Review: Star Trek: Lower Decks “The New Next Generation”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

The crew of the Cerritos face their greatest battle yet when the entire multiverse is at stake.

OUR TAKE

And so we have arrived at the end of Lower Decks, as well as the end of Star Trek animation for the foreseeable future, which this series helped kicked off for the modern era. This wasn’t intended to be how the show went out, but like another Trek show that got cancelled this year, Lower Decks was able to rework enough of this into a more or less proper finale that feels less like a “goodbye” and more like a “see ya later”. Though while everyone gets something to do, it does feel a bit forced in at points. We get resolution to the Boimler relying on his alt self’s history by destroying the pad it was on when he needs to, but it feels pretty sudden considering how much he relied on it before. Rutherford recommits his love for the ship and even gets his cybernetic implants removed, but there was very little leading into that before this. Tendi and T’Lyn quibble a bit as co-Chief Science Officers, but it’s a bit of a retread of the conflict they just got over a few episodes ago. And on top of that, throwing in another Klingon plot with Ma’ah threatens to make the episode feel overstuffed, even though I like Ma’ah!

But I wanted to get the negatives out of the way to make clear I think this is a good finale…SEASON finale, specifically. As the end to an entire show, it does check off some important boxes, like having a major status quo change by the end of Boimler and Mariner being co-First Officers while Ransom takes over as Captain and Freeman moves on to Starbase 80 to help with multiversal exploration, as well as showing how far every principle character has come not just in rank but in development and evolution. I AM very glad we didn’t end up leaving on a cliffhanger or with anything feeling unresolved, which is helped by the coda at the end, but this episode had a lot working against it because of the situation it was placed in, which is also not helped by the fact that the two episodes prior barely featured the main cast at all. Again, I’m glad THIS one did so we didn’t end up with an even worse Enterprise tribute, but this was not ideal and I think everyone who worked on this knows that. But they still made the best of it and wrote as if it was their last, kinda like Futurama has been known to do, and since it seems like everyone who works on LD wants it to keep going if possible, maybe they’ll share the fate of both Futurama and the show that inspired them, TNG, and get a movie or four out of this some day. Chronologically, this closes the gap between this show, Prodigy (which takes place a year later) and Star Trek: Picard, which…well, the less said about that, the better. However, the future looks bright for this crew and hopefully for the franchise as a whole.