Season Review: Star Trek: Lower Decks Season Five

Space. The Final Frontier. These were the voyages of the USS Cerritos. Its five year mission: To cram as many obscure and deep cut Star Trek references into twenty minutes as possible and fan wank like no man has fan wanked before! And while it didn’t intend to actually end after five years, five years is where it ended, and it’s off to space dock before being put in moth balls, at least for now. Lower Decks began during a time when the franchise was finding itself again, with Discovery stumbling over itself to blaze a trail into the further future, and Picard fumbling a long awaited return for its title character. Where those shows at least attempted to move things forward, Lower Decks seemed fine fondly looking back, taking place shortly after the end of TNG era so as to bask in proximity to some of Trek’s most iconic moments and have the opportunity to bring back just about any returning characters it could get ahold of. Yet even with its more low stakes premise and focusing on characters in the bottom rung, it made sure to highlight its own stories first and foremost and always champion how the greatest things are only possible thanks to the people who do the jobs most wouldn’t do.

As for this season in particular, it’s another strong one for the series. It may not have been meant to be the final one, but if you didn’t know better, you might see some parts as bringing certain things full circle. After resolving the Tendi focused cliffhanger last season and restoring the status quo, this season introduces an ongoing plot line about multiversal rifts that mostly happens in the background, but also pushes some characters to realize they could be doing more (as well as chances for more cameos, of course). Boimler (whom my autocorrect still keeps making into “Boiler”) swipes some tech from a doppelganger and starts trying to cheat sheet his way to improving himself. Tendi finally makes peace with her Orion family and has to overcome her own insecurities when she is put in competition with T’Lyn for a high level position. Rutherford faces a brief lapse in affection for the Cerritos and makes a major decision to remove his cybernetic implant. And Mariner…well, she mostly dealt with all her bigger issues last season, but she does properly break up with her ex finally AND mentors a new Ensign who has similar issues to her when she started out. You can tell somewhat that the writers took the Futurama approach of giving everyone some level of closure while also being ready to do more if they ever get the greenlight.

But it seems they didn’t, though again, at least right now. As of this writing, everyone from the show has said pretty explicitly that they will jump at the chance to make more of it if allowed, which seems to speak pretty highly of how fun it must have been to be a part of it. And considering it’s the show that got me to properly look at the franchise in the first place, I would absolutely love to see more if possible. When it first started, I had a pretty low tolerance for all of the in-jokes I didn’t get substituting as comedy, but my tune changed once it became clear that it mostly put its own characters and their own journeys in the greater context of an established universe first. Star Trek overall is in a different place than it was when Lower Decks started, with now only one ongoing show, Strange New Worlds, an upcoming movie reworked from a scrapped series, Section 31, and an upcoming semi-sequel to Discovery, Starfleet Academy, which is slimmer pickings than back in 2020. And that’s without thinking about the state of limbo for Prodigy since it was stripped off Paramount+ and dropped on Netflix. But the franchise has survived worse and brought back so many things that were once thought gone forever. All good things come to an end, but even with that in mind, I have no doubt that we’ll see the crew of the Cerritos again. It’s just a matter of when.