My High Praise for Lower Decks
An ode to the Parks and Recreation of the Star Trek Universe
Some of the hard-working readers here at Drezner’s World pointed out that the past-tense title of a recent newsletter might have given a finality to cultural trends that is simply impossible to achieve. And fair enough! The politics of cultural trends wax and wane, and I do apologize if that title was overblown.
One reason I might have overblown it is that one of my favorite sci-fi shows just came to an end.
On Space the Nation, a running joke between Ana Marie Cox and myself is that when it comes to our sci-fi favorites, she’s a Star Wars girl and I’m a Star Trek boy. This is ostensibly because Star Wars is darker than Star Trek — although let’s be honest, every sci-franchise is darker than Star Trek. It is nonetheless true that one of the reasons I love Star Trek is its ability to be entertaining and optimistic about the future — an optimism that has been in short supply in the real world as of late.
Reflecting the times, there have been recent attempts to grimdark Star Trek. Those efforts have been mixed at best, with nothing approaching the quality of, say, Andor. Picard had its charms but in the end was a disappointment. Discovery was a decidedly mixed effort. We will have to see how the Section 31 film and Starfleet Academy series play out this year.
It is noteworthy that the Discovery spinoff Strange New Worlds has been a revelation — but that is because of its ability to vary its tone from dark to light. In other words, Star Trek is often at its best when it combines optimism and humor. Which is why the hard-working Trekkie portion of the staff here at Drezner’s World wanted to wish a fond farewell to a Trek series that ended last month in glorious fashion: Star Trek: Lower Decks.
Inspired in part by a late-season Star Trek: The Next Generation episode, the protagonists of Lower Decks are four lowly ensigns at the bottom rung of the U.S.S. Cerritos, a California-class starship that handles “second contact” — i.e. all the Federation paperwork that has to take place after first contact. In other words, this show isn’t about the rock-star bridge crew of the Enterprise — it’s about the lower, greener, more humorous rungs of Starfleet.
Over the course of five seasons, Ensigns Mariner, Boimler, Tendi, and Rutherford had to deal with all sorts of mundane tasks never highlighted on other Star Trek shows, like cleaning the holodeck and recruiting for Starfleet and organizing the anomaly storage room and completing training simulations. Their away missions often led to misunderstandings about which alien creatures were truly dangerous and which ones were not. Along the way the Cerritos wound up having to battle all sorts of bizarre threats, from a Pakled war to proliferating interdimensional space rifts.
Think of it this way: if Next Generation is akin to The West Wing, then Lower Decks is the Parks and Recreation of the Star Trek universe. Along the way, our protagonists found their grooves and got promoted. Like the officials of Pawnee, Indiana, they made their universe a better place.
If this description makes the show sound boring, then that’s on me. Because it was incredibly funny for anyone who has more than a passing familiarity with the Star Trek universe. What Lower Decks did best was to cull some of the goofier parts of Trek — like Q or Armus or the Ferengi — and have so much fun with them. They even managed to come up with a valid reason for slam poetry.
My favorite bit was when a standard response to an emergency that gets dismissed out of hand in most Star Trek shows becomes the right thing to do for the Cerritos:
Like Parks and Recreation, Lower Decks managed to be both funny and touching. Tawny Newsome, who voices Mariner, explained the secret of the show’s success to Variety: “It definitely feels like an exploration and celebration of fandom. I guess I would extend that to ‘community.’ I think it’s an examination of what it means to buy into the culture of community that you really believe in and that you are a fan of.”
I hope the characters live long and prosper. Newsome also told Variety that the finale “feels like an appropriate pause to the story. It’s an end of a chapter.” I hope these characters come back, maybe in another Strange New Worlds crossover or a stand-alone movie.
In a relatively dark timeline, it’s nice to have some sci-fi that can make me laugh.
(I also had the great pleasure of watching "WeJ DuJ" when that was nominated but that was never going to beat The Expanse for anything.)
Exactly why I said that "Those Old Scientists", in which I grinned from beginning to end, was the kind of thing the Hugos were made for. But you might have to get the references like "Travis Mayweather Middle School" to have understood that.