Review: Star Trek: Lower Decks “Upper Decks”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

The Lieutenant Junior Grades take a back seat this week as we focus on a typical day in the life of the Bridge Crew.

OUR TAKE

It’s honestly just hitting me that we are mere episodes away from the end of Lower Decks, and now we’re at the antepenultimate (that means third to last!) installment. And in another example of them accidentally making a fitting episode for a final season even though they never intended this to be the final one, the show comes full circle again, though this time for its original inspiration. See, the concept for Lower Decks came from an episode from The Next Generation’s own final season, unsurprisingly titled “Lower Decks”, which followed four Ensigns on the Enterprise who bonded over their low station, among them Sito Jaxa, who was killed in this episode and later retconned to have been friends with Mariner, so…pick your poison, I guess. So yeah, Mike McMahan saw this connect in the bottom rung of rankings and eventually came up with the show you’re reading a review for now! And over in the UK, Russell T Davies would also watch it and get inspired to write one of the worst Doctor Who episodes ever, “Love & Monsters”, though that would then lead to the creation of “Blink”, one of the best, so all’s well that ends well I guess.

And while that is a pretty neat idea for Lower Decks to homage the episode of TNG that gave it its start, I kinda don’t know if this was the most novel way they could’ve handled it? I haven’t seen “Lower Decks” the episode, but from what I can tell from what I hear about it, it was novel for the show because that show focused on the higher ranks on the ship most of the time, so focusing on those who fall in between the cracks gave us a new or at least rare perspective. In Lower Decks the show, we see that all the time, but Captain Freeman, Ransom, and Shax are also often involved in stuff too, so even though they’re still great characters, giving them time really isn’t anything new or novel. That may be why they were all given vignettes instead of actual plots that eventually come together at the end, though personally I would have preferred an episode just about Freeman to see what a more typical Trek captain focused episode may be like for her, and you can still have the Phil Lamar cameo as her husband and Mariner’s dad. But this is fine too, though obviously not super substantive, especially for being so close to the end of the show though that’s not their fault. We now move on to the final two episodes of the series, and there are still a couple clips from this season’s trailer we haven’t seen, so place your bets on when you’re gonna see Harry Kim from Voyager talking to multiple versions of himself!