Review: Star Trek: Lower Decks “The Stars at Night”

Overview

The California Class of the Starfleet has been shuttered in favor of the autonomous Texas class. It doesn’t take long before word reaches the USS Cerritos causing all sorts of worry among the crew…except Mariner who seems to love her new gig as a renegade tomb raider, but is Jennifer hiding something? Yes, Admiral Picard is funding their operation.

Instead of accepting a new job, Captain Freeman challenges the Texas class to a race to see who is superior. We come to find out that not only is the Texas class autonomous, but it makes most of the operational staff, especially in engineering, rather useless in their execution. The Texas class wins by a mile in speed, but soon the Cerritos begins to find the holes in the Texas class which includes code-theft, skipping out on important procedures, and the fact that Les Buenamigo is an asshole.

Eventually, the Texas class’ rogue goes corrupt and starts to go nuts and even kills Les in the process. When Mariner hears about what’s going down, she convinces Jennifer to let her go save her friends. Bringing with her, Mariner gets the entire California class to fight Texas and ultimately prove victorious. But what of their future?

Our Take

Star Trek: Lower Decks wraps its third season in some unconventional ways, almost with no hints towards this ending during the course of the season. We’ll get into that more in the season review next week, but the season finale was of otherworldly excellence that, I think, make some of the live-action Star Treks head for cover in embarrassment.

One of the things I’ve noticed, Mike McMahan is the writer of this episode, and typically likes to take the premieres and finales, in other words, he wants to take off and land, and it’s a great strategy that works, but sometimes lends itself to a bumpy ride along the way (again more on this next week). Mike lands this fucker, and does so with pizzazz.

Titmouse HAS to be the studio of 2022. The technical brilliance of Star Trek: Lower Decks can’t be understated, and THIS episode is the MUST see to truly get that experience. The raw emotions that came out of me after watching the intergalactic battles that had transpired were real, and quite frankly, I ended up tearing up. THIS is why we cover adult animation, this show right here.

The episode largely wraps up quite a few threads from the course of the show’s season, but still leaves questions for the show’s fourth season. That’s a text book sci-fi trait right out of the books written by the likes of Ridley Scott and Chris Nolan.