Review: Star Trek: Lower Decks “Old Friends, New Planets”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Nicholas Lacarno reveals his plan to both Mariner and Starfleet: He has collected an organized, leaderless coalition of ships (made up of lower deckers from the ships his ship attacked) that grew tired of Starfleet’s power structure and plan to rule together as…Nova Fleet, a expansion of “Nova Squadron” which he and a few Lower Deckers came up with during their academy days. Their only deterrent is a Genesis device, but Mariner swipes it and tries to escape, kept in place by a system-wide barrier. The Cerritos manages to breach the barrier with help from a bargain with Tendi’s sister, and Mariner dresses down Locarno by revealing that this whole plan is just a way to gain some power after he was kicked out of the academy. She then activates the Genesis device which kills him, but his atoms are made part of the planet that forms, so Starfleet names the planet after him and plans to use the planet to house refugees. But the bargain with Tendi’s sister forces Tendi to go back to the Orion’s, which leads to a tearful goodbye. But Tendi herself doesn’t seem too worried.

OUR TAKE

And with that, Star Trek: Lower Decks is another season down. There’s still at least one more on the horizon, and if it gets another after that it’ll be the longest running Trek show of the current era (at least in terms of seasons). But in the meantime, how well did the end of THIS season stick the landing? Well, actually pretty dang well! After dreading what the reveal of the “mystery ship” could be and seeing the pretty repetitive scenes of it attacking other non-Federation ships in the same way over and over, it’s nice to know it ends up as a pretty solid story, and in fact a really great story for Lower Decks specifically! I’ve mentioned over the weeks that I feared the reveal would be some random deep cut, but instead we got a thematically appropriate and character focused deep cut with Nicholas Locarno, who is revealed to have a connection to Mariner through both her deceased friend Sito AND their shared time at the academy, which traces this whole plot and Mariner’s backstory back to characters related to the Next Generation episode that was the inspiration for this whole show, the Season 7 episode fittingly titled “Lower Decks”.

But it gets better! Locarno’s whole plan is, on paper, something that Mariner would probably jump at if she let her worse instincts get the better of her; an organization of those who have been stuck at the bottom of the totem pole for whatever reason, whether through power abuse or incompetent superiors. And yet this gives Mariner, after weeks of feeling herself backslide after being given a promotion and feeling she needs to sabotage herself, to better understand that she actually respects and believes in Starfleet. Unlike her, Locarno simply wants affirmation of his talents and wants the power he thinks he deserves, which shows itself very quickly once his leadership is questioned. Perhaps his plan for a fleet independent of Starfleet could work on its own, but he’s simply not the kind of person who could hold it together. The point is that this is basically Mariner’s ultimate test. Is she willing to trust the people supporting her and the imperfect system that wants her to succeed or will she continue to distrust both them and herself in a desperate bid for some control? Thankfully the answer was the former. That may be it for the lion’s share of her development in the show, and if so, it’s a great note to go out on.

In the context of other Trek shows, this reminds me of the two part finale of the prequel series “Star Trek: Enterprise”, which focused on the days prior to the beginning of the Federation. Without giving too much away, “Demons” and “Terra Prime” showed the crew of that series face a terrorist group that played on the growing xenophobia against aliens and tied this directly into the growing relationship between two characters in a way that simply would not have worked for any other show (and then they had an unrelated final episode that nobody likes). While this episode of Lower Decks is thankfully not the SERIES finale, it very well could work as one, as it focuses squarely on an antagonist force made up of Lower Deckers and ties back to the show’s inspiration, once again in a way that you couldn’t have in Discovery, Picard, Prodigy, or Strange New Worlds. This is a Lower Decks problem and Lower Decks solves it in the way only they can. And it didn’t just solve it all off-screen, thank god! Next week, we’ll go over the arcs of this season and the hints towards the next one, but for now, we bask in another instant classic for the franchise.