Star Trek: Lower Decks (2020-2024) Review
5/10
Fifty episodes across five seasons, animated, twenty-six minutes each, about the junior enlisted crew doing the unglamorous work aboard one of Starfleet’s least important ships.
The 5 is a genuine middle instead of a dodge. Nothing in the episodes I watched penetrated or stayed with me, and I can see clearly what the production was trying to do and why people who are in its audience like it.
If I were twenty years old I would probably have enjoyed this, and most of the jokes would have gone straight over my head, which turns out to be the most useful thing to say about the show.
I should be plain that I watched a handful of episodes instead of the run. What follows is an honest account of why it did not hold me and an honest account of what it does well.
The Premise Is Genuinely Clever
Second contact is the idea and it is the best thing in the show. Somebody else makes first contact, gets the ceremony and the history, and the Cerritos arrives afterward to handle the paperwork, the infrastructure and the follow-up.
That is a real observation about every previous Star Trek. The flagship arrives, resolves something enormous in forty-five minutes and leaves, and somebody has to have gone back and dealt with whatever was left.
The ship is a California-class, described in the show’s own terms as one of Starfleet’s least important, and the four leads are ensigns with menial jobs who are not in the room when anything is decided.
The title is taken from a Next Generation episode, Lower Decks in the seventh season, which followed junior officers around events the regular cast were handling elsewhere. That episode is on the essentials list in my Next Generation review and it is the best thing this show is built on.
What the premise buys is a legitimate angle nobody had used. An institution looks different from the bottom of it, the people doing the unglamorous work have their own hierarchy and grievances, and a franchise about command can be examined from the position of people who take orders.
The show also does something with the monoculture problem that is worth crediting. McMahan has said the aim was to push back on Trek’s habit of making every planet a single culture represented by one alien, and several episodes follow that through properly.
So the foundation is sound. The premise is clever, the target is fair, and the production understood what it was aiming at from the first episode.
A hierarchy looks completely different from the bottom, and almost nobody writes the bottom. Every institutional story defaults to the people making decisions, which leaves the larger and more relatable population unexamined. The angle costs nothing and it is available in any setting with a chain of command.
Find the work your genre skips. Somebody had to go back and handle the aftermath of every episode of Star Trek ever made, and forty years passed before anybody built a show on it.
An affectionate target is more durable than a hostile one. This show likes what it is examining, which is why it lasted five seasons where a straight parody would have run out in one.
The Comedy and the Audience Do Not Match
This is the structural problem and it is the reason the show is simultaneously beloved by a small group and forgettable to everybody else.
The comic style is young. Rapid overlapping dialogue, meta commentary, adult animation pacing, characters who talk in the register of people in their twenties, and a lineage that runs directly through Rick and Morty, where McMahan wrote.
The comic content is old. The jokes require knowing what a Cardassian is, why an unstable wormhole matters, what happened at Wolf 359, which admirals have historically been corrupt, and what a holodeck malfunction implies. A large proportion of them are unavailable to anybody who has not watched several hundred episodes.
Those two things point at different people. A young viewer gets the style and misses the substance. A viewer with forty years of Star Trek gets every reference and may bounce off the delivery, which is roughly what happened to me.
That is why nothing stuck. The jokes I could follow were jokes about material I already knew, which is recognition instead of comedy, and the material I could not follow was the tone instead of the content.
The show’s defenders are the overlap, which is a real audience and a narrow one. Somebody who knows the lore thoroughly and enjoys fast meta animation is going to find this the best thing the franchise has made recently, and they are not wrong about their own experience.
None of that makes the show bad. It makes it precisely targeted, which is a commercial decision instead of a failure, and it explains why a competently made series with a clever premise leaves so little behind for anybody outside the target.
Form and content have to aim at the same reader. A young style carrying references that require decades of knowledge splits your audience into people who get one half or the other. The overlap is your real market, and it is always smaller than either group.
Recognition is not the same as comedy. A joke that consists of naming something the reader knows produces a nod instead of a laugh, and a work built mostly on that has a ceiling.
Know which of the two you would sacrifice. A production that will not choose between accessibility and depth usually ends up narrower than one that picks.
One Showrunner, Five Seasons
Mike McMahan ran all fifty episodes and that is the most remarkable fact about the production, particularly set against the rest of modern Star Trek.
Five seasons, one creative authority, no firings, no mid-season rebuilds and no change of premise. Compare Discovery, which is covered separately on this site and got through five credited showrunners in the same number of seasons.
