Star Trek: Lower Decks (2020-2024) Review

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 real 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’d probably have enjoyed this, and most of the jokes would have gone straight over my head. That turns out to be the most useful thing to say about the show. I’ve seen a handful of episodes out of the fifty. What follows is why the show didn’t hold me and what it does well, and it does enough well that I don’t want to shortchange it.

The Premise Is Clever

Second contact is the idea and it’s 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’s 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 aren’t in the room when anything is decided. The show takes its title from a Next Generation episode, Lower Decks in the seventh season. That 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’s the best thing this show builds 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’s 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.

The Comedy and the Audience Do Not Match

This is the structural problem and it’s the reason the show is at the same time 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 tone 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 hasn’t 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. That’s roughly what happened to me.

For that reason nothing stuck. The jokes I could follow were jokes about material I already knew. That’s recognition instead of comedy, and the material I couldn’t follow was the tone instead of the content. The show’s defenders are the overlap. That’s 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’re not wrong about their own experience. None of that makes the show bad. It makes it narrowly targeted, 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.

One Showrunner, Five Seasons

Mike McMahan ran all fifty episodes and that’s the standout fact about the production, 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. It’s 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’s 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. That’s what stability is really worth. He’s 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 because the Federation is otherwise good.

That anecdote made me like McMahan a lot more than I liked his show. An executive on a Star Trek production asking whether an admiral could be corrupt is a little alarming, and it’s reassuring that the person in charge knew the answer cold.

That’s a small anecdote with a large point in it. A showrunner who knows the material can win arguments with people who don’t, 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 winning the thing the title had been withholding from them.

None of that rescues the show for me, and it’s the strongest evidence in this whole set of reviews for a point I’ve made about several of the others. Stability produces coherence, and coherence isn’t the same as quality.

wej Duj Is the One to Watch

If you watch a single episode, watch this one, and it’s the show showing 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 at the same time 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. That’s evidence that the idea was strong instead of a one-off gag. I wish Lower Decks had been this show all the time. A Klingon with an entry-level job is the best joke the premise ever produced, because it’s a joke about the whole galaxy and it doesn’t need me to have memorized hundreds of episodes to land. 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. That’s 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. That’s a technical stunt that worked better than it had any right to. That’s around six hours worth seeking out of fifty. For a show I’m rating a 5, six good hours is an honest accounting instead of a contradiction.

It Was a Good Try

It’s 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 isn’t a container for consequence, and a show about people with menial jobs can’t 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’s 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 doesn’t rate higher for me is the reason I gave above. I’m 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.

That’s the fairest thing I can say about it. It’s mediocre for me and a good try by any standard, and its failure to land is mostly a fact about who I am. The 5 is where it sits because I can admire the premise, the stability and the idea behind wej Duj while admitting that none of the jokes I sat through left anything behind.

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 couldn’t 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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