, the “Frasier Crane” Cinematic Universe. How much of any of that do you need? But, if people still like it, why stop making it?

Then you have the ones that get stuck in these weird cyclical, boom-to-bust loops. They’ll start with something popular, have a period of commercial and maybe even critical success, and then a sort of death drive sets in where the material gets worse and worse until augers into the ground, dead. The concept will usually eke out an existence surviving in spin-off or fan-made material until someone else comes along, dusts it off, and says “why not just do a good job?” and the cycle starts all over, and they find out.

Bond is probably the ur-example of this? Everyone on earth knows who James Bond is, and everyone whose seen more than one Bond movie can tell you their least favorite.

Star Trek is an extra weird example of a cyclical francise. By my count, it’s augured in at least three times by now. (1969, 2005, 2013/16.) Unlike most other similar long running francises—Bond, or the other big Star movie series—it’s not about a singular group of characters, it’s about a setting, a core premise, but the characters are up for grabs.

On the one hand, Trek feels like the sort of premise where you really can just keep going with Star Trek: New Ship Name forever. On the other hand, how much of that do you really need? By my count, there’s 11 TV shows and 13 movies (with more on the way), which is something just shy of 600 total hours. How much is enough? And the answer to that is very simple, because in all honestly, I’m much more likely to give a new a chance if it has the Star Trek logo on it that not, and I’m not alone.

Back to the Law & Order comparison: what’s different? TNG started in 1987, and then it, Voyager, and Enterprise were basically the same show that just swapped out the cast and sets every couple of years, same as the cop show. But that strand of Trek staggered to an ignominious end by 2005, long past the point where anyone was watching or cared, whereas L&O just kept on trucking.

I’m being slightly facetious in that comparison, because the big difference is that L&O maintained the same level of quality the whole time. The TNG-era Trek, and I’m putting this mildly, did not.

Part of the reason for that, is that Trek requires a very specific tone that’s genuinely hard to do. Star Trek always works best when it’s a little funny, and the heros are back on their heels a little bit. This is why Star Trek IV: The Whale One is the best movie.

Star Trek is also frequently extremely dumb. I’m hesitant to call it “camp” exactly, if for no other reason than it’s not British, but it’s in the same zip code. The premise is intrinsically silly, and requires a very specific camp-adjacent tone to work. You have to treat the material sincerely, you can’t be making fun of it or going full spoof, but a big part of the reason why we’re still talking about a show from the mid-60s was Shatner and Nimoy’s ability to wink at the audience like “yeah, we know what that looks like, just roll with us here.” If you take it too seriously it implodes under it’s own weight and does a sort seriousness integer overflow and becomes ridiculous. Too silly and you get something like Star Trek V: The One Where Scotty Knocks Himself Out. A big part of various Trek incarnations working or not comes down to how well they threaded that needle. Sincere, but not Serious.

The biggest challenge to maintaining that tone, frankly, is a very specific corner of the fanbase. They want their show to be taken seriously as Serious TV For Big Kids, which usually means darker lights, meaner characters, more space fights, and less time spent on characters and relationships. (Science-Fiction fans traditionally have dismissed that last one as “soap opera stuff”, which is a big part of why SF shows tend to get cancelled after a year.)

What happens as something fossilizes into a “franchise” is that it stops being about anything other than “more of itself,” and chases a smaller and smaller group of diehard fans who end up hating it anyway. And then it gets cancelled, having become inexplicable to anyone who didn’t take a degree in Deep Lore (or even to those of us who did.)

Thick with all these problems and more, TNG-era Trek plowed into the ground in ’05. The late aughts and twenty-teens was absolutely thick with reboots, remakes, attempted Cinematic Universes, and sequels, both legacy and otherwise. Thanks largely to the corporate shenanigans around Viacom/CBS/Paramount breaking up and then reassembling, all Star Trek had to show for the early part of this period were the three Chris Pine movies. Those only managed to be a partial restart, leading Trek to be almost totally absent from the first part of the Legacy Sequel Wave.

