Comic Review: Star Trek – Lower Decks (2024) Issue 2
OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)
Stranded on an unknown planet, the Lieutenant Junior Grades are forced to face simulations of their most ideal mentors: legends from Star Fleet’s history!
OUR TAKE
Isn’t it crazy how the preview for this last issue hyped up a T’Pol cameo a month ago, only for the show to beat them to it last week? But yeah, we’re back to Lower Decks comics, and the last one released before the show ends! As of this writing, the series finale has aired, and you’ll be getting that review tomorrow, so in the meantime let’s enjoy what Lower Decks was best at: gratuitous deep cut references to older Trek shows! Carrying on from and concluding the storyline from last time, the crew of the Cerritos deals with the missing crew of the USS Bonaventure…or rather, the bridge crew deals with it off screen while the Lieutenants deal with shenanigans, as is so often the case. And in THIS case, those shenanigans involve getting characters from the five classic live action Trek shows to act as fake mentors to the main cast. From The Original Series, we’ve got Montgomery “Scotty” Scott, who mentors Rutherford, from DS9 we get Jadzia Dax for Tendi, From Voyager we get Captain Janeway for Mariner, from Enterprise we get T’Pol for T’Lyn, and from The Next Generation we get Captain Picard, but specifically the more angry one from the earlier seasons, as per Boimler’s very specific mental request.
And hey, with a comic you don’t need voice actors, so it makes perfect sense that the comic would take full advantage of this and bring back either people who were unlikely to come back (T’Pol and Jadzia’s actors famously had a bad time on their shows), people who just had very involved returns (Picard and Janeway in Picard and Prodigy, respectively) or whose actors were dead (Scotty). Plus, let’s just go nuts and make these simulations do the same by having them try and fight to death! Because let’s face it, these comics are really just about being zany to the max in a way the show can’t because it has to be a more upscale production, and in that sense, I think it succeeds well enough. I’ve checked the solicitations for the next two issues and they seem to be more single story focused, but they’re coming out weeks after the show itself has finished so who knows if we’ll cover them, but hopefully we do! In the meantime, feel free to pick up these first two issues if you’re a fan of the show, and then use them as tissues once you feel the need to cry about how the show is over.