The consequence is visible in the work. The show knows what it is from the first episode to the last, the characters develop in a consistent direction, and the finale resolves arcs that were started years earlier.
McMahan also had the lore knowledge to defend his choices, which is what stability is really worth. He has described an executive in the first season asking whether there would really be a bad admiral in Star Trek, and having to explain that a corrupt admiral is part of the franchise’s DNA precisely because the Federation is otherwise good.
That is a small anecdote with a large point in it. A showrunner who knows the material can win arguments with people who do not, and a production without one loses those arguments by default.
He also got the cast promoted properly across the run, moved Freeman off the ship, elevated Ransom to captain and closed the series on the crew earning the thing the title had been withholding from them.
None of that rescues the show for me, and it is the strongest evidence in this whole set of reviews for a point I have made about several of the others. Stability produces coherence, and coherence is not the same as quality.
One authority for the length of a work produces coherence, and coherence is necessary instead of sufficient. This show is consistent, knows itself, and still did not hold me. That is worth separating. Discovery failed because nobody was in charge. This one had somebody in charge and simply was not for me.
Knowing your material lets you defend it. A creator who can cite a hundred episodes wins the note, and a creator who cannot takes the note.
wej Duj Is the One to Watch
If you watch a single episode, watch this one, and it is the show demonstrating what the premise was capable of.
The structure is three parallel stories. The Cerritos crew have downtime during a long warp transit, and the episode simultaneously follows the lower-ranking crew aboard a Klingon ship and a Vulcan one, all three heading toward the same encounter.
What that does is apply the show’s own idea to the rest of the galaxy. Every species in Star Trek has junior personnel doing unglamorous work and complaining about their superiors, and nobody had ever shown a Klingon with an entry-level job.
The Klingon farmer who comes out of it is the show’s most successful character outside the core five, and he recurs across later seasons, which is evidence that the idea was strong instead of a one-off gag.
It also won the show its awards attention and McMahan has said the writers spent the fourth season trying to bring that kind of thinking to the whole run, which is a showrunner correctly identifying his own best work.
Beyond it, the episodes people name are Crisis Point, I Excretus, Reflections and the crossover with Strange New Worlds, where two of these characters appear in live action, which is a technical stunt that worked better than it had any right to.
That is around six hours worth seeking out of fifty. For a show I am rating a 5, six good hours is an honest accounting instead of a contradiction.
It Was a Good Try
That is my actual verdict and it is not a consolation. This is a show that identified a real gap, was made competently by people who knew the material, and ran for five seasons under one hand.
What it lacks is weight, and weight may not have been available inside the format. Twenty-six minutes of animated comedy per week is not a container for consequence, and a show about people with menial jobs cannot easily put the galaxy at risk without abandoning its own premise.
The later seasons push against that and partly succeed. The characters get promoted, relationships develop, somebody dies, and the finale treats five years of small work as having amounted to something.
It is also the franchise’s first animated series since 1974, which is worth recording, and it re-established that Star Trek can be animated for adults without being either a children’s show or a parody.
The reason it does not rate higher for me is the reason I gave above. I am outside the overlap, the references are recognition instead of comedy at my end of the audience, and nothing in the hours I watched stayed with me afterward.
Somebody twenty years younger with the same lore knowledge would rate this considerably higher and would be making a defensible case. This is the one series in the set where I think the disagreement is about audience instead of about quality.
Which is the fairest thing I can say about it. Mediocre for me, a good try by any standard, and a show whose failure to land is substantially a fact about who I am instead of about what they made.
Separate did not work from was not for me. Most criticism collapses the two, and a reviewer who can tell them apart is worth reading on the things they dislike. The test is whether you can describe who would like it and why they would be right.
A format has a ceiling on consequence. Twenty-six animated minutes a week cannot carry permanent loss easily, and a show about people with no authority cannot risk the galaxy without breaking its premise.
Note when a work re-establishes a possibility. This was the first Star Trek animation in forty-six years and it proved the form was viable, which is worth something independent of the episodes.
Should you watch Star Trek: Lower Decks?
In pieces, and start with wej Duj. A clever premise about the people who arrive after the ceremony, one showrunner across five seasons in a franchise that could not manage that anywhere else, roughly six hours worth seeking out, and a comic style and comic content aimed at two different audiences. Mediocre for me and a good try by anybody’s measure.
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