Then, fresh of the cratered disaster that was Star Trek Beyond and flush with zero percent interest rates and the insane peak of the streaming era, CBS/Viacom decided to get back into the small screen Trek business in a big way with their own CBS All Access platform and Star Trek: Discovery.

Discovery came of the gate with all the edgy, “I’m not your dad’s Star Trek!!” energy of a fifteen-year old that’s just discovered Hot Topic. The best review I’ve ever read of Discovery is Elizabeth Sandifer’s takedown at Tardis Eruditorum: Pop Between Realities, Home in Time For Tea: Star Trek: Discovery

But then, Disco was followed up with Star Trek: Picard, which was even worse; it felt like something you'd make up to bully wanana-be prestige legacy sequels. One returning actor and character, who has a new, edgier trauma background, totally different aesthetics, just terrible, but not uniquely so. Just the same terrible baseline that most TV was operating under. The sort of thing where you look at it and ask “why bother bringing it all back if this was all you were going to do with it?”

Somewhere in there they announced that next, they were going to do a comedy cartoon, Rick & Morty–style, written by one of the Rick & Morty showrunners. This was right about the height of the Rick & Morty fanbase being absolutely deranged about the McDonalds chicken nugget dipping sauce? I don’t even remember the details. The problem with Rick & Morty is that while funny, it’s fundamentally mean, about bad people in a bad universe who never get better. That’s exact opposite of Star Trek.

That was enough for me, I tapped out, stopped paying attention.

The Pandemic Years started and began to tick by, and I kept hearing about it, hearing good things. On a whim, armed with a free trial of Paramount+ and with nowhere to go and nothing better to do, I gave it a shot.

Having said all of that, you can imagine my surprise when Lower Decks quietly turned out to be the best Star Trek ever made.

The premise is straightforward: instead of the usual Bridge Crew, it’s Star Trek from the perspective of four Ensigns working in the “Lower Decks” of a Federation Starship. Star Trek plots, but from the perspective of those characters that normally would be standing around in the background. From that, it’s easy to imagine a show that looks like a cross between the TNG episode “Lower Decks” and that episode of Buffy told entirely from Xander’s point of view. But Lower Decks had more ambition than that.

Because the ship itself is also from the metaphorical Lower Decks—it’s the USS Cerritos, a California-class ship which we learn have always been around but off screen, doing the grunt work and cleaning up after the Big Hero ships like the Enterprise have moved on. There’s an esprit de corps to the California class ships, but they know they’re not the ones that get the attention.

(In a nice piece of worldbuilding, all the California-class ships are named after smaller cities in California, while the shuttles are all named after CA state parks.)

Critically, while they might not be the best of “the best of the best,” they aren’t incompetent or inept, and they aren’t cowards. This isn’t Inspector Clouseau in Space. They’re the Star Fleet equivalent of “regular people.” They know they’re not the A-Team, but they’re still Star Fleet, and they’re going to muddle through as best they can.

The show takes the approach that Star Trek–style Hijinks are happening constantly to everyone out in space, the Enterprises are just the best at dealing with them. Everyone else is in a little over their heads and has to muddle through.

On top of that, the show has two genuine innovations on the Trek formula. First, it assumes all the weird stuff that happens in Trek episodes is common knowledge. Weird aliens, time travel, spacial anomalies, they know what this stuff is. Trek has a tendency to give its characters “TV amnesia” and have them be surprised every time something shows up, but not here. The characters have the same basic working knowledge of “how Star Trek works” that the average fan does.

But the real genius of Lower Decks is that the characters act like real people. These aren’t the frequently programmatic Space Heros of other Treks, the Lower Deckers have anxieties, fears, ambitions, messy relationships with each other, complex friendships, painfully recognizable flaws. They’re all good people. But none of them are great people.

But this is Star Trek, and if Trek stands for anything, it stands for the idea that “tomorrow” is going to be better than “today,” and that applies as much to people as it does to their stuff. So they learn, and get better, and find ways to move forward. One of the central axes of the show is a mother and daughter learning how to see each other as real people beyond those roles, and it works. And this isn’t “Riker’s dad shows up once, they knock each other over, and then he goes away never to be mentioned,” this is a slow boil over five years. Friendships evolve and mature. Characters start dating, break up, and then learn to be okay with it. Characters who initial seem like dorks or pompous windbags turn out to have depths that can’t always be seen at first from the Lower Decks.

It’s also screamingly funny. A lot of that you get almost “for free” just by putting people who act like real people in wacky Star Trek situations. It’s a show where some “Star Trek Thing” will happen, and then someone will actually say what you always wished someone would say; they crack a joke, or act freaked out, or groan that there’s yet one more “some kinda spacial anomaly”. A group of people who encounter a Star Trek Thing, and instead of saying “Fascinating” they’re much more likely to say either “oh man, one of these again,” or “Oh shit!”

Star Trek is already a heightened melodramatic cartoony universe, so moving to animation doesn’t heighten that so much as it lets them move faster and avoid the endless padding of walking up and down hallways.

It’s a show clearly made by people who love Star Trek, but are not in the least bit precious or defensive about it. They know exactly what’s cool about it, and also exactly what’s deeply ridiculous. This lets them spin out an insane number of deep cuts while making it completely accessible to newcomers.

This lets them do things like drop the Ferengi War Memorial to the Profits lost during the Dominion War, with the confidence that it’s funny on its own without needing to recite an entry from Memory Alpha at the audience.

It’s one of the first things that really seems to have cracked how to use 600 hours of previous material as an asset rather than an anchor. Core to that is the recognition that people know how franchises work, they know they’re coming in “late.” You don’t have to spoon-feed the audience, they’re used to picking up what’s going on from context. They can look stuff up on the internet later, you just have to make this work within these twenty minutes, and then if they really want to they can go see what “the Dominion War” was later and then laugh at the joke again.

My favorite example of pulling a deep cut and making it work are the Dolphins. “Cetacean Ops” was a running background joke on TNG. Hall signs, PA announcements, the occasional oblique line of dialog. The internal technical documentation, later cleaned up and published as the TNG Technical Manual described that a portion of the Enterprise was filled with water, and a percentage of the crew were Dolphins, who ran the navigation department, their underwater background making them better at navigating 3D space than any landlubber. There are different stories about how serious any of this was, whether they ever actually intended to put Dolphins on the screen in the 80s or if it was a fun joke, like the engines having been built by Yoyodyne Propulsion Systems. Either way, everyone seems to agree that the combination of SeaQuest DSV and Johnny Mnemonic scotched any serious idea of putting a live-action dolpin on a star ship.

With that as the background, Lower Decks just has a pair of Beluga Whales—Lieutenants Kimolu and Matt—as part of the reoccurring cast. It never gets talked about, they’re just down in the whale room navigating the ship. The characters go hang out with them, they come along on away missions to water planets, we’re told they throw great parties. Its fun, it’s wacky, a great piece of utopian future world-building, and if you happen to know this obscure trivia from thirty years ago you just laugh a little louder and a little harder.

I watched this with two kids who have seen very little Trek overall, and they loved it, and they accepted that once or twice an episode dad would laugh uproariously at something they didn’t understand they could ask him about later.

I enthused about it least year as part of the Fall ’23 Good TV Thursdays, and everything I said then holds up and then some.

As long as I’m slinging links, I very much enjoyed this interview with Mike McMahan: Lower Decks’ showrunner talks doing a Star Trek show on his terms.

What’s Star Trek about? I’d submit it’s: highly competent fun characters with interesting relationships with each other having wacky space adventures in a fundamentally optimistic future. It’s also about people who have lived a little, who have lived through Some Disappointments, who are having those adventures to help heal over.

Despite being animated, or maybe because of it, Lower Decks ended up as the most confident, and the most Human version of Star Trek to date. I loved every second of it.

To loop back where we started, this really did feel like a show that could have run forever, cut down in its prime. I’m sorry it’s gone, but feel lucky we got what we did. Why keep dusting franchies off and making new versions? Because sometimes you can actually do better.

And it’s got the best Trek opening credits to date